© Jeff
Matthews entry June 2003, revised Sept
2013
The Galleria
Umberto I
The Galleria Umberto in Naples is in the shape of a Crux immissa (lit. extended cross) or Latin Cross; that is, one in which the main, vertical beam sticks above the crossbeam. The Gallery is oriented almost precisely to the four cardinal points; in this image, north is at the top. The long "beam" (horizontal in this image) is 138 meters long; the shorter crossbeam is 108 meters long. The Galleria is often termed "cathedralesque"; in keeping with that terminology, in this image, the left-hand section would be the "nave" of the church, the right hand section the apse, the top and bottom together, the transept. They meet at a large space called the "crossing." If you stand in the middle of the crossing, the top of the dome is 57 meters above you. Where the sections of the cross meet at the central space, they |
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form large surfaces at the NW, NE, SW and SE points. These are quite large (photo, right, below) and are, in fact, entrances to the offices on the upper floors of the Gallery. |
Main Article
The first
architectural results of the industrial
revolution sprang up in Britain in the middle of the
19th century: Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace in 1851,
for example, and The Oxford Museum (1859) by Deane and
Woodward. By using iron, these architects sought to
reconcile the split in the Victorian personality,
which viewed such industrial material as the substance
of engines to power modern society with, perhaps, but
hardly the stuff of Architecture with a capital A—the
discipline of designing museums, hotels, universities
and other such places for the genteel to gather.
Such use of
glass and iron, however, was to revolutionize
architecture and eventually lead to the first
steel-framed skyscrapers of the Chicago architects
before the century was out. High vaulted glass and
iron domes, governed by their own new architectural
aesthetics, characterized a number of structures built
in Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth
century. The most prominent example in Naples is the
Galleria Umberto I, across from San Carlo Theater. It was
inaugurated in 1890, and named for Umberto I, who was
king of Italy from 1878 until 1900 when he died at the
hands of an assassin [see this
entry on an earlier attempted assassination of
Umberto]. (There is a slightly earlier, smaller
example of the same type of architecture in Naples,
the Galleria Principe di
Napoli.)
The
idea behind the Risanamento
('resanitizing' or 'making healthy again') of Naples
in the 1880s and 90s was to clear large sections of
the city that for centuries had been nests of squalid
overcrowding and disease; then rational construction
could take place. The wide boulevard known as Corso Umberto (or
the Rettifilo, the 'straight line') running
from Piazza della Borsa all the way to the
main train station at Piazza Garibaldi was one result
of this effort, as was the construction of a new
seaside road and 20 blocks
of new buildings at Santa Lucia. The Galleria
Umberto was another.
There was a
need to renew the area across from San Carlo known as
Santa Brigida, and four designs were submitted. One by
Emanuele Rocco (1852-1922) was chosen. His plan left
in place a number of historic buildings that others
would have torn down, yet presented a high and
spacious cross-shaped mall, a truly cathedralesque
affair surmounted by a great glass dome braced by 16
metal ribs. Of the four glass-vaulted wings, one
fronts on via Toledo (via Roma), still the main
downtown thoroughfare, and another opens onto the San
Carlo Theater, framed like a splendid proscenium by
the portals of the gallery (photo, below). The Galleria
Umberto was based on the design of the gallery
in Milan completed in 1865; yet, it was a more
aesthetic fusion of the industrial glass and metal of
the upper part and the masonry below, which, itself,
is a spectacular collage of Renaissance and Baroque
ornamentation, tapering off to clean smoothness of
marble at the ground concourse. Other architects
involved were Ernesto Mauro and Antonio Curri, the
latter being primarily behind the intensely ornate
decorative and symbolic designs that cover surfaces in
the Galleria. (He also worked on restoring the
interior of the San Carlo
theater as well as the delightful interior of
the nearby Gambrinus Caffè.)
The Gallery was
built to stimulate commerce and to be a symbol of a
city reborn. It still contains numerous cafès,
businesses, book and record shops, and fashionable
stores. Once it held
theaters and restaurants as well, and was,
indeed, the sitting room of bourgeois Naples. (One
such theater was the fabled Salone
Margherita, home of the local version of the café-chantant.
It was below the main concourse with a stairway
leading down to it and a separate entrance from
street-level outside. It was closed for many years and
is currently being rebuilt.) The fate of the Galleria
Umberto has come to be somewhat of a metaphor of
Naples, meaning that there are good times and bad,
periods of splendor as well as decay. Among its many
ups and downs is even the fact that it was the target
of aerial bombardment by a
dirigible in the First World War!
These days, you can
still —and should still— marvel at the architecture,
its deceptive orderliness as it moves and shifts like
Proteus from one detail to the next. Yet, the Galleria
also lets you become for a moment the center of an
equally fascinating bit of flesh-and-blood
architecture: a true human kaleidoscope swirls around
you, on the way to the opera, to work, to a
rendezvous. Perhaps they are well-dressed, perhaps
disheveled; the weird as well as the mundane, the
casual and the poised. From the perfectly nondescript
to those who look like extras in some bizarre film,
they all have their own reasons for being drawn to
what is still a most remarkable structure.
entry
Sept 2013
"What are all those Stars
of David up there?"
That was precisely the question a woman asked whom I was leading though the Gallery. In the Gallery Umberto, as noted in the box at the top of this page, the four sections of the cross come in from the four cardinal points, N, S, E & W, stopping well short of the center and allowing for large surfaces at the intermediate points; these are, in fact, entrances to the upper floors of the gallery by internal stairways and elevators. There are thus four such entrances in the Gallery, each topped by a semicircular framework of glass called—I think, but am not sure—a lunette, a typanum, a half-moon window, or, my personal favorite, a semicircular framework of glass! They are identical; one of them is seen in the image, above. They are all decorated identically with what my guest referred to as "Stars of David"—a single large six-pointed star—a hexagram—at the top and two sets of five smaller similar stars arrayed along the bottom, separated by three empty panes.
Capernaum
photo by & courtesy of W. Johnson
Strictly
speaking, however, in this case they are not Stars of
David. Well, wait—back up. "In this
case" is important, since obviously they ARE Stars of
David—that is, the hexagram, the
six-pointed star. That symbol has been a symbol of Judaism
at least since the Middle Ages; it has a much older
history as a decorative or ornamental design in Jewish
archaeology in the Middle East (and possibly a religious
symbol, though that is disputed).* There are, in
any event, such designs or symbols on very old synagogues
in the Middle East —in Capernaum, for example,
(photo, left). The hexagram has also been used in
religious and cultural contexts other than Judaism. Today,
the symbol is indelibly linked to Judaism in the
perceptions of both Jews and non-Jews; it was adopted as
the symbol of the Zionist movement in 1897 as well as by
the state of Israel in 1948 for their new national flag.
(It bears noting that the traditional "co-symbol" of
Judaism has been the menorah, the seven-branched
candelabrum used in the temple; it is at least as strong a
symbol of the Jewish faith as the Star of David.)masonic symbols*note to "...though that is disputed." the Jewish Virtual Library says "The Magen David (shield of David, or as it is more commonly known, the Star of David) is the symbol most commonly associated with Judaism today, but it is actually a relatively new Jewish symbol....there is really no support for the claim in any early rabbinic literature. In fact, the symbol is so rare in early Jewish literature and artwork that art dealers suspect forgery if they find the symbol in early works. "
In 1890 in Naples, Italy, that connection between the six-pointed star and Judaism was not particularly part of the non-Jewish perception among the populace. (The Jewish population of Naples numbered fewer than 1000 persons at the time.) Rather, the hexagrams are masonic symbols. This makes sense when you consider that the Gallery Umberto, from the outset in 1890, housed (at #27 in the Galleria) the Neapolitan center of the Grande Oriente d'Italia, one of the largest and most significant masonic organizations in Italy, founded in 1805 and counting among its 19th-century members the likes of Giuseppe Garibaldi, Alessandro Manzoni and Giosuè Carducci. It is still the largest masonic organization in Italy and still in the Galleria Umberto.
I am not concerned
with the nature of freemasonry—what it is,
what it isn't. I am content to believe in their
published accounts of support for hospitals and schools
and less inclined to believe that they are ensconced in
a mountain retreat planning to take over the world—or, in the
words of my dear friend, Peter, they are "hardly the
Bilderburger Trilateral Commission conspirators so often
depicted." I admit that I don't see the necessity of
symbols, but maybe that's just me. The eclectic masonic
use of symbols is well-known. My light-hearted layman's point of view is that if
you are going to lay claim to some sort of genealogy of
knowledge, that is, a connection to esoteric secrets
that run back through the centuries, even millennia —knowledge
that might serve us well today— then you
pretty much need all the symbols you can find: 6-pointed
stars, 5-pointed stars (the Gallery in Milan, very
similar to the one in Naples, is ornamented with
8-pointed stars) pyramids, upside-down pyramids,
circles, squares, crosses, all-seeing eyes, pentagons,
eagles, anchors, harps and tesseracts. On the right is a
photo of a masonic ritual where the standard masonic
symbols of the square and compass (representing the
Grand Architect of the Universe, as the masons put it)
are next to a menorah! My friend, Warren, interprets
this as a symbol of "I believe in something," and that
is fine with me. (Note, too, that in the large photo,
above, there is also a display of five-pointed stars,
the pentagram, running around the metal base of the
dome. That is also a common masonic symbol.) So, they're
not Stars of David up there. Well, wait —back up
again. Can you deal with their presence in the same way
as the juxtaposed square, compass and menorah" That is,
might it be some sort of an all-encompassing
all-welcoming way of saying "I believe in this, too!
I believe in something." Maybe.(Thanks to Warren Johnson, Peter Humphrey and Selene Salve for their comments.)
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