Jan. 2011
The Castel dell'Ovo
These three items appeared separately in the original version of the Around Naples Encyclopedia on the dates indicated and have been consolidated here onto a single page. There is another item on The Egg Castle by another author at this link.
Number 1, the Egg Castle is directly below; number 2, Neapolitan Legends is here. Number 3, Virgil, is here.
entry
Mar. 2003
1. Castel dell'Ovo
(Egg Castle)
The Castel dell'Ovo
(the Egg Castle) is what you first notice as you stroll
along the seaside Villa Comunale,
the Communal Gardens, in Naples. It is a fortress built on
the small island of Megaride, just off the Santa Lucia
section of the city. Here, legend has it, is where the
siren Parthenope washed
ashore after throwing herself into the sea when her song
failed to bewitch Ulysses.
Less mythologically,
here is where the Greeks from Cuma
to the north first settled the bay of Naples in the fifth
century bc. Centuries later, the island became the home of
the last Roman emperor, exiled here in 476 A.D. after the
empire was overrun by the Goths.
[Various sources say that
the young, last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was
banished to the "castle of Lucullus" in Campania
by Odoacer, whom Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
called "...that successful barbarian...". Gibbon also
says, however, that "When the Vandals became formidable to
the seacoast, the Lucullan villa, on the promontory of
Misenum, gradually assumed the strength and appellation of
a strong castle, the obscure retreat of the last emperor
of the West." That is almost certainly a mistake. There
were imperial villas on the promontory of Misenum, but the
great villa of Lucullus (from which we derive the
expression, "To live in Lucullan splendor") was indeed on
the island of Megaride, where the Castel dell'Ovo now
stands. The ex-last-emperor was then apparently
instrumental in founding a monastery on the island. There
are no reliable accounts of his last years or even of when
he died.]
The
fortress that you now see dates back "only" about a
thousand years and is essentially the result of Norman and Angevin construction
done in the Middle Ages. It was then that the strange
legend arose that a thousand years earlier, the poet Virgil had hidden an egg in
the castle, the fate of which would parallel the fate of
Naples, itself. As long as the egg remained intact, the
city would be spared destruction. Thus the unusual name,
the Castel dell'Ovo, or "Egg Castle".
The egg, of course,
is in many contexts —from pre-Christian ones to
Augustine's commentary on Luke to Bosch's "The Garden of
Earthly Delights" and even to the popular use of the
"Easter egg"— a symbol of life, resurrection and hope.
Thus, the broken egg stands for spiritual death, and,
thus, at least once in the Middle Ages, a Neapolitan
monarch had to go out and assure the people that the egg
had not broken. It was intact —and Naples was safe.
entry
May 2003
2. Cronache di Partenope; Neapolitan
Legends; Castel dell'Ovo.
Yesterday, I tidied up a few loose
ends in my mind concerning the Castel dell'Ovo
(Egg Castle) in Naples. First of all, on the ramparts are
some cannon positioned such that they would fire in at the
city and not out to sea (as one might expect in a fortress
meant to protect against attack by naval forces). It turns
out that the ones you see up there today were put there
for ornamentation, having been recovered from the bottom
of the bay of Naples at a point where some ship went to a
watery grave centuries ago.
Yet, tales of guns
from the castle taking pot-shots at the city are not
entirely false. Around the year 1500, when the French and
Spanish were disputing the future of Naples, the Spanish
parked their artillery on the height of Mount Echia, the cliff directly
across from the small island of Megaride (where the Egg
Castle is situated)—only about 200-300 yards as the crow
flies—and shelled the Angevin French in the castle, who,
of course, returned fire. If you could fire those cannon
today would you would take out the row of luxury hotels
that have sprouted like poisonous mushrooms since the new
seaside road was built a century ago. They are so tall
that they obscure the original cliff face of Mount Echia,
the height that was so enchantingly beautiful 2,500 years
ago that the Greeks chose it for their city, Parthenope.
One barrage would do it (see photo, above).
Many of the legends
having to do with the Castel dell'Ovo (indeed, with
Naples, itself) including those recounted by Matilde Serao
in her Neapolitan Legends (see
here) about the poet Virgil,
his magical powers, his connection with Naples, etc., come
from an anonymous work written in the mid–1300s entitled la
Cronaca di Partenope (The Chronicle of Parthenope),
or Croniche de la inclita Cità de Napole. It is
here that we learn of the origins of Virgil's powers—how
he wandered into an enchanted cave on Mt. Barbaro near
Naples and found the wizard, Creon, using his book of
magical recipes as a pillow for a short snooze. Virgil
absconds with the manual and the rest is mythology. (No, I
don't know if the Creon in question is (1) the son of
Lycaethus, king of Corinth and father of Glauce or Creusa,
the second wife of Jason, or (2) the son of Menoeceus and
king of Thebes who had Antigone buried alive. I suspect it
was another Creon, but you never know. Wizards can fool
you.)
[There is a critical edition of the Cronaca di Partenope, edited by Antonio Altamura and published in 1974 by S.E.N. in Naples. That stands for Società Editrice Napoletana. They are no longer in business.]
3. Virgil is said to have taken the first egg laid by a hen, put it in a glass amphora, and placed that in a finely wrought metal cage suspended from a beam braced against the walls of a small secret chamber built especially for that purpose within the castle. As long as the egg remained intact, the city was safe. Virgil, thus, joins the list of select protectors of the city, including the original siren, Parthenope and the more recent Christian protector, the patron saint of Naples, San Gennaro —St. Januarius.
Interestingly, even
if there were an egg in that castle, it would be a second
generation one. At the time of Queen
Joan I of Naples (1326-82) —shortly after the Chronicle
of Parthenope was written— a devastating storm
wrecked much of the Castel dell'Ovo, even destroying the
natural arch that joined the two parts of the island. Joan
had to ensure the population that it was because the egg
had broken, but that she had personally gone through the
same magic ritual as Virgil, putting a second protective
egg in place in the same spot. The populace was calmed.
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