Naples Declared

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Overview

A lively, elegantly concise historic tour of Italy’s city by the bay An invaluable addition to the art of literary travel writing, Naples Declared presents an informative and compulsively readable account of three thousand years of Naples history. From the catacombs of San Gennaro to the luminous paintings of Caravaggio to the ruins of Pompeii in nearby Campania, renowned author Benjamin Taylor takes readers on a stroll around the city Italians lovingly call Il Cratere. Gracefully written and full of good ...

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Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay

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Overview

A lively, elegantly concise historic tour of Italy’s city by the bay An invaluable addition to the art of literary travel writing, Naples Declared presents an informative and compulsively readable account of three thousand years of Naples history. From the catacombs of San Gennaro to the luminous paintings of Caravaggio to the ruins of Pompeii in nearby Campania, renowned author Benjamin Taylor takes readers on a stroll around the city Italians lovingly call Il Cratere. Gracefully written and full of good humor, wisdom, and amusing anecdotes, Naples Declared is a wholly original work that will be welcomed by anyone seeking to know more about the art, culture, and history of this fabled place.

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Editorial Reviews

Joshua Hammer
[Taylor's] encounters with quirky Neapolitans…inject some spontaneity into the proceedings. And he serves up some morbidly entertaining nuggets of Neapolitan history.
—The New York Times Book Review
Publishers Weekly
Compared to that parvenu Rome, southern Italy’s metropolis is “more ancient, less well-off…wiser, grander…glorious ghastly,” as well as the ideal setting for shaggy-dog repartee and philosophical ruminations, to judge by this beguiling travelogue. Taylor (Into the Open: Reflections on Genius and Modernity) offers a meandering, conversational account of 3000 years of Neapolitan history, one that veers off on interesting digressions on the origin of the alphabet to the fate of a lost American bomber crew but which always circles back to gossipy anecdotes about Roman emperors, medieval potentates, and latter-day literary figures and sexual outlaws. Meanwhile he leads readers on a journey through the modern city’s cathedrals, poets’ tombs, and famously finicky concert halls—a chorus of boos erupts when a harp recital strays into the avant-garde modernism—and periodically repairing to some café for impromptu debates with locals about everything from Faulkner to CIA conspiracies. (Naples’s buried Greek heritage provokes Taylor’s own opinionated musings on the superiority of pagan spirituality, which he greatly prefers to Christianity’s “masochistic preoccupation with suffering, death and putrefaction” and “untragic view of life.”) Steeped in off-hand erudition and raptly attuned to the city’s scruffy allure, Taylor makes a charming guide to an under-toured city. Photos. Agent: Irene Skolnick. (May)
Stacy Schiff

“Splendid.”  - Stacy Schiff, author of Cleopatra: A Life 

Library Journal
This book contains no itineraries, advice on getting around, or hotel or restaurant recommendations—in fact, novelist Taylor (The Book of Getting Even) hasn't so much penned a literal guide as one literary—but there is a chronology of Naples (from c.1800 B.C.E. to the present) that proves useful when planning a walk through the city. Taylor's book, like his subject, Naples, is a lot of things at once; there are lengthy discussions of history, philosophy, religion, art, culture, literature, customs. The book meanders between past and present, wanders in stream-of-thought fashion through the Naples streets, delves deeply into the city's stories, lives, and lore, and drops in for conversations with locals; it is an accurate representation of what travel is and what it means. VERDICT Scholarly and insightful and balanced with wit and levity, this is written with an effortless poeticism. It has drawn comparisons with Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia and Eleanor Clark's Rome and a Villa, but there is the potential for cross-genre (and media) appeal as it shares a cinematic pace with Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Before Sunset films as well as Chris Marker's Sans Soleil. Recommended.—Ben Malczewski, Ypsilanti Dist. Lib., MI
Kirkus Reviews
From novelist/essayist/editor Taylor (The Book of Getting Even, 2009, etc.), an idiosyncratic, atmospheric portrait of "the great open-air theater of Europe." Once considered Italy's pleasantest city, second only to Rome in importance, Naples today is as noted for its dire poverty and malevolent Camorra crime syndicate. "Its residents know themselves by instinct to be different from other European citizenries," writes Taylor: "more ancient, less well-off, more skeptical, less clean. But wiser, grander." Those sentences resonate with the author's attractive blend of romanticism and realism as he plumbs Naples' Greek roots and the pagan sensibility that still underpins its Catholic surface. Taylor's scope is as all-embracing as the stroll he takes around the Bay of Naples. He connects the magnificent wall paintings in the Villa of Poppaea with Italian art of the 15th century. He notes his "fear and dislike" of Christianity "because it sets the flesh against the mind and denies the brevity of our expectations; because, in a word, it is so un-Greek." Taylor finds Neapolitans of every generation deeply Greek in their tragic sense of life, borne out by centuries of foreign domination, climaxing with the brutal Nazi occupation in the final years of World War II. The author wears his formidable erudition lightly as he cites classical authors and 20th-century travel writers such as Norman Douglas with equal zest and acuity. Yet some of his most enjoyable pages are present-day encounters with a fervently communist doctor, a chain-smoking student of Faulkner and novelist Shirley Hazzard, one of Naples' many devoted longtime, part-time residents. Though this is a highly personal book, the Neapolitan spirit is palpable: "the being-visible-now, the quasi-divinity that flows from a fundamentally theatrical sense of life," as Taylor puts it in a characteristically ecstatic, evocative assessment. Packed with elegant aperçus and vibrant with the author's rueful understanding that "Naples the glorious and Naples the ghastly have always been one place."
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780143123460
  • Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
  • Publication date: 4/30/2013
  • Edition description: Reprint
  • Pages: 240
  • Sales rank: 387,555
  • Product dimensions: 5.20 (w) x 7.90 (h) x 0.70 (d)

Meet the Author

Benjamin Taylor is the author of two acclaimed novels—The Book of Getting Even and Tales Out of School—and the editor of Saul Bellow: Letters. He lives in New York City. 

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Table of Contents

Chronology xiii

Map of Naples and Environs xxiv

Introduction: One Hundred Fifty Generations 1

1 From Pithekoussai 21

2 Four Europes 47

3 The Very True Truths 79

4 Particulars 107

5 Siren Calls, Siren Echoes 141

Conclusion: Lacrimae Rerum 165

Acknowledgments 183

Sources 185

Index 197

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