Naples: Life, Death & Miracles vol. 2

By Jeff Matthews

This is volume 1 (A-D) of the second edition of the four-volume encyclopedia, Naples: Life, Death & Miracles. The entire set contains 690 separate essays, anecdotes and observations about Naples, Italy and cover history, music, literature, architecture, mythology, biography and general culture and traditions. They are meant to inform as well as amuse, and they range in style from the lighthearted to the serious and scholarly. The combined volumes cover everything from Driving in Naples to an Oral History of Naples in WWII, the San Carlo Theater, Greeks in southern Italy, lives of great writers and composers, the importance of dialect, etc. Is the entrance to Hell really here? Was Shakespeare a Neapolitan? Why do Neapolitans call themselves Parthenopeans? What is the hidden city beneath Naples, and can you really trip and fall into it? Why do they call it the Egg Castle? These and almost any other question you can think of will be answered somewhere in these entries. The volumes have ample graphics and are well indexed. The entries are in alphabetical order but can also provide a casual, jump-in-anywhere reading experience; they can serve as an encyclopedia or a guide. The entries have ample graphics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeff Matthews
• Release date: Apr 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476419787

Jeff Matthews

I am a longtime resident of Naples and have written about the area extensively. I have also taught English, linguistics and music history at local schools, universities as well as for the US military campus of the University of Maryland in Europe. I am originally from Los Angeles, California.

Book preview

Naples: Life, Death & Miracles

a personal encyclopedia

2nd edition

volume 2

E—M

by Jeff Matthews

Copyright 2012 Jeff Matthews

Smashwords Edition

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* * * * *

Introduction

Please see main introduction at the beginning of volume 1.

Table of Contents

—E—

Easter Monday

Edenlandia

Egg Castle

Eight Statues

Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel

Elia (Velia)

Emigration museum

English Forts on Capri

Epiphany (la Befana)

Essere o non essere...

Etruscans in Campania

Eureka!

Evil Eye & Good & Bad Luck

ex-military hospital

—F—

Fanzago, C.

Farnese Collection

Fashion Zombies

Femminiello

Ferdinando e Carolina

Fersen

Fighting for Two Souths

Filangieri & the US Constitution?

Filangieri Museum

Films Set in Naples

Fireworks

First Republic

First train

Fjord of Furore

Floridiana

Fontana, D.

Fontanelle Cemetery

Football (soccer), early

Fortunato, Giustino

Forty-Hour Devotion

Four Days of Naples

Fra Diavolo

Frankenstein

Frederick II

Freight Village

Friday the 17th

Fuga, F.

Funiculì-Funiculà

Fusaro, Lake

—G—

Gaiola

Galleria Prince di Napoli

Galleria Umberto

Garibaldi

Garigliano river

Gay Odin

Genovese, Antonio

Gentle Street Scam

Gesualdo, C.

Gesù Vecchio

getting by & bureaucracy

Giannetti, Giovanni

Giant Fountain

Gioconda, la

Giordano, Luca

Girolamini

Goethe (1)

Goethe (2)

Grand Tour

Great Race of 1908

Greeks in Naples

Gretna Green, Penelope & Carlo

Guarracino

Guitar in Naples, the

gypsies and accordions

—H—

Hamilton, William

Hand Gestures & Andrea de Jorio

Handwriting on the Wall

Haunted Houses

Health Care & Thomas Aquinas

Hera, Temple to, near Paestum

Herculaneum

Herculaneum Papyri

Herman WW2 Sicily & Naples

Highnames & Bynames

Hill Towns of Cilento

Holmes & the Medium of Naples

Homer, Vico & the Ur-Google

Homo Erectus

Horse's Head

Hospital 1st Polyclinic

Howells, William Dean

—I-J—

illegal building

Immacolatella

Imperial Port of Baia

Incurabili Hospital

Industrial archaeology

inquisition, medieval

Installation Art

Intarsia

Io speriamo

iSanGennaro, the

Isolympics

Jesuits in Naples

Jews, early

Jews of San Nicandro

Joans, Keeping up with the

Joli, A.

Jommelli, Niccolò

Jung, Spielrein & Carus

—K-L—

Kagoshima

King Arthur

Knights Templar

Krupp, A. on Capri

Lady Craven

Last Caravaggio

Lauro, A.

lentils

Leo, Leonardo

Leoncavallo, R.

Leopardi, G.

Lepanto, Battle of

Lighthouses

Literature in Neapolitan

Liternum & Scipio Africanus

Little Choo-Choo

Little King, the

Lizards, Leprechauns & Little Monks

Lombroso

Lucera, a Muslim Colony

Lucius Cocceius Auctus

Luck, Wine & Doo-Doo

Lucky Luciano

Lucy, Everybody Loves

Lynn, Richard

—M—

Madre di Buon Consiglio

Magdalene Bridge

Magic & Fortune Tellers

Magna Grecia

Maiuri, A.

Majorana, E.

Manfred

Mannesi

Marble Halls

Maria Cristina di Savoia

Maria d'Enghien

Marinaro (Borgo)

Marino, Giambattista

Martucci & Instrumental music

Masaniello's Revolt

Mater Matuta

Matteucci NYT article

megaliths of S. Italy

Melfi, Malfi, Amalfi & Mozart

memento mori

Mercadante theater

merchant marine academy

Mergellina & Sannazzaro

Mergellina Station

Messiah & the Lady from Naples

Metastasio

Michele Archangelo-St.Alfonso

Mike & Lola & the Sicilian Vespers

Miseno

Modern Art Museum

Molosiglio harbor

Monasteries, Ex-

Monkey-Men and Nestor's Cup

Monopoly (Board Game)

Monte Nuovo

Montevergine

Mortella, la

Mostra d'Oltremare

Mother Theresa

Movie Star Dogs

Mozart & the Comic Opera

Mummies, Spirits & Pompei

Munnezza

Munthe, A. (Letters, Mourning City)

Murat, G.

Murolo, R.

Music Conservatories, original

Music Conservatory

Musical in Naples, the

* * * —E— * * *

Easter Monday (Pasquetta)

—And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus…and they talked together of these things which had happened…[and] Jesus himself drew near and went with them…

(Luke 24:13-15)

The Monday after Easter is called Monday of the Angel in Italian, but, more commonly, Pasquetta—a diminutive of Pasqua—Easter. It commemorates the meeting (recounted in the Bible, above) of the risen Christ with his disciples in Emmaus, a village near Jerusalem, on the Monday after the Resurrection. To recall the disciples' walk from Jerusalem out to the nearby village, it is still customary in many parts of Italy for people—especially young people—to go on an outing.

This custom easily makes Pasquetta the most hectic, bustling day of the year in Naples. Last–minute Christmas shopping, Mardi Gras celebrations, New Year's Eve, rowdy bands of football hooligans—all of that is nothing compared to the Monday after Easter. Every single teenager who is upright and breathing puts on a knapsack packed with food and sets out to go somewhere—anywhere. But not alone. They travel in packs, herds, swarms, or whatever the appropriate collective noun is for a carefree mob out for a picnic in celebration of a religious event they no longer remember anything about.

The Biblical verses tell us that Emmaus was about threescore furlongs from Jerusalem. If the translators of the King James Bible and I are using the same single AA-cell-driven calculator, that rounds off to about 7½ miles. It goes without saying that Neapolitan teenagers of today are not about to walk 7½ miles to commemorate anything, but they will take the train. The local narrow-gauge iron horse that runs from Naples to Sorrento is called the Circumvesuviana. It makes almost 30 stops on the way out; many of these stations are on the slopes of Vesuvius in what is the most-densely populated area in Europe. All of these kids populate densely onto that train on Pasquetta and go somewhere. I have been on the train on Pasquetta and actually had kids come over and sit on me! They will also take the boat. I have been on the ferry to Capri on Pasquetta. We were packed to the gunwales with teenagers, each of whom carried his or her own weight in obnoxious very loud portable music toys—and I say that without even knowing where the gunwales of a ship are located.

All that may be in keeping with something I've just read about Easter Monday—that early Christians celebrated the days immediately following Easter by telling jokes and playing pranks. I had never heard that before, and I am not sure how much better off I am now that I know it. In any event, the disciples did not enjoy such modern amenities as portable CD or MP3 players and cell-phones beeping in 20 different keys at the same times. One wonders how they passed the time on their walk. The best thing to do on Easter Monday in Naples is stay home.

* * * * * * *

Edenlandia

Edenlandia is the largest amusement park—or fun fair—in Naples and one of the best-known such attractions in Italy. It opened in 1965. It is located at the extreme west end of the gigantic Overseas Fair Grounds, the Mostra d’oltremare in the Fuorigrotta suburb of Naples. Those fair grounds have an interesting history (see link, above) and were originally a pre-war Fascist undertaking that underwent dramatic post-war subdivision more in keeping with the needs of urban expansion and, obviously, no longer dedicated to the megalomaniacal display of Italy’s African colonies. When the park was opened in the 1960s, there was a small road that led by the entrance as one drove out from Naples to Bagnoli. That road is now a major thoroughfare, viale Kennedy, and has newer buildings along it for the entire length.

The amusement park is adjacent to the now (thank God!) defunct premises of a dog-racing track and to the renovated grounds of the Naples Zoo. Apparently, both Edenlandia and the zoo are now owned or sponsored by the same persons or agency since one ticket gets you into both. Edenlandia—along with the zoo—fell on hard times after the boom years of the 1970s, but, as far as I know, Edenlandia—unlike the zoo—always managed to stay open. These days, the amusement park seems to be doing well. I have been out there on a few weekends and notice that it is very popular and generally regarded as a good place to take the kids.

As I recall, I used Edenlandia at one time to increase my Italian vocabulary. Such a park is, in fact, called a Luna Park in Italian—Moon Park. I don’t know why moon or why they used the English word, park. A Ferris wheel is boringly called a giant wheel in Italian (and in some other languages) but the roller coaster is called The Russian Mountains in Italian. I do know that one, but I’m not going to tell you because they took out that ride and that was my favorite. Someone has to pay for that outrage, so it might as well be you.

Egg Castle

The Castel dell'Ovo (Egg Castle) is what you first notice as you stroll along the seaside Villa Comunale, the Communal Gardens, in Naples. It is a fortress built on the small island of Megaride, just off the Santa Lucia section of the city. Here, legend has it, is where the siren Parthenope washed ashore after throwing herself into the sea when her song failed to bewitch Ulysses.

Less mythologically, here is where the Greeks from Cuma to the north first settled the bay of Naples in the fifth century bc. Centuries later, the island became the home of the last Roman emperor, exiled here in 476 A.D. after the empire was overrun by the Goths.

[note: Various sources say that the young, last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was banished to the castle of Lucullus in Campania by Odoacer, whom Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, called ...that successful barbarian... . Gibbon also says, however, that When the Vandals became formidable to the seacoast, the Lucullan villa, on the promontory of Misenum, gradually assumed the strength and appellation of a strong castle, the obscure retreat of the last emperor of the West. That is almost certainly a mistake. There were imperial villas on the promontory of Misenum, but the great villa of Lucullus (from which we derive the expression, To live in Lucullan splendor) was indeed on the island of Megaride (and the height of Mt. Echia on the adjacent mainland), where the Castel dell'Ovo now stands. The ex-last-emperor was then apparently instrumental in founding a monastery on the island. There are no reliable accounts of his last years or even of when he died.]

The fortress that you now see dates back only about a thousand years and is essentially the result of Norman and Angevin construction done in the Middle Ages. It was then that the strange legend arose that a thousand years earlier, the poet Virgil had hidden an egg in the castle, the fate of which would parallel the fate of Naples, itself. As long as the egg remained intact, the city would be spared destruction. Thus the unusual name, the Castel dell'Ovo, or Egg Castle.

The egg, of course, is in many contexts—from pre-Christian ones to Augustine's commentary on Luke to Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights and even to the popular use of the Easter egg—a symbol of life, resurrection and hope. Thus, the broken egg stands for spiritual death. Interestingly, even if there were an egg in that castle, it would be a second generation one. At the time of Queen Joan I of Naples (1326-82) a devastating storm wrecked much of the Castel dell'Ovo, even destroying the natural arch that joined the two parts of the island. Joan had to ensure the population that it was because the egg had broken, but that she had personally gone through the same magic ritual as Virgil, putting a second protective egg in place in the same spot. The populace was calmed.

That legend of the Castel dell'Ovo is recounted by Matilde Serao in her Neapolitan Legends when she discusses the poet Virgil's purported magical powers. Virgil is said to have taken the first egg laid by a hen, put it in a glass amphora, and placed that in a finely wrought metal cage suspended from a beam braced against the walls of a small secret chamber built especially for that purpose within the castle. As long as the egg remained intact, the city was safe. Virgil, thus, joins the list of select protectors of the city, including the original siren, Parthenope and the more recent Christian protector, the patron saint of Naples, San Gennaro—St. Januarius.

Some people comment on the odd fact that on the ramparts are some cannon positioned such that they would fire in at the city and not out to sea (as one might expect in a fortress meant to protect against attack by naval forces). It turns out that the ones you see up there today were put there for ornamentation, having been recovered from the bottom of the bay of Naples at a point where some ship went to a watery grave centuries ago. Yet, tales of guns from the castle taking pot-shots at the city are not entirely false. Around the year 1500, when the French and Spanish were belligerently disputing the future of Naples, the Spanish parked their artillery on the height of Mount Echia, the cliff directly across from the small island, only about 200-300 yards as the crow flies—and shelled the Angevin French in the castle, who, of course, returned fire. The only thing that would happen today if you could fire those cannon would be that you would take out the row of luxury hotels that have sprouted like poisonous mushrooms since the new seaside road was built a century ago. They are so tall that they obscure the original cliff face of Mount Echia, the height that was so enchantingly beautiful 2,500 years ago that the Greeks chose it for their city, Parthenope. One barrage would do it.

* * * * * * *

Eight Statues, Eight Sculptors

One of the most visited points in Naples is Piazza Plebiscito, the large public square bounded on opposite sides by the Royal Palace and the great church of San Francesco di Paola. At that point, one can view the western façade of the palace and the symmetrical array of eight full-length statues, set in niches, four on each side of the main entrance. The statues represent, in chronological order, the seven dynasties that ruled Naples from the 12th to the 19th century plus a statue to mark the dynasty that ruled Italy from the incorporation of the Kingdom of Naples into the modern nation state of Italy in 1861 until the monarchy was abolished in Italy in 1946. The statues were installed in 1888 at the behest of King Umberto I. Facing the statues, in order from left to right, they are:

Roger II, the Norman (ruled from 1130-1154)

—Sculptor: Emilio Franceschi (1839-90) Franceschi was from Florence. He also sculpted prominently in wood; among many other items, he did the ornate wooden chimney-breast in the Tirrenia building (a.k.a. Palazzo Sirignano) in Naples. His most visible creation in Naples—in addition to this statue of Roger II—is the monument to King Victor Emanuel II in Piazza Municipio. He was the designer of the monument but died, leaving the completion to others.

Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (1211-1250)

—Sculptor: Emanuele Caggiano, (1837-1905). Born in Benevento, Caggiano was one of the important sculptors working in Naples in the second half of the 1800s. He taught sculpture at the Naples Royal Art Academy from 1878 on. Besides this depiction of Frederick II, another well-known work of his in Naples is Virtues of the Martyrs set atop the high monument column in the middle of Martyrs' Square.

Charles of Anjou (1266-1285)

—Sculptor: Tommaso Solari (1820-1889)—not to be confused with his sculptor grandfather, also Tommaso, from the 1700s, who has works in the Villa Comunale in Naples. Besides this statue of Charles of Anjou, the younger Solari did the statue of Italian patriot, Carlo Poerio, in Piazza San Pasquale. Also, he was one of the sculptors who did the monument to Victor Emanuel II in Piazza Municipio; as well, he (together with sculptor, Tito Angelini, created the statue of Dante in Piazza Dante and was one of the sculptors of the lions on the monument column at Piazza dei Martiri.

Alfoso of Aragon (1442-1458)

—Sculptor Achille D'Orsi (1845-1929). D'Orsi was the son of a small landowner and entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Naples in 1857. His main interest was realism, and other than this stature of Alfonso, his noted works include his early terracotta, Wounded Soldier of Garibaldi and, later, The Parasites (a depiction of drunken Roman revelers) and Proximus tuus, a life-sized statue of an exhausted laborer—a work widely reproduced in late 19th-century Socialist propaganda. D'Orsi also created the prominent bronze statue of Umberto I on via Nazario Sauro in Naples.

Charles V of Hapsburg (1520-1558)

—Sculptor: Vincenzo Gemito, (1852 -1929). Gemito was an eccentric of almost Dickensian origins, having been abandoned as an infant at the famous Annunziata orphanage. He was later adopted, worked as an apprentice painter and sculptor, and then enrolled in the Naples Academy of Fine Arts at the age of 12. Besides this statue of Charles V, he is well known for his terracotta piece, The Player, (Il Giocatore), done when he was only 16. He displayed successfully in Paris (notably, the Neapolitan Fisherboy), then returned to Naples and opened his own foundry to revive the Renaissance art of the wax process for bronze casting. He spent many years in a mental hospital, but later returned to his work.

Charles III of Bourbon (1734-1759)

—Sculptor: Raffaele Belliazzi (1835–1917). Belliazzi was prominent among Realist sculptors in post-unification Italy and among those sculptors in Naples who belonged to the so-called Resina school, many of whom opened studios in the ex-Royal Palace of Portici (now part of the agricultural department of the university of Naples). Besides this statue of Charles III, Belliazzi created the monument tribute to King Umberto I to recall the monarch's visit to Naples during the cholera epidemic of 1884. That statue is done in volcanic rock and is in the Sanità section of Naples near the Capodimonte roundabout.

Gioacchino Murat (1808-1815)

—Sculptor: Giovanni B. Amendola (1848–87). Amendola was from Sarno and studied in Naples at the Academy of Fine Arts. Besides this statue of Murat, other works by Amendola in Naples include the bust of architect Enrico Alvino on the grounds of the Villa Comunale. In nearby Salerno, his sculpture, Pergolesi Dying, is at the opera house. He moved to England and some of his works were commissioned abroad and remain there to this day, including the well-known bronze of a pensive woman entitled The Dominant Thought and his striking 21"-high bronze of a young couple, entitled Wedded.

Victor Emanuel II of Savoy (1861-1878)

— Sculptor: Francesco Jerace (1854 –1937). This painter and sculptor was from Calabria and went to Naples to attend the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Besides this statue of the first king of united Italy, he is most known for his contribution—a group statue called L'Azione—to the national monument to King Victor Emanuel II in Rome. A somewhat hidden work of his in Naples is the statue of Beethoven in the courtyard of the Naples Conservatory. He also did a great number of famous literary and political figures of the day, including Carducci and King Umberto I, located in many places throughout Italy and, indeed, internationally. The museum in his birthplace of Polistena is named for him.

Instant folklore: As soon as these statues went up, local wags coined pithy, vulgar expressions in dialect to put in the mouths of some of the monarchs. They were saying certain things. I have been unable as yet to determine if the first four have such sayings connected with them, but statues 5 through 8 are solid:

-Charles V, accusatorily pointing to the ground with his right hand, is saying, Chi ha pisciato cca n'terra?! (Who peed on the ground right here?!);

-Charles III, daintily looking down, says, Ma guarda che fettienti... (Just look what disgusting pigs...);

-Murat, with his hand melodramatically splayed against his breast in a Who, Moi?! gesture says, Giuro che non sono stato io (I swear 'twas not I.)

-Victor Emanuel, with his sword raised on high, thunders, Tagliammolo 'o pesce! (Roughly, Off with his d***!)

I love doing real research.

* * * * * * *

Eleonora

—Forsan et haec olim meninisse juvabit

—The tragic life of Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel

Failed revolutionaries usually wind up as footnotes in history books. Certainly, the period between 1789 (the beginning of the French Revolution) and 1805 (the year in which Napoleon crowned himself emperor) is one of such turmoil in Europe that it is easy not to see any but those who are larger than life. Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel is one such overlooked person. She was a major figure, but on a small stage, connected with the little-known and failed Neapolitan revolution and subsequent short-lived Neapolitan republic of 1799. It was a sister of the French republic and one of many set up in the 1790s in Europe, all of which—the Neapolitan version included—have been relegated to the status of also-rans in history.

Eleonora was an unlikely revolutionary. She was born in Rome in 1751 of Portuguese nobility and would be hanged in Piazza Mercato in Naples in 1799 in a grotesque caricature of an execution. Her executioner, Maria Caroline of Hapsburg, Queen of Naples during the Neapolitan Revolution was also born in 1751. That was also the decade of the great Lisbon earthquake, about which an anonymous poet wrote lines as if describing the dramatic events that would soon shake Europe the way the earth had shaken Portugal:

With her last earthquake this round world shall rise,

The sun shall lose his fires in endless night,

And the moon turned to blood, glare horrid light,

When comets dire shall sweep athwart the sky,

And stars like leaves before the tempest fly.

Certainly, the last days of one of Portugal's daughters, Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel, seem contained in that verse.

In 1760, Eleonora's family moved to Naples as a result of political difficulties between the Vatican States (of which Rome was the capital) and its Portuguese citizens, which included the Fonseca Pimentels. As a child in Rome, she had already shown precocious talent, even brilliance. She enjoyed the tutelage of a scholarly uncle and wrote poetry, read Latin and Greek, and was well versed in the monuments of the Eternal City.

In Naples, she fit right in. She was young, intelligent, wealthy, and extremely well educated. She was primed to be part of that great movement in human history known as the Enlightenment. Science, progress, and reason were the by-words of the mid-1700s. The words of Rousseau's Social Contract (1762) were taking hold. He wrote that government is justified only if sovereignty stayed with the people and said that Man is is born free, yet everywhere is in chains. His solution spoke of the natural rights of man.

In the 1770s and into the '80s Naples was one of the most open societies in Italy, well exposed to the ideas of Enlightenment Europe. It had been a free and independent kingdom since the 1730s and for most of that time had enjoyed the reign of Charles III of Bourbon, by all accounts a benevolent monarch.

The Neapolitan Enlightenment had the likes of Vincenzo Cuoco (1770-1823). He believed in educating the people towards liberty; he was to take part in the 1799 revolution and suffer exile. He would write the first account of the revolution, Saggio Storico sulla Rivoluzione Napoletana nel 1799. There was Vincenzo Russo, somewhat of a Neapolitan Rousseau, born in 1770 and who wrote in his Pensieri Politici [Political Thoughts] (1798) of revolution as the regenerator of human virtue. He would be part of the Neapolitan Republic and one of those executed with Eleonora in 1799. And, then, Gaetano Filangieri (1752-1788). His 7-volume The Science of Legislation was widely translated and was of monumental influence in a Europe on the verge of change. (Filangieri was so enamored of democracy that, for a short time, he carried on correspondence with Benjamin Franklin following the American Revolution about the possibility of emigrating to America, where certain inalienable rights had just been codified into the social contract.)

In short, Naples had the beginnings of an intelligentsia and educated middle-class. It still had, to be sure, a large underclass—the lazzaroni (from Lazarus, the patron saint of lepers —those whom Victor Hugo called les miserables in France), those largely unaffected by the social strivings of the Enlightenment. Unlike their Parisian counterparts—and this was crucial in the ultimate failure of the Revolution—they were not the revolutionaries. When the time came in 1799, there would be no peasant rabble storming a Neapolitan bastille. The peasant rabble remained loyal to their king. (The Neapolitan Bastille, by the way, was the prison in Castel Capuano, where the Hall of Justice was housed until recently)

In the 1770s, Eleonora became an important part of literary circles of the day. She joined discussions of literature, politics and science. She wrote poetry and carried on the type of correspondence so popular among intellectuals of that period, the kind destined to wind up in some distant future anthologized as The Collected Letters of.... These groups, themselves, were in imitation of the French salon of the day, as was the participation of women. It was the beginning of the age of the liberation of women—education, participation and, eventually, suffrage.

On the political scene back in Naples, Charles III had returned to Spain in 1759, leaving his kingdom in the hands of his good-natured, but not very bright son, Ferdinand, still a minor. Ferdinand ruled through a regent, Tanucci, until he was old enough to marry, in 1767. He married Maria Carolina of Hapsburg, daughter of the Empress Maria Teresa and sister of Marie Antoinette. The King eventually became known as King Lazzarone—perhaps Beggar King—a term of endearment, really, since it showed how much the people considered him one of them. He was quite content to wander down to the fish market and sell fish with the merchants, leaving his young, brilliant wife to rule Naples—which she did. In 1776, she junked Tannuci, who had ably stayed on as Prime Minister. Then, she replaced him in 1778 with John Acton (1736-1811), born in France of English origin and described as an admiral in some sources, but in others as a freebooter. She later made him Secretary of State and, apparently, her lover. During these years, Queen Caroline spared no effort to make Naples another Vienna and Paris—at least in the glittering, aristocratic sense.

History, in a sense, is made by those who write about it. That is to say, you get widely disparate views on the same person, depending on who is doing the telling. One of the least flattering views of Eleonora is to be found in The Bourbons of Naples (Acton 1957, below—indeed, related to the aforementioned admiral). She was a writer of Metastasian rhapsodies; she was that exalted blue-stocking Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel... one of those who longed to deliver [her] country to the French; one who declaimed her latest effusion, a 'Hymn to Liberty'...; ...an earnest idealist with little practical experience of mankind. At one point, in citing Eleonara's declaration that Democracy and true liberty render people gentle, indulgent, generous and magnanimous, the author simply says that Eleonora looked at the world through rose-colored spectacles. All in all, it is a picture of a poor little rich girl, flightily enamoured of the ideals of the French Revolution but without the foggiest idea of what really makes the world go round.

At the other extreme, a recent book entitled, Cara Eleonora [Dear Eleonora] (Macciocchi 1993), is laudatory but, at the same time, a strange mish-mash of historical fiction and good investigative journalism. The former would include a highly implausible (or, at least highly unknowable) scene of soft-core lesbian pornography between Queen Caroline of Naples and Lady Hamilton. On the other hand, the author was apparently the first, at the late date of the 1990s, to dig up the facts of Eleonora's separation from her husband in 1784, a Neapolitan officer by the name of Pasquale Tria de Solis. She had borne him a child in 1778, who died at the age of 8 months. In the course of the next few years, she was apparently beaten by her husband into the miscarriage of a second child and suffered the indignity of being forced to sleep in the same room and often in the same bed as her husband and his mistress. The royal court was sufficiently outraged to grant a separation. So much for Eleonora having little practical experience of mankind. The documentation of this sordid episode in her life is still on record. The information either eluded earlier historians or they considered it irrelevant. (Recent women writers on Eleonora [Urgnani 1998] say that men—even great historians such as Croce—typically overlook such episodes in the lives of women. Note, however, that even a woman biographer of Eleonora [Gurgo 1935] also missed—or ignored—this episode.)

If there had never been a French revolution and a subsequent Neapolitan revolution, Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel would still be remembered as a minor poet in Italian literature of the 18th century. Her literary output starts in 1768 with an epithalamium, a nuptial hymn, on the occasion of the marriage of King Ferdinand and Queen Maria Carolina, some 600 lines of verse praising the accomplishments of the conjoined dynasties, the Bourbons and Hapsburgs. She was 16 when she wrote it, and it was so impressive that she was promptly accepted into the Arcadia, the Neapolitan poets' circle of the day, where she became the new, young voice. She wrote sonnets and verse in Latin as well as Italian, and she wrote a number of cantatas and oratorios.

Much of her literary output, as was customary among lettered people of the day, was given over to voluminous exchanges of letters with other literati. Most prominent of these is a long correspondence in the 1770s with Pietro Metastasio, the Italian court poet in Vienna and greatest librettist of the 18th century. She had started the exchange by sending him a copy of her first work, the one written for the king and queen. Metastasio praised it, and by the end, in his seventies, was writing her letters calling her the last of the great seductress poets and how he wished he were younger!

Eleonora even tried her hand at writing original verse in the dialect of Naples, the language of the people. The sonnet has survived and was an expression of Eleonora's approval of the King, in 1777, abolishing the co-called Chinea (from the Italian word for to bow down), a holdover feudal ritual where the king presented money to the Pope once a year. It seems trivial today, but at the time, refusing to pay tribute to the Pontif was revolutionary and provoked friction between the Vatican and the Kingdom of Naples and actually endeared king Ferdinand to the social reformers in Naples—at least, for a while.

Her last writings, of course, are from 1799, when she wrote most of the material for, and edited, the Monitore Napoletano, the newspaper of the Neapolitan Republic. She had started out as the little Portuguese princess poet, darling of the court, and wound up as the fervent, revolutionary newspaper editor, writing hymns to liberty and calls for social justice. If one has to find a point at which Eleonora's efforts turned away from the lofty classicism of the 18th century literary circle, it would be in 1785. She became legally separated from her husband and returned to her father's house. Her father died in that year, and from then on she concerned herself with Enlightenment issues— economics, law, and advancement of the natural sciences. In the years following the French Revolution, she dedicated herself to translating literature of social reform and even revolution into the Neapolitan dialect so that the people she thought she was helping to transform might better understand the issues. She does truly seem to have been convinced that Democracy and true liberty render people gentle, indulgent, generous and magnanimous.

Eleonora's best remembered sonnet is a touching and short poem to her child, dead at 8 months—...alone, my only joy is that you reign in heaven... . The verses that helped to get Eleonora executed were undoubtedly two. One is a Hymn to Liberty, declaimed at the proclamation of the Neapolitan Republic in 1799. That hymn has not survived. The other was written from the Bourbon prison in Castel Capuano in 1798 where Eleonora had been sent for revolutionary activities, including the possession of censored books in her library. Times had changed since the days when Eleonora praised Queen Caroline and wrote nice little ditties, for example, on the occasion of the birth of the Queen's second child. The poem from prison starts:

Rediviva Poppea, tribade impura,

d'imbecile tiranno empia consorte...

In just the first two lines (of 14) she manages to compare Caroline to Poppea (Nero's wife and a murderess), calls her impure and a lesbian and says that she is unfaithful to her husband, an imbecile tyrant. Indeed, times had changed.

A short reminder of what had been going on in France is in order: In 1788, the Parlement at Paris presents Louis XVI with a list of grievances. The King calls the Estates-General to assemble in May of 1789 for the first time since 1614. In July of that year, the Bastille is stormed and Louis XVI is overthrown. This is the beginning of the French Revolution. Nobility begins to emigrate. The guillotine is invented. Radicals are called Jacobins, so-called from their meetings in the Dominican convent of St. Jacques in Paris. In 1790 the King, now merely a figurehead, accepts the constitution drawn up by the revolutionaries. Support for the idea of even a titular monarchy weakens, however, and Louis flees to the northeast frontier to gain protection from troops still loyal to him. He is recognized, captured and returned to Paris. The Paris Commune takes power under Danton in that same year, and The French National Convention abolishes the monarchy. It declares September 22, 1792 the first day of the Year One for the French Republic. The French National Convention offers assistance to all nations that want to overthrow their governments. (Read that sentence again and let what it really means sink in.)

In 1793 the king and his wife, Marie Antoinette (sister of Queen Caroline of Naples) are beheaded. France declares war on Britain, Holland, and Spain. They, in turn, form an alliance with Austria against France. The Reign of Terror in France takes hold and in 3 months, 15,000 people are guillotined. The counter-revolution in Vandea is put down brutally. Some 500,000 men, women and children are killed there and 13,000 more are executed. Napoleon gains notice for the first time as the French take Toulon from the British. The next year Robespierre crushes his rivals and has Danton and others executed. Juries may now convict without hearing evidence or argument. Opposition to Robespierre mounts. He is overthrown and executed. The Ring of Terror ends. Moderates take over and the French set about revolutionizing Europe.

It had been an exhilarating few years. Neapolitan Jacobins, sympathizers with the ideals of the French revolution now had solid evidence that a revolution could work. There were meetings and discussions and mumblings about the natural rights of man and how the monarchy was outmoded and should be done away with. One such sympathizer was Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel, that nice little woman who had written all those nice little poems and who—in the interim—had actually become the Queen's own librarian! The monarchy in Naples started to crack down on such sympathy. Indeed, Queen Caroline kept in her study a painting of the execution of her sister, Marie Antoinette, and wrote on the picture, I will have my revenge for this! Stars, indeed, were starting to fly before the tempest.

In quick succession, the French invade Italy in 1796. Napoleon enters Milano and sets up the Lombard Republic. He advances, declaring a Cisalpine Republic in Northern Italy and then takes Rome and sets up the Roman Republic in 1798. The French alienate the populace (revolutionaries are not known for their diplomacy) by arresting the Pope and taking him to France, where he dies. France and Naples break off diplomatic relations because Naples, in violation of a treaty, has supplied British ships in the port of Naples. The Kingdom of Naples prepares for a French invasion.

It is difficult to know what would have happened if Naples had not acted first. But King Ferdinand, in a show of bravado, sets off to liberate Rome from the French in 1798 and is routed. He flees back to Naples, giving the local street wags the opportunity to mock him with a paraphrase of Caesar: Ferdinand—he came, he saw, he ran.

The King and his army are pursued back to Naples by the French army. This sets the stage for the overthrow of the monarchy in Naples. With the French at the gates, Ferdinand and Caroline flee to Sicily, accompanied by British ships under the command of their English ally, Admiral Horatio Nelson. The French wait outside the city until the revolutionaries take the city after a week of utter chaos in the city, horrors that include manhunts, torture, and, apparently, even cannibalism. The rabble lazzaroni, seeing their king leave, hunt down and torment and murder as many Jacobins as possible. The Jacobins, in turn—the middle-class, the teachers, merchants, lawyers, writers, and rebel officers and troops—take the city from the last troops loyal to the king.

The last scene is at the Sant'Elmo fortress overlooking the city, where a force led in person by Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel—now poet turned passionaria—obtain the capitulation of the royalist forces. The Republic is proclaimed on January 21, 1799. Liberty, Fraternity and Equality have arrived.

The Republic lasted until late August. During that time, Eleonora dedicated herself to her newspaper, Monitore Napoletano. The first issue came out with the date inscribed at the top as "Saturday, the 14th day of Piovoso in the VII Year of Liberty, Year 1 of the Neapolitan Republic, one and indivisible, (2 February 1799)." (The changes in the names of the months—Piovoso means Rainy—and in the calendar system were two of those French revolutionary items that have not survived—unlike the metric system!)

Eleonora's lead article began, We are free at last, and the time has come when we, too, can utter the scared words Liberty' and 'Equality." All in all, from February through August, she wrote and published 35 issues of the Monitore and two extra editions. She was well aware that the people—the street lazzaroni—had largely supported the monarchy and now distrusted the Republic. She was concerned with explaining the revolution to the people and went so far as to promote a gazette in Neapolitan dialect where social issues of the day were discussed in the language of the people. She even stood up for the people in the pages of her newspaper when the Republican government confiscated property of those who had resisted the revolution, calling the move unjust' and illusory.

She was optimistic to the end and, in her last issue in August, referred readers to the next issue, which of course never came. The French army had pulled back from Naples on its way to more pressing matters elsewhere. The Army of the Holy Faith, the counter-revolutionary force led by Cardinal Ruffo had fought its way up from Sicily and was now at the gates of Naples.

There is no consensus as to why the revolution failed. No, wait. The revolution failed because the people didn't support it. By people, we mean the lazzaroni, the masses, the Neapolitan equivalent of the Parisian Bastille stormers a decade earlier. The real question is: Why didn't they support the revolution? I know of no easy answer. Why did one of the most miserable masses of population in Europe turn away from—turn ON(!)—a revolution that had their best interests at heart? Croce, who has written that the Neapolitan Jacobins transplanted the new ideas of liberty to Italy, chalks up the failure of the revolution to the Neapolitans' sense of false religiosity, carefully avoiding the word religion. Be that as it may, the revolution was not as passive as Vincenzo Cuoco (1820) claimed; it had the support of the nascent middle-class. But it didn't have the support of the people. That much is incontrovertible. And perhaps, here, Cuoco is not far off the mark:

Since our revolution was a passive one, the only way for it to be successful would have been to gain the opinion of the people. But the view of the patriots was not the same as that of the people; they had different ideas, different customs, and even two different languages. The very same admiration for things foreign, which held back our culture as a kingdom, formed the basis for our republic and was the greatest obstacle to the establishment of liberty. The Neapolitan nation was split in two, separated over two centuries into two very different kinds of people. The educated classes were formed on foreign models and possessed a culture quite different from one that the nation needed, one that could come about only through the development of our own faculties. Some had become French, and some English; and those that stayed Neapolitan—most of the people—stayed uneducated. [Cited in Diana. The above translation is mine.]

Beyond that, perhaps the issue is moot; the fact remains that the masses were on the side of the monarchy.They had not supported an earlier revolution in the 1600s and they didn't support this one. It doesn't take long even in the Naples of today to notice a distrust of change, an attitude that can manifest itself in cynically self-destructive behavior among the people.

The surrender of Naples to the returning forces of the King involved a staggering bit of treachery. The royalist forces bargained their way into the city by guaranteeing safe passage to France—the revolutionary motherland—for Republican defenders of the city, meaning, largely, members of the Republican government and prominent revolutionaries, including Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel, herself. The surrender took place, and those who were to leave for France were put on ships in the bay of Naples. At that point, Admiral Horatio Nelson—acting on orders from the Queen relayed to him apparently by his mistress, Lady Hamilton, good friend of the Queen, went out and took the prisoners off the ships. They were to be tried. Queen Caroline had said a few years earlier that she would like to be Robespierre (cited in Albanese 1998). At long last, she was going to get her chance. She would have her revenge.

It is instructive to read a Yes, but... version of this episode. From Acton (1957):

...A few facts may be gleaned from such documents as the records of the Bianchi Con-fraternity, who ministered to the condemned; a few anecdotes from contemporary diarists, especially De Nicola. The rest is hearsay, much bedizened by the rich Neapolitan imagination. Of 8,000 political prisoners 105 were condemned to death, six of whom were reprieved, 222 were condemned to life imprisonment, 322 to shorter terms, 288 to deportation, and 67 to exile, from which many returned: a total of 1,004. The others were set at liberty.

Nearly all intellectuals are rebels, and it is deplorable that most of the condemned were men of culture. The howls and execrations of the populace crowding to gloat upon their final agony added a poignant horror to their executions. ‘I have always desired their welfare, and they are rejoicing at my death!’ said Gennaro Serra before he was beheaded. And De Nicola wrote that when Eleonora Pimentel was hanged, ‘the shouts of the populace rose to the very stars'. The masses to whom she and her colleagues had preached liberty and fraternity, viewed these scenes with bloodthirsty gusto to which the hangman and his clownish assistant, the tirapiedi , who clung to the prisoner’s feet and swung with him into space, pandered with gruesome relish. But this royalist Reign of Terror as it has been called, pales into a provincial side-show beside quite recent and far more systematic pogroms. Granted that the Court's policy of revenge was cruel and unintelligent, there is little to be said in favour of the rebels, whatever their individual talents. To quote Luigi Blanch, the most balanced of Neapolitan historians, 'they were an almost imperceptible minority seeking to establish a form of government not wanted by the country and in the same year so discredited in France that it ceased amid popular applause on 18 Brumaire [the coup d’etat of November 9]. Their aims were opposed to liberal principles, based on national independence externally and on the consent of the majority internally. They were pleased by the disastrous campaign of 1798 and irritated by the vigorous resistance of the people... Had they triumphed, they they would have been all the more cruel as they were so few. Sacrificed, they inspired compassion for the individuals and sympathy for the cause. As executioners they would have inspired for both.’

Since then the technique by which a minority could seize power over a state against the will of the majority has been perfected, and most of us know where it leads. After a careful examination of the short-lived Parthenopean Republic one is driven to doubt whether it could have retained the power it had usurped with the aid of French troops and civil strife, except by subjecting the majority to violence and the constant threat of violence. This would have resulted in a police state far more inhuman than that of the Bourbons.

Whatever the other merits of Acton's The Bourbons of Naples may be, that passage is astonishingly glib. First of all, the betrayal, the arrests, the trials and executions of Republicans were not simply cruel and unintelligent. They were illegitimate, and the entire affair took even other monarchies of Europe by surprise. The Czar of Russia (hardly a revolutionary sympathizer) reproached the Bourbons for the massacre of Neapolitan Republicans, saying that he had sent troops to help regain the kingdom, not to slaughter the flower of Neapolitan culture.

And Admiral Nelson's behavior was