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This richly illustrated book is a monument to modern urban construction in Naples. New photos by French photographer Cyrille Weiner, new sketches of important details and around 100 drawings show significant buildings with a wide range of different characteristics, dating from the years 1930-1960. They reveal how this Southern Italian metropolis developed its own form of Modernism, one that combined Mediterranean culture with local materials and a strong internationalist spirit. The book's line of enquiry and presentation follow the same methodology as with Paris Haussmann: A Model's Relevance (Park Books, 2017), which was produced by the same team, analysing the construction of Paris. This new publication about the legendary harbor city of Naples is just as attractively presented, with plenty of photos, a selection of essays and descriptive texts, along with sketches of important architectonic details, supplemented by plans and sections of all the documented buildings. The result is a lively portrait of a fascinating city that is both famous and infamous, but whose qualities and individuality in terms of architecture and urban development really should be better known.

Invisible City vividly portrays the religious world of seventeenth-century Naples, a city of familial and internecine rivalries, of religious devotion and intense urban politics, of towering structures built to house the virgin daughters of the aristocracy. Helen Hills demonstrates how the architecture of the convents and the nuns' bodies they housed existed both in parallel and in opposition to one another. She discusses these women as subjects of enclosure, as religious women, and as art patrons, but also as powerful agents whose influence extended beyond the convent walls.

This book investigates baroque architecture through the lens of San Gennaro’s miraculously liquefying blood in Naples. This vantage point allows a bracing and thoroughly original rethink of the power of baroque relics and reliquaries. It shows how a focus on miracles produces original interpretations of architecture, sanctity and place which will engage architectural historians everywhere. The matter of the baroque miracle extends into a rigorous engagement with natural history, telluric philosophy, new materialism, theory and philosophy. The study will transform our understanding of baroque art and architecture, sanctity and Naples. Bristling with new archival materials and historical insights, this study lifts the baroque from its previous marginalisation to engage fiercely with materiality and potentiality and thus unleash baroque art and architecture as productive and transformational.

The city of Naples (Campanian region, Southern Italy) has been hit by the strongest earthquakes located inside the seismogenic areas of the Southern Apennines, as well as by the volcano-tectonic earthquakes of the surrounding areas of the Campi Flegrei, Ischia and Vesuvius volcanic districts. An analysis of the available seismic catalogues shows that in the last millennium, more than 100 earthquakes have struck Naples with intensities rating I to III on the Mercalli–Cancani–Sieberg (MCS) scale over the felt level. Ten of these events have exceeded the damage level, with a few of these possessing an intensity greater than VII MCS. The catastrophic earthquakes of 1456 (I0 = XI MCS), 1688 (I0 = XI MCS) and 1805 (I0 = X MCS) occurred in the Campania–Molise Apennines chain, produced devastating effects on the urban heritage of the city of Naples, reaching levels of damage equal to VIII MCS. In the 20th century, the city of Naples was hit by three strong earthquakes in 1930 (I0 = X MCS), 1962 (I0 = IX MCS) and 1980 (I0 = X MCS), all with epicenters in the Campania and Basilicata regions. The last one is still deeply engraved in the collective memory, having led to the deaths of nearly 3000 individuals and resulted in the near-total destruction of some Apennine villages. Moreover, the city of Naples has also been hit by ancient historical earthquakes that originated in the Campanian volcanic districts of Campi Flegrei, Vesuvio and Ischia, with intensities up to VII–VIII MCS (highest in the Vesuvian area). Based on the intensity and frequency of its past earthquakes, the city of Naples is currently classified in the second seismic category, meaning that it is characterized by “seismicity of medium energy”. In this paper, we determine the level of damage suffered by Naples and its monuments as a result of the strongest earthquakes that have hit the city throughout history, highlighting its repetitiveness in some areas. To this aim, we reconstructed the seismic history of some of the most representative urban monuments, using documentary and historical sources data related to the effects of strong earthquakes of the Southern Apennines on the city of Naples. The ultimate purpose of this study is to perform a seismic macro-zoning of the ancient center of city and reduce seismic risk. Our contribution represents an original elaboration on the existing literature by creating a damage-density map of the strongest earthquakes and highlighting, for the first time, the areas of the city of Naples that are most vulnerable to strong earthquakes in the future. These data could be of fundamental importance to the construction of detailed maps of seismic microzones. Our study contributes to the mitigation of seismic risk in the city of Naples, and provides useful advice that can be used to protect the historical heritage of Naples, whose historical center is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Can painting transform philosophy? InInventing Falsehood, Making Truth, Malcolm Bull looks at Neapolitan art around 1700 through the eyes of the philosopher Giambattista Vico. Surrounded by extravagant examples of late Baroque painting by artists like Luca Giordano and Francesco Solimena, Vico concluded that human truth was a product of the imagination. Truth was not something that could be observed: instead, it was something made in the way that paintings were made--through the exercise of fantasy. Juxtaposing paintings and texts, Bull presents the masterpieces of late Baroque painting in early eighteenth-century Naples from an entirely new perspective. Revealing the close connections between the arguments of the philosophers and the arguments of the painters, he shows how Vico drew on both in his influential philosophy of history,The New Science. Bull suggests that painting can serve not just as an illustration for philosophical arguments, but also as the model for them--that painting itself has sometimes been a form of epistemological experiment, and that, perhaps surprisingly, the Neapolitan Baroque may have been one of the routes through which modern consciousness was formed.

By means of information technology, 3D digital geologic models are increasingly the best methods of constraining interpretations of geology at depth. Visualization in three dimensions has allowed us to develop solutions that explain the stratigraphic and structural complexity of the Campania margin of the Eastern Tyrrhenian Sea, especially the lateral relationships among volcanoes and underlying normal faults. Using seismic and sequence stratigraphy and structural geology approaches in a dedicated GIS environment, we interpreted a seismic grid and investigated a subsurface volcanic field in Gaeta Bay (off Campi Flegrei) located within the Campania margin. The Gaeta Bay basin fill is characterized by several volcanic units that were analyzed using 2D structure contour maps and isochron maps. These volcanoes are comparable in size to the edifices of Campi Flegrei, Vesuvius, and the submerged volcanoes of the Bay of Naples. Their age spans from the Lower Pleistocene for the isolated V0 volcano sited in Central Gaeta Bay to 0.4–0.1 Ma for the volcanic field of southern Gaeta Bay. The study of the interplay between volcanic units and faults allowed us to distinguish (1) the oldest fault buried by the Lower Pleistocene V0 volcano in Central Gaeta Bay; (2) a normal fault swarm NE–SW that in the Middle Pleistocene gave rise to a half-graben filled by the V1–V5 volcanic field in southern Gaeta Bay; and (3) post-0.4 Ma normal faults that downthrow the V1 and V3 volcanoes. We correlated the >1,500-m-thick Late Quaternary volcanoes of southern Gaeta Bay to the buried lava volcanoes interlayered with volcanoclastic deposits drilled at Campi Flegrei geothermal wells.

Results of a research carried out on the lavas from Campi Flegrei and Somma-Vesuvius volcanic districts are reported here. The lavas have been widely employed, since Roman age, in several important monumental buildings of the Campania region, mainly in the town of Naples and in its province. They are classified as trachytes (Campi Flegrei products), tephri-phonolites and phono-tephrites (Somma-Vesuvius complex) from a petrographical point of view. Sampling was carried out from well-known exploitation districts. A substantial chemical difference between the products of the two sectors was confirmed, while petrophysical characterization evidenced similarity among the two different materials, although some differences were recorded even in samples coming from the same exploitation site.

This thesis offers the first comprehensive interpretation of Spanish architectural patronage in Naples in the kingdoms of Philip II (r. 1556-98) and Philip III (r. 1598-1621) of Habsburg. While focusing on secular architecture, I also take into account the commissioning of major public sculptures and painted cycles, as well as the restoration and recycling of existing monuments and spaces. I analyze the architectural and engineering activity of Domenico Fontana (1543-1607) and his son Giulio Cesare (1580-1627) in Italy and Spain, contextualizing their realized and unrealized projects within a discourse on the cultural politics of the Monarquía Hispánica. In relation to Habsburg imperialism, I contend that the entire city of Naples (\"La Fedelissima\"), participated, at different levels, in the imperial program of the Habsburg monarchy. I discuss the evolution of architectural proficiency and style in Naples in relation to major trends shaping the aspect of other primary capitals of early modern Europe at the turn of the sixteenth century, such as Rome, Palermo, and Madrid. My objective is to cast light on the local functioning of public commissions in order to offer a tentative explanation of the deferred flowering of Baroque architecture in the kingdom of Naples.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Grand Tour in Outline Greek Art in Italy What They Saw on the Grand Tour Emma Hamilton's Attitudes Rediscovering Greek Architecture on the Grand Tour to Italy and Greece The Impact of the Grand Tour Acknowledgments Further Reading