Naples, 1760

Ulysses, if Homer is to be believed, was the first mariner to escape the temptations of the Bay of Naples. According to The Odyssey, Ulysses had heard of the bay’s infamous sirens — part women, part bird or nymph-like creatures — who lured sailors to their death by singing so beautifully that no one could sail on without succumbing. Thus, when returning from the Trojan War via the bay, Ulysses plugged the ears of his crew with bee’s wax and bound himself to the mast until they had sailed safely out of range of the sirens’ audible temptation. In response, one of the sirens, Parthenope, angry over their failure to seduce their prey, drowned herself in the sea. The original settlement on the bay was said to have grown on the spot where she washed ashore, claiming her name as its own.

Various communities huddled around the Bay of Naples date, in one incarnation or another, back to the second millennium before the birth of Christ. Ever since, this urban area has remained one of the world’s great cultural fulcrums. “The wonder of the place,” as the novelist and writer on the arts Benjamin Taylor reminds us in Naples Declared (2012), “is that it has not been annihilated by so much history. Ask yourself what New York or Chicago or Los Angeles will be twenty-five centuries from now. Imagination falters.” 5 Although Taylor is correct in asserting that our imagination falters, the Neapolitan imagination rarely has.

Greek colonizers made the town of Parthenope, which was on the site in Naples where the medieval Castel dell’Ovo stands today, a beachhead for further conquest of the western Mediterranean Sea region. Their cities, including the “new town” of Neapolis, sprang up along the bay’s shores as residents paid their devotion to the god of reason, Apollo. Nearby, the mountain we know as Vesuvius reminded them of Nisa, the sacred mountain of Dionysus back home. They traveled up its slopes to organize seductive rites of fertility and renewal. Ancient and Byzantine Greeks dominated the bay’s towns for centuries, creating a local culture that manically swings between Apollonian rationality and Dionysian sensuality.

As the Greeks quickly appreciated, the Bay of Naples promises humans one of the most salubrious habitats on the planet. The bay’s environment, in fact, is so perfect that local residents have rarely been forced to be enterprising. They have merely needed to live off the land and sea as the mild Mediterranean climate, safe harbor, turquoise sky and indigo sea have sustained lush vegetation boosted by a deep layer of rich volcanic soil and an easy growing season.

Plaza and church of San Francesco di Paola, Naples, Italy, 1890. Photo: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

In 326 BC, the victorious Romans assumed control over the area. The local Neapolitan Greeks did all they could to make sure that the arriviste Romans remained under their spell despite having been defeated militarily. Naples conquered Rome culturally. Prominent Romans started building large villas for their retirement as they turned the area into an elite resort.

Yet all was not quite idyllic. The inhabitants of this earthly paradise constantly faced the possibility of near-instantaneous annihilation by Mount Vesuvius. Categorized as a “red” volcano for the lava that periodically spews from its crater, Vesuvius has erupted cataclysmically over the centuries, as when it eradicated the Roman port cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in AD 79. A Neapolitan of any century only needed to peer at the menacing mountain looming over the city to be reminded of the transitory folly of human existence.

Under such circumstances, Neapolitans have naturally looked for salvation wherever available. A persistent and living interdependence between Christian and pagan traditions, marks the local culture to this day. It is no wonder that the city has been known widely since the Middle Ages as a “paradise inhabited by devils.”

The city’s combination of natural appeal and peril has nourished a lively culture marked from the time of its original settlers, the Epicureans, by a distinctive blend of sensuous, joyful hedonism and rigorous, stern sanctity — of paganism and piety. Thus, Naples has been home both to the inventors of pizza and chocolate ice cream, on one hand, and to countless religious orders, on the other.

At the end of the 1760s, Joseph-Jerome LeFrançais de Lalande told readers of his guidebook for French travelers that, as translated in Jeanne Chenault Porter’s Baroque Naples (2000), “music is the Neapolitans’ triumph. Apparently, eardrums are more sensitive, more attuned to harmony, more sonorous, in this country than in the rest of Europe; the entire nation sings; gestures, inflections of voice, the way each syllable is emphasized, conversation itself, all show and manifest a sense of harmony and music. Naples is the principal source of Italian music, of great composers, and of excellent operas.” 6

The Neapolitan Dionysian and Apollonian cultural dyad reinforced the local embrace of music. Song, perhaps more than any other genre, dominated Neapolitan musicality. Verse was sung on the street in a local dialect, in church in Latin, and on an aristocratic stage in some vague approximation of how erudite scholastics thought a Greek chorus might have performed. Naples had become a city in which children did not take music lessons; they learned simply by becoming aware of their surroundings.

Neapolitan progenies studied music unreservedly. According to some estimates, by the mid-seventeenth century, Naples was home to seven conservatories and 617 religious institutions, including 248 churches, offering musical education. At its height, this system produced a constant stream of innovative musicians who transformed the musical landscape of the era. The city’s musicians formed what became known as the Neapolitan School, whose members were avidly sought by impresarios and aristocrats from Paris to Saint Petersburg, from Madrid to Vienna to London.

Since its founding, Naples has been such a city of sudden and disconcerting juxtaposition of opposites — the sort of place that creates and recreates over and over again the kind of delirious urbanism that constantly bursts forth with invention and creativity. The Naples of delirium and creativity is a place where the devils make the music, and do so gloriously.