A sampietrino
means various things in Italian: (1) it was a coin
minted by the Papal States under Pius VI (Pope from
1775-91) and was worth 2½ baiocchi, a name
that apparently derives from the northern French town
of Bayeaux. I have never been to Bayeaux, but if I go,
I shall be sure to take plenty of baiocchi;
(2) it refers to a person charged with tending the
premises of San Peter's Basilica in Rome (indeed, sampietrino
means "little St. Peter"); (3) it means a cobblestone,
or paving stone, cut from a dark, fine-grained igneous
rock with the geological name, in Italian, piperno
—"trachyte" in English. I don't know why these
cobblestones are called "little St. Peters," except
that it might mean "a stone that looks like the kind
they used when they built St. Peter's—the kind of
stone that costs all those baiocchi."
The sampietrino
—the cobble-stone— is ubiquitous in Naples. It
provides one of the two major stone colors in the
city, the other being the lighter yellow of tufa,
stone so porous that walls made from it will erode and
have to be replaced in a few decades. But piperno
is durable and many main roads are still laid by
workers with small hammers, tapping one fist-sized sampietrino
after another into place, mile after mile, and then
drip-sealing the cracks with hot tar. Asphalt has made
major inroads (thank you!) only with great difficulty.
That will change shortly, according to a report in the
paper. Asphalt is cheaper, safer, and faster to work
with. The paper gave no date, but soon that friendly
clatter as your car slowly jars itself to smithereens
over those miles of treacherous trachyte along the
port road of Naples will belong to another age.
[Also see this short entry
from 2013. That's right. Ten years later.]
There will still be no shortage of sampietrini in Naples. All of the many stairs that lead up and down the hillsides of Naples are made of Little St. Peters, the piperno pockmarked with centuries of chisel strikes to roughen the surface so that the stairs are less slippery in the rain and so you don't slide those 200 meters of elevation from the Vomero hill down to the center of town.
The dark stone comes from
hills of Naples. The suburb of Naples called "Soccavo"
sits below the height of the Camaldoli hill and takes
its name from the Latin subcavum—beneath the
quarry. For centuries, stonecutters quarried that
hillside to extract not just tiny paving stones, but the
true monoliths used at the base of almost all Neapolitan
monuments, large buildings, and churches. The stone was
then loaded onto ox-carts that plodded their way into
the city a few miles away. The Spanish moved quarries
well away from the city in the 17th century out of
concern for the structural integrity of the hill that
much of Naples rests upon; thus, the quarries of Soccavo
closed. There is, however, still a large cross hewn from
that same material standing on a street corner in
Soccavo (photo, above). It was originally a religious
object, certainly not uncommon on the streets of Naples,
but today (protected recently by a display case) it is
also, because of the material it is made of, a monument
to the bygone craft of stone-cutting. It bears the
engraved name of the artisan who made it and the date,
1613.
*note on spelling:
St. Peter is San
Pietro in Italian. The stone is a sampietro with
the letter m.
The n
changes to m through
a process known as phonetic assimilation. Don't ask.
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