ErN
94, entry Feb. 2003 updates Dec 2013
& Nov 2014
The Nile in Naples
The name "Nile," curiously occurs in
Neapolitan toponymy. There is a small Nile Square
where you find the Church of Sant'Angelo a Nilo, as
well as a statue of a Nile river god. The church is
the only one in Naples with a name that gives such
obvious testimony to the bonds that the Greek founders
of the original city had with their own cultural
forerunners, the Egyptians; the word "Nilo" does, in
fact, mean Nile. Here was the Alexandrian (Egyptian)
Quarter of the original Greek city.
The church (photo, right) goes
back to 1384 when it was built by Cardinal Rinaldo
Brancaccio. Most of the physical structure visible
today, however—the facade—for example,is the result of
work done in the early 1500s. The works within the
church bear the stamp almost entirely of the
Brancaccio family, throughout the centuries the only
true patrons of this church. The tomb of Cardinal
Brancaccio within the church is one of the most
important examples of Renaissance sculpture in Naples.
It was done by Donatello and Michelozzi in Tuscany,
where the executor of Brancacio's will, Cosimo dei
Medici, then had it transferred to the church in
Naples.
To understand why there should be anything at
all in Naples named for the Nile river, it helps to
remember that our inherited body of Greco-Roman myth
is at least partially Egypto-Greco-Roman. There were,
for example, at the time of Christ, a number of
Temples of Serapis throughout the Roman Empire. That
Roman cult is directly traceable back through the
Greeks to the Egyptian worship of Isis and Osiris.
(However, the so-called 'Temple of Serapis,' in
Pozzuoli, we now know, was just a market-place.)
Nearby, the small statue, itself, has been
restored and cleaned up. It is of an old merman-like
figure reclining on his pedestal and at the
approximate spot where the colony of Egyptians from
Alexandria settled in the days of Nero, well after the
incorporation of Naples into the dominion of Rome.
Here the Egyptians erected a statue, possibly for
veneration, of the God of the Nile, the river that
played such an important part in the mythology of
their own native culture.
The statue disappeared for centuries following
the advent of Christianity in the Roman Empire. It was
not until the 1100s that it was uncovered, headless,
during construction of an early kind of town hall for
the area. (The name "Nilo" of the general area had
stuck through the centuries even in the absence of the
statue.) That building was eventually demolished in
the 1600s and the statue was moved to the center of
the square where it still stands. At that time the
sculptor, Bartolomeo Mori, was hired to add the head;
the statue was restored again in 1734, and a plaque,
in Latin, was added to commemorate the restoration.
[See 2013 update, below, for further details.]
Given the importance of water,
particularly rivers, in much world mythology—and
especially the importance of the Nile to the
Egyptians—it is not surprising that settlers from
Egypt would have brought the Nile with them to Naples.
They chose a city by the sea, but also one that had a
river of its own at the time, the Sebeto, which then flowed
through the eastern part of Naples.
Even without the head, the original statue
would have been easy to identify as a chimera, that
fantastical patchwork of more than one creature,
something common to many mythologies. It is likely to
have been a representation of Creation, and the
original head might have been that of a crocodile,
making it the man-crocodile, Sobek, the Egyptian river
God. Possible, too, is that it was another chimera,
Ammut, the god that devoured the souls of the
condemned, and a composite of crocodile, lioness and
hippopotamus. The creature represented by the statue
would in both cases have been similar to those in much
sacred literature ("leviathan," in the Bible, for
example) or in Canaanite and Babylonian mythology,
where the Creator conquers a dragon or sea-monster
representing primordial Chaos.
The Nile figure in Naples is
resting on sand, (perhaps rising out of "primordial
mud"), making the "sea monster" interpretation
plausible. Yet, in spite of the paws on the body of
the statue, clearly identifying it as at least
part beast, the 17th century sculptor chose to restore
the statue with the head of a man. This might simply
have been an attempt to re-establish the gender of the
statue, which many had mistaken for a goddess of some
sort when it was rediscovered. It might, however, have
been a conscious attempt to make the statue resemble
the Egyptian god, Nun, god of the original waters
before the Creation and often depicted as an old man
with a beard, a sign of virility. Also, the figure
holds a cornucopia, a widespread symbol of abundance,
probably stemming from 'horn' ('corno-') as the symbol
of a bull and thus the source of virility, fertility
and abundance, all of which makes the 'Creator'
interpretation just as plausible as that of the 'sea
monster'.
During the Middle Ages, the square of the Nile
became the center of one of the city's administrative
districts ('sedili'), called Tocco Maggiore, or in
Latin, Toccum capitis platae, meaning the
"zone of large houses and wide streets". Since there
is an Italian word very similar to nilo —'nido'
(meaning 'nest)—which can be taken to mean 'house',
Nilo was understandably transformed into 'nido' in the
minds of many, thus losing a sense of the original
name. It is still common to hear the square
misidentified as 'nido'.
For reasons that are unclear, the statue has
come to be called Cuòrpo' e Napule in
Neapolitan dialect (Corpo di Napoli, in
Italian)—the Body of Naples—and the statue and the
site have long been objects of popular 'worship'. The
famous 18th-century magician, Cagliostro, even made a
pilgrimage to it. During a recent cleaning, many
lottery tickets and votive scribblings were found
wedged in between the paws.
Surrounded by so many later and
larger monuments in the downtown area, this small
statue is easy to overlook. Its origin and history,
too, are much less certain than those of more recent
artifacts, yet, perhaps that is what gives it a
peculiar charm. In a 2,500-year-old city, there are
bound to be many tiny mysteries that captivate,
precisely because they are enigmatic.
UPDATE: Dec. 2013 - The statue,
in the form of the restoration from the 1700s, had
some bits and pieces that were stolen in the 1950s
and 60s. If you look at early drawings and even
photographs, indeed if you examine the photo,
above, you can see where some of the pieces used
to be. There used to be three putti; now
there is only one, seen looking directly up at the
merman's head. You can also see a hole in the
marble on the left where something else was ripped
out, a crocodile head; you notice, particularly,
two metal studs projecting on the right as you
face the statue. They supported a sphinx. In
Egyptian mythology, the sphinx was often meant to
be a benevolent guardian. GOOD NEWS! That was
recently found in a shop in Austria (no doubt
unloaded there after WWII by art thieves). It has
been returned to Naples, put on display and is to
be remounted on the statue.
above, sphinxhead: Newfotosud, Renato
Esposito
-
UPDATE: Nov. 16 2014 -After an initial
restoration in 1992 and after 50 years during
which an integral part - the sphinx - had been
missing from the statue - the Nile god is back in
some semblance of its original form, although we
shall never really know what the original head of
the merman chimera was (see comments above). There
was a ceremony yesterday, a military band was
present and the statue was unveiled (photo,
right). Also present was a captain of the corps of
Carabinieri, one of the "art squad" that tracked
down the missing piece to its hiding spot in
Austria last year. He was also one of those who
helped organize a citizens' appeal for private
donations to support the restoration. They
received 2200 donations from locals and well as
tourists, many of whom chose to remain anonymous.
Local shops in the area had set up "piggy banks"
(sphinx banks?) for the occasion. The finished
product looks fine.
- Update Feb.
2015 – Egypt in
Naples – The ANSAmed news agency recently (Feb
2015) reported on a lecture given by
“scholar Marco Ruggiero” on the topic
of “Egyptian esotericism in Naples,” citing
the presence of Marian processions in and around
Naples and their similarity to ancient Egyptian
ceremonies in celebration of the goddess Isis. For
example, in Pollica, a town in the province of
Salerno, you can find processions in which women
carry miniature boats decorated with flowers and
candles on their heads and sing devotional songs.
“The practice is a descendant of the 'Navigium
Isidis' ('Isis's ship'), which in Antiquity
consisted in a masked procession featuring a boat
filled with floral tributes.” The lecturer
(according to the report) noted the presence of
two churches in Naples named Santa
Maria Egiziaca, as well as the prominent
Egyptian Collection at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. He
mentioned the presence of a “Nile square” (but not
the recent restoration of the statue and return of
the small sphinx) (see this page, above) nor,
apparently, the fact that the small 'Nile' square
(still occasionally miscalled 'Nido' - meaning
'nest') was for centuries referred to as the
“Alexandrian Quarter.”
(See map of the
historic center of Naples. The church and
statue are # 17 and #19, respectively.)
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