Street Fight in Naples

Author: Peter Robb
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408822326
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 425

Book Description
Naples is always a shock, flaunting beauty and squalor like nowhere else. It is the only city in Europe whose ancient past still lives in its irrepressible people. In 1503, Naples was the Mediterranean capital of Spain's world empire and the base for the Christian struggle with Islam. It was a European metropolis matched only by Paris and Istanbul, an extraordinary concentration of military power, lavish consumption, poverty and desperation. It was to Naples in 1606 that Michelangelo Merisi fled after a fatal street fight, and there released a great age in European art - until everything erupted in a revolt by the dispossessed, and the people of an occupied city brought Europe into the modern world. Ranging across nearly three thousand years of Neapolitan life and art, from the first Greek landings in Italy to the author's own, less auspicious, arrival thirty-something years ago, Street Fight in Naples brings vividly to life the tumultuous and, at times, tragic history of Naples.

Street Fight in Naples

Author: Peter Robb
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781741754124
Category : Naples (Italy)
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Book Description
Naples is always a shock, flaunting beauty and squalor like nowhere else. Naples is the only city in Europe whose ancient past still lives in its irrepressible people. Peter Robb's book ranges across nearly 3,000 years of Neapolitan life and art, from the first Greeklandings in Italy to his own less auspicious arrival over 30 years ago.

Tuff City

Author: Nicholas T. Dines
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857452797
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Book Description
During the 1990s, Naples' left-wing administration sought to tackle the city's infamous reputation of being poor, crime-ridden, chaotic and dirty by reclaiming the city's cultural and architectural heritage. This book examines the conflicts surrounding the reimaging and reordering of the city's historic centre through detailed case studies of two piazzas and a centro sociale, focusing on a series of issues that include heritage, decorum, security, pedestrianization, tourism, immigration and new forms of urban protest. This monograph is the first in-depth study of the complex transformations of one of Europe's most fascinating and misunderstood cities. It represents a new critical approach to the questions of public space, citizenship and urban regeneration as well as a broader methodological critique of how we write about contemporary cities.

New Approaches to Naples c.1500-c.1800

Author: Helen Hills
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317088689
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
Early modern Naples has been characterized as a marginal, wild and exotic place on the fringes of the European world, and as such an appropriate target of attempts, by Catholic missionaries and others, to ’civilize’ the city. Historiographically bypassed in favour of Venice, Florence and Rome, Naples is frequently seen as emblematic of the cultural and political decline in the Italian peninsula and as epitomizing the problems of southern Italy. Yet, as this volume makes plain, such views blind us to some of its most extraordinary qualities, and limit our understanding, not only of one of the world's great capital cities, but also of the wider social, cultural and political dynamics of early modern Europe. As the centre of Spanish colonial power within Europe during the vicerealty, and with a population second only to Paris in early modern Europe, Naples is a city that deserves serious study. Further, as a Habsburg dominion, it offers vital points of comparison with non-European sites which were subject to European colonialism. While European colonization outside Europe has received intense scholarly attention, its cultural impact and representation within Europe remain under-explored. Too much has been taken for granted. Too few questions have been posed. In the sphere of the visual arts, investigation reveals that Neapolitan urbanism, architecture, painting and sculpture were of the highest quality during this period, while differing significantly from those of other Italian cities. For long ignored or treated as the subaltern sister of Rome, this urban treasure house is only now receiving the attention from scholars that it has so long deserved. This volume addresses the central paradoxes operating in early modern Italian scholarship. It seeks to illuminate both the historiographical pressures that have marginalized Naples and to showcase important new developments in Neapolitan cultural history and art history. Those developments showcased here include bot

Allied Encounters

Author: Marisa Escolar
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823284514
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
Honorable Mention for the 2019 American Association for Italian American Book Prize (20-21st Centuries) Allied Encounters uniquely explores Anglo-American and Italian literary, cinematic, and military representations of World War II Italy in order to trace, critique, and move beyond the gendered paradigm of redemption that has conditioned understandings of the Allied–Italian encounter. The arrival of the Allies’ global forces in an Italy torn by civil war brought together populations that had long mythologized one another, yet “liberation” did not prove to be the happy ending touted by official rhetoric. Instead of a “honeymoon,” the Allied–Italian encounter in cities such as Naples and Rome appeared to be a lurid affair, where the black market reigned supreme and prostitution was the norm. Informed by the historical context as well as by their respective traditions, these texts become more than mirrors of the encounter or generic allegories. Instead, they are sites in which to explore repressed traumas that inform how the occupation unfolded and is remembered, including the Holocaust, the American Civil War, and European colonialism, as well as individual traumatic events like the massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine and the mass civilian rape near Rome by colonial soldiers

M: The Caravaggio Enigma

Author: Peter Robb
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408819899
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 585

Book Description
M is the name of an enigma. In his short and violent life, Michaelangelo Merisi, from Caravaggio, changed art for ever. In the process he laid bare his own sexual longing and the brutal realities of his life with shocking frankness. Like no painter before him and few since, M the man appears in his art. As a book about art and life and how they connect, there has never been anything quite like it.

Only in Naples

Author: Katherine Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN: 0812998162
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
"In the tradition of M.F.K. Fisher and Peter Mayle, this ... memoir follows American-born Katherine Wilson on her adventures abroad, where a three-month rite of passage in Naples turns into a permanent embrace of this boisterous city on the Mediterranean. It is all thanks to a surprising romance, a new passion for food, and a spirited woman who will become her mother-in-law--and teach her to laugh, to seize joy, and to love"--

Naples Declared

Author: Benjamin Taylor
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143123467
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
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.

Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump

Author: H. G. Wells
Publisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 185

Book Description
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump" (Being a First Selection from the Literary Remains of George Boon, Appropriate to the Times) by H. G. Wells. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

The Serpent Coiled in Naples

Author: Marius Kociejowski
Publisher: Haus Publishing
ISBN: 1909961809
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 514

Book Description
A travelogue revealing the hidden stories of Naples. In recent years Naples has become, for better or worse, the new destination in Italy. While many of its more unusual features are on display for all to see, the stories behind them remain largely hidden. In Marius Kociejowski’s portrait of this baffling city, the serpent can be many things: Vesuvius, the mafia-like Camorra, the outlying Phlegrean Fields (which, geologically speaking, constitute the second most dangerous area on the planet). It is all these things that have, at one time or another, put paid to the higher aspirations of Neapolitans themselves. Naples is simultaneously the city of light, sometimes blindingly so, and the city of darkness, although often the stuff of cliché. The boundary that separates death from life is porous in the extreme: the dead inhabit the world of the living and vice versa. The Serpent Coiled in Naples is a travelogue, a meditation on mortality, and much else besides.