entry
June 2006
Poggioreale — Paradise Lost
—I
mean really lost
It is perfectly reasonable to expect
any large European city to change over the course of
four-hundred years. Yet, in the case of Naples, many of
the physical features of the city from 1600, and even
well before that date, are still easily discernible in
the layout of the modern city: the Angevin fortress at the port is
still prominent; the large St. Elmo castle and adjacent
museum of San Martino (an
ex-monastery) still dominate the heights of the city;
the famed —notorious!— Piazza
Mercato with its Carmine church is still there; the square blocks of the Spanish Quarter are still
easy to identify; etc. etc. One part of the city,
however, that has changed beyond all recognition is the
section of Naples known as Poggioreale. If you go to the
spot where historical maps tell us that one of the great
examples of Italian Renaissance architecture once stood,
the Villa Poggioreale, you would never know it. It has
absolutely disappeared.
Strange—that
name. “Poggioreale” means “royal hill”—clearly, a fine
hill at the foot of which one might build a residence
fit for a king. The only well-known such seats of
royalty in Naples are the above-mentioned Angevin
fortress from 1300 and the various Bourbon royal palaces
from the 1700s, notably the Royal
Palace in the heart of the city and the building
that is now a major art
museum on the Capodimonte hill. The name
“Poggioreale” now means other things to modern
Neapolitans; it the site of the largest cemetery in the
city and the site of the largest prison in southern
Italy; the main train station is there; it is, broadly
speaking, the grimy and degraded industrial section of
Naples (thoroughly
bombed in WW2); optimistically, however, it is
also the location of the gleaming new Centro Direzionale, the new
Civic Center, an island of glass and steel skyscrapers
(perhaps as close to Regained as this former paradise
will ever get). Was there, then, ever a true royal
residence in that area?
Indeed,
there was. The Angevins were
driven from Naples in the early 1400s by the Aragonese, who took over the
kingdom and started an expansion of the city to the east,
through the city walls at the Nolana Gate and along the
slopes of what is now called the Capodimonte hill. It was a
bucolic area and perfect for a royal residence. Such a
residence, the Villa Poggioreale, was begun in 1487 for
the ruler of Naples, Ferrante, who ruled from 1459 to
1494. Sources from that period speak of the villa with its
main structures and adjacent gardens as a splendid example
of the kind usually associated with Florentine
architecture of the same period.(1) Indeed, one of the great
Renaissance architects of the
day, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s favorite, Giuliano da Sangallo
(1443-1516), was present in Naples during part of the
construction. There is some evidence of his participation
in the final design of the villa, and there is direct
evidence of his enthusiasm for such building in Naples in
the form of a design he made for a spectacular new royal
palace to be built later for the Aragonese rulers of
Naples. (2)
The
Aragonese dynasty in Naples, however, was
short-lived. Events in Spain fused the royal houses of
Aragon and Castille into modern Spain in 1492; shortly
thereafter, the new Spanish Empire moved into Naples and
incorporated it as a vicerealm. Subsequent Spanish plans
for the city did not correspond to those of the earlier
rulers. The massive city-building undertaken in the
early 1500s by Spanish viceroy Don
Pedro de Toledo was concentrated almost totally in
the west. The eastern approaches to the city were
refortified, yes, but Ferrante’s Villa Poggioreale now
stood isolated well outside the city walls. Yet, a map
from 1670, almost at the end of Spanish tenure, shows it
to be not only still there, but still thriving, set
amidst the still pastoral setting at the foot of the
Capodimonte slope. (3)
The
economic doldrums of the late 1600s and the
turbulent change of dynasty in 1700 did not encourage
expansion, or even maintenance, of the city and its
environs. That condition did not change noticeably until
the arrival of the Bourbons in the 1730s. Their
priorities, like those of the Spanish, did not involve
keeping up the Villa Poggioreale; they chose, instead, to
build to the east, yes, but along the coast, where there
arose a string of spectacular homes for the noble classes,
residences that are now historically known as the “Vesuvian villas.” Farther
inland, the area at the foot of that “royal hill”, the
site of the Villa Poggioreale, was left to its own
devices. (It was no longer a royal residence since the
Spanish and then the Bourbons had built their own such
estates either inside the city or, if outside, in other
directions (for example, the Bourbon Palazzo Reale at
Portici on the coast, in the shadow of Vesuvius).
The
“decline” of the area (though not viewed as such
at the time), started with the decision in 1762 to
locate the new Santa Maria del Pianto cemetery in the
area. For its time, it was a
very forward-looking, new and hygienic approach to
cemetery management in Europe, one that forbade burial
within city limits, moving that activity out of the city
to one large single location. That site was greatly
expanded in the 1830s with the addition of the adjacent
Cimitero Monumentale. It is all now known simply as the
Poggioreale Cemetery and is the largest cemetery complex
in southern Italy. As modern as all that was, such a
move obviously discouraged further residential building
in the area, or even maintenance of those properties
that were now in a setting swiftly becoming less and
less idyllic. Subsequent location of early industry in
the east did not help, either. Maps of the mid-1800s do
show the name “Poggioreale,” but show little more than
tracings of where the by-then 400-year-old villa had
stood.
To
finish off any pastoral illusions, the train
station was then placed in the area when railroads came of
age, and subsequent grander stations and necessary rail
yards grew as the railroad industry expanded. Then, the
large prison of Poggioreale was located in the area in the
early 1900s, and, finally, the area was heavily bombed in
WW2. So much for Italian Renaissance architecture in that
area. There is now no trace of the villa at all. What was
presumably the main entrance of the Villa is now directly
across the street from the entrance to the cemetery.
To my own disappointment, I have not
been able to determine exactly what happened to the
place —that is, physically. Who were the landed gentry
in the late 1700s who lived there and decided to leave
because the king had decided to open a cemetery across
the street? What was the process by which bits and
pieces of the structure and gardens started to vanish,
leading to the ultimate disappearance of the whole
villa? As they say, more research is needed. Stay tuned.
[Also see the entry on a similar Aragonese
project, the Villa Duchesca.]
---notes---
(1)
See J. Leostello da Volterra, Effemeridi delle cose
fatte per il Duca di Calabria (1484-91) cited in. G.
Filangieri di Satriano, Documenti per la storia, le
arti, le industrie delle pronvincie napoletane,
Napoli, 1883-91, vol. 5, pp. 230 and 315, vol. 6, p.45.
(return to text)
(2) See Libro di Giuliano da Sangallo, Vatican Library, Vatican, Rome. The design for the new royal palace is preserved in the collection of the Uffizzi in Florence as architectural design n. 282. (return to text)
(3) The map in question is from
1670 by Alessandro Baratta, ed. Giovanni Orlandi, in the
Bowinkel collection in Naples. It is reprinted piecemeal
and extensively cited in Cartografia della Citta’ di
Napoli , by Cesare de’ Seta, edizioni
scientifiche italiane, Naples, 1969. The
illustration in this article is from that map, reprinted
in Le citta’ nella storia d’Italia, Napoli, by
Cesare de’ Seta. (1981) Rome-Bari: Laterza ed. (return to text)
--- additional reading on the
Villa Poggioreale---
-Ackerman, J.S. (1963). “Sources of the Renaissance Villa,” in Studies in Western Art. Acts of the XXth International Congress of History of Art. Princeton.
-Blunt, Anthony (1975) Neapolitan
Baroque & Rococo Architecture. London.
-Hersey, George L.H. (1969) Alfonso II and the Artistic
renewal of Naples 1485-95. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
-Pane, Roberto. Il Rinascimento nell'Italia Meridionale. 2 volumes, (1975 vol. I), (1977 vol II), Milan: Edizioni di Comunità.
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