🍕 Naples: a history

Naples is called New Town. It got the name because there was an older town next to it, and it has carried it for two and a half thousand years.

For six hundred years it was the capital of a kingdom. Then it lost that, and it has gone its own way ever since.

The siren who gave up

Legend says the siren Parthenope drowned here. Odysseus resisted her song, she took offence, and the sea washed her ashore; the city is said to have grown on her grave.

The truth is duller and almost as old. Greeks founded a settlement called Parthenope here in the eighth century BC - settlers from nearby Cumae on the usual reading, sailors from Rhodes on another. A few centuries later Neapolis, New Town, went up beside it. The older one came to be called Palaepolis, Old Town, and it is the younger name that survives.

A Greek city with a Roman address

Rome took Neapolis in 326 BC and then did almost nothing with it. The city kept its Greek language, its Greek offices and its Greek habits, and Romans came here to rest. It was the address for anyone who wanted to be left alone by Rome.

Virgil lived here, and by tradition he is buried here. In the Middle Ages he turned into a figure he would not have recognised: a sorcerer and the city's protector.

The egg under the castle

The prettiest of those sorcerer's tales still holds on in a name. Castel dell'Ovo, the Egg Castle, is said to have an egg in its foundations, hung there by Virgil in a glass jar. While it stays whole, the castle stands and so does the city.

The belief was strong enough that when part of the castle collapsed in the fourteenth century, Queen Joanna is said to have had to declare publicly that she had replaced the egg. Calming people down was easier than talking them out of it.

Six hundred years a capital

From 1266, when Charles of Anjou moved his seat here from Palermo, Naples was the capital of a kingdom - under several dynasties and with several interruptions, right up to the unification of Italy in 1861.

One of those rulers managed something that outlasted them all. In 1224 Emperor Frederick II founded a university here, and it was founded neither by a pope nor by a guild but by the state. That makes it the oldest university founded by a state that is still running, and it still carries his name.

The largest, or the second largest?

Around 1600 Naples had roughly a quarter of a million people and was among the largest cities in Europe. Whether it was first or second behind Paris depends on who you read: the estimates differ and both versions are quoted with equal confidence. The only thing beyond dispute is the crush.

Masaniello's ten days

In July 1647 the Spanish put a tax on fruit. A brawl broke out over it in the market, and at the head of the revolt stood a twenty-seven-year-old fish seller they called Masaniello.

Within days he controlled the city. The viceroy gave way and scrapped the tax. Then Masaniello's head was turned, he started handing out death sentences, and on the sixteenth of July he was murdered. Ten days had passed since the revolt first broke out.

A republic that lasted five months

In 1799 the educated men of Naples proclaimed a republic. It ran from January to June, it was well read, it was well meant, and outside the city almost nobody wanted it.

When the Bourbons came back they promised an amnesty and then broke it. They executed hundreds, among them Eleonora Pimentel Fonseca, who wrote and edited the republic's newspaper. It was a revolution made by intellectuals for a people who had not asked for it. They were the ones who paid.

Blood that sets and runs again

The cathedral keeps a phial of the blood of Saint Januarius. On set days it is carried out and people wait to see whether it liquefies. If it does, all is well. If it does not, Naples raises an eyebrow, because it has always been read as a bad sign.

More interesting than the event is what the Church says about it: nothing. It supports the celebrations, but it has never officially called it a miracle.

Skulls for adoption

In the underground quarries of the Fontanelle lie the bones of tens of thousands of people, brought there by epidemics of plague and cholera. Neapolitan women would come to choose a skull, clean it, talk to it and pray for it. In return they expected it to put in a word for them. They were called anime pezzentelle, the abandoned souls.

The Church banned the custom in 1969 as superstition. People still go.

Four days

By late September 1943 Naples was starving, broken by bombing and occupied by a German army under orders to destroy the port. On the twenty-seventh of September the city rose. It was started by the street children, the scugnizzi, and the adults joined in.

Four days later the Germans were gone. On the first of October the Allies arrived in a city that had freed itself.

And that pizza

Everyone knows the story: in 1889 the Neapolitan pizza maker Raffaele Esposito baked a pizza for Queen Margherita, made it red, white and green, and named it after her.

The only evidence is a thank-you letter from the royal household, and it is almost certainly a forgery. The historian Zachary Nowak showed that the signature does not match other signatures by the same official, that the seal is in the wrong place, and that the letter is addressed to "Raffaele Esposito Brandi" - using his wife's surname. No man in Italy in 1889 would have done that.

The pizza is real. The story probably is not. But a city that invented an egg in a castle's foundations can handle one forged letter without breaking stride.