"During WW-2 I
spent two
months in the 17th General Hospital
(US Army which I believe was in the Vomero section of Naples, set high
overlooking the bay and an
exquisite view of Vesuvius. From the balconies you had a picture card
scene in
view. Is the hospital still there? If you know, what is its name now?"
The Antonio Carderelli hospital
I didn’t know the answer,
but that note was
from Fred Hellman and led to his contribution
to the WWII Oral History
items on
this website. It also set me to finding out a bit of hospital
history
in Naples.
(Finally, it was Fred, however, who actually sleuthed down the answer
to his
own question. He also got some photos, one of which you see, below.)
Depending on how one
defines “modern,” the
first great wave of modern hospital building in Naples
was an outgrowth of the Spanish incorporation of Naples as a vicerealm in the 1500s.
Some of
those hospitals still function today (the “Incurabili”,
for example).
Using a
more modern definition of “modern,” in the early 1900s a
section of the western end of the historic
center of Naples (near the church
of San Pietro a Maiella)
was
cleared to make room for what is now called the Old Policlinic
Hospital.
Today, however, the “hospital section” of Naples refers to
the great number of hospitals in the “high
Vomero” section of the city, way up on the hill on the way to the Camaldoli monastery, a section of Naples
that was countryside until the twentieth century. The major
facility up
there is the university clinic, a mini-city known as the New
Policlinic, which opened in 1973. The first major modern hospital in
that
area, however, is the one that Fred inquired about—the Antonio
Cardarelli
hospital.
A wartime aerial view of the
Cardarelli in its role as the
US Army 17th General Hospital.
(Photo from Fred Hellman,
courtesy of the Conrad R. Lam archives of the Henry Ford
hospital in Detroit, Michigan.)
Construction of the
Carderelli hospital (on a 28 hectar
site—about 70 acres)
was started in
1927. The architect was Alessandro Rimini. The Nuovo Ospedale Moderno di
Napoli (The New Modern Hospital of Naples) was called, more
simply, "The 23
Marzo" (March 23rd, the day on which the Fascist Party was founded in
1919
by Mussolini). It was opened in 1934. The entire grounds,
themselves, with various out-structures dedicated to different
specialties,
were completed in 1939/40.
In WW2, the hospital was used first by the
Germans
and then the Americans (as Fred's US
Army 17th General Hospital).
The original Fascist name for the hospital was obviously abandoned after
the
war (although the
1934 date, expressed in the Fascist numbering as "XII E.F." remains on
the facade (or, possibly has been restored); the hospital was renamed
for Antonio Carderelli (1832-1927), one
of the
great names in Italian medicine in the early part of the twentieth
century. A heliport was added to
the facility in
1974. By the 1980s, it had become the most important hospital in the Campania region of Italy. In 1988 a new
section for
orthopedics and rehabilitation was added. In 1990 Pope John Paul
inaugurated a
new Emergency Room—a five-story building (!), one of the best equipped
in Italy
in terms of staff and equipment. The hospital remains extremely active
today. Architecturally, the almost 18th-century Vanvitelli look of the main facade
contrasts starkly with the solid 1930-ish Art Deco interior typical of
so much architecture in Italy of that decade (photo, below)—straight lines and rectangles,
unornamented, flat, efficient and white. (See also this item on architecture.)
The life of the architect, Antonio Rimini,
was dramatically shaped by war. He was born in 1898 in Palermo
and studied art in Venice at the academy of Fine Arts. He gave up his
studies
because of World War I, a war in which he was taken prisoner. He
survived the
life of a POW in Germany
by bartering his sketches of other prisoners for food. He finally
escaped to Holland.
(He said of his
wartime experiences, “I owe my life to my art.”) In the early 1920s, he
got a
degree in architecture and dedicated himself to the restoration of
monuments,
churches and other buildings. He quit that in the mid-1920s and went
into
free-lance architecture. Besides the Cardarelli hospital in Naples
in 1927, he designed Milan's first skyscraper, the S. Babila building in Milan
(1936), as well as a number of other
buildings in Milan.
Rimini, however, was a Jew and thus excluded
from his
professional guild in 1938 by the Fascist racial laws. He was arrested
by the
German SS in 1944 and interned at the camp in Santa’Agata Fossili in
the
extreme north of Italy.
Then, however, he was put on a train bound for Ausschwitz. The good
news is
that once again his art saved his life; he used his artistic skills to
dummy up
an arm-band that identified him as a member of the Italian police (the
north
was still Fascist at the time); he then brazened his way past his
captors, got
off the train and escaped to freedom. He hid out in Milan under a false name until war’s
end. He
took up his architecture again, deserting it in 1955 for painting, his
real
love. He died in Genova in 1976. The Cardarelli hospital put on a Rimini
exposition in 1997
on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the founding of
the
hospital.
to main index
to
portal index for architecture