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The
Sanità area of Naples
Baratta
map of 1670, detail.
west-----------------------------------------east
 If you stand at the west end of the National Museum, you are
at the northwest corner of the city of Naples as it existed in the
mid-1500s after the great Spanish rebuilding of the city under viceroy Toledo.
Most of the urban renewal of the period had actually been within the
city
behind you
and along the coast. Much activity, in fact, had been directed at
expanding
the city
walls up the Posillipo hill to the west and strengthening the
fortifications
along those walls. If you imagine yourself then walking out through the
city
gate and looking north, the well-known Laffrery map from 1566 (a
century before the map on the right) shows
that you
will be staring at farmland, cultivated all the way back to the
Capodimonte
hill; at most there are a few scattered farmhouses.
As you
step off in that direction, you'll walk up what is left of the Vomero
hill as it slopes down from your
left; then you'll descend into a small valley and cross it until the
terrain rises
to Capodimonte a short distance away.
If you stand at the same spot (the yellow
dot on the above map) a
century later, the Baratta map of 1670 shows the walls to be gone and
the
northern area developed considerably, at least up to the foot of the
Capodimonte
hill. The building that will some day house the National Museum
is now there—from 1585—and there is already something “familiar” to
modern eyes
about the area. The small valley just north of where you are standing
is
called the
“Sanità”; it filled up in the demographic explosion in Naples in the
early and mid-1600s, when the city went
from 250,000 inhabitants in 1607 to 450,000 by 1660. (The population
would then
decrease in the wake of the great plague of
1656.)
The expansion to the north was dictated (1)
by available
space and (2) by the discovery of paleo-Christian
remains in the
area—especially the Christian catacombs and
the ancient church
of Santa Maria
della Sanità; the original
church had been buried many
centuries earlier in a tremendous series of mudslides.
Even in a city and age driven by the Spanish
fervor to build
churches, the Sanità was exceptional. By the early 1600s, 16
large churches had
been built in the area, most of them with adjacent monasteries or
convents. It
was essentially a race to build churches and living quarters for the
faithful
as they flowed out of the crowded city into a more spacious area to be
physically closer to the origins of their faith. The Baratta map, in
fact,
shows the Sanità dominated by the presence of the large expanded
church and
monastery of S. Maria della
Sanità (marked #63 on the above map)
just to the
east of the road that crosses the valley towards Capodimonte.
The Sanità, looking down to the west from the
main road, via S. Teresa degli Scalzi.
The street
below continues out of the bottom of the photo
and passes beneath the main road into the
eastern part of the Sanità.
 The area continued
to be built up in the
1700s, but then a
strange thing happened. The French, under Murat,
built a wide boulevard from
the city out to the Bourbon Palace at
Capodimonte. The road was elevated many meters above the surrounding
area of
the Sanità, such that your carriage ride took you over the area
extending to
both sides. The road was called Corso
Napoleone. Eponyms come and go, and today the street is via Santa Teresa
degli Scalzi, changing name along its length to corso Amadeo di Savoia Duca d'Aosta, but
the fact remains that your passage from
downtown to the area
of the catacombs and then up to Capodimonte takes you over the
Sanità and not into
it. You
can’t get down into it without purposely turning off and doing so.
Today, turning off and doing so is something
that most
people tell you not to do since the Sanità is an area of social
unrest, high unemployment,
and all the rest. The area is run by the camorra
(the Neapolitan version of the Mafia) and even the cops don’t like to
venture into it unless they are accompanied by
lots of other cops. It is an area where the residents will tell you
that there
is a lot of good to be said for the camorra
and almost nothing good to be said for the state. For some reason I am
reminded
of Lewis Mumford’s
remark
that the clearing away of the winding medieval streets of
Paris by
Napoleon III in the mid-nineteenth century did away with the last
physical
barrier that protected the common citizen from the power of the state.
Here we are 150 years in Naples,
and the Sanità really is such a physical barrier, at least in
the minds of
some.
The very isolation of the
Sanità—from the fact that traffic passes over it and not through
it—makes it relatively tranquil. There are some villas set amongst
trees and vegetation, lending an unexpected pastoral quality in places.
The area contains, as well, a number of attractions, including the San Gennaro dei Poveri hospital,
an institution built in the wake of the plague of 1656. (The hospital
was the true
forerunner of the great Royal Poorhouse, the Albergo
dei Poveri built during the later Bourbon dynasty.) Also, the
Sanità is where you find the uniquely grotesque Fontanelle
cemetery with its display of skeletal remains. If one
chooses to turn off and go down into the
Sanità, it isn't really that easy. There is one vehicular road
leading
down from the main road. Or you can walk, but that isn't too
easy, either; some
web-savy types in the area maintain a tidy webpage in
Italian about the
Sanità, featuring a running litany of comments and complaints
from citizens, foremost of which at the moment seems to be the
on-again but mostly off-again state of repair of the one elevator for
pedestrians to get in and out of the area. It was built in 1937 and is
located at the point from which the above photo was taken. In absence
of that friendly mechanical contrivance, you can trudge
the long way around, along that one vehicular road, or you can walk
down a
stairway from the lower slopes of the Vomero hill to the south. Or you
can
jump.
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Reference: De Seta, Cesare. "Il
viceregno: una
nuova dimesione urbana" (chapter
VI) in Le
città
nella storia d'Italia , editore Laterza, 1981.
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