CI need talent and courage to write a book about Naples that is not rhetorical and you don’t wearily enumerate a series of stereotypes, but Marino Niola he succeeded. His The capital of the soul. Because Naples is an exception (Raffaello Cortina Editore) is a brilliant little essay that makes us fall in love again with that seductive and mysterious place which, as Anna Maria Ortese underlined, is inhabited by “a shapeless tumult of feelings”.
On the other hand, Niola is an experienced and witty anthropologist and it is a pleasure to be taken by the hand by his cultured and ironic prose and to retrace alleys and storiesback and forth in time, between the living and the dead who, as the author explains, live happily together in the shadow of the volcano.
It would be simplistic to call Naples just a citywe are rather faced with a place of the soul, a metaphysical entity that inspires legends and releases ghosts whose energy is still present in the salty air: a magical force that one cannot help but breathe, remaining forever bewitched like all the great writers and artists who have immortalized it over the centuries like the devotees of a pagan cult.
Serena Dandini (photo by Gianmarco Chieregato).
I agree and I think, in my small way, that the program Goofy Chennedy Show achieved while living for a few months in Naples would not have been the same in another place, and the holy man Quelo, played by Corrado Guzzanti, is the demonstration of that magic.
“The capital of the soul. Why Naples is an exception” by Marino Niola (Raffaello Cortina Editore).
Niola offers us a book that is an opulent banquet, a rich and sumptuous wedding lunch just as is customary in that latitude. Chapter after chapter we move from the passion for music and theatre, to the living theater which is the street with its alleys that seem like the papier-mâché sets of an eternal drama.
Up to the maximum symbol of the city, the undisputed patron San Gennaro, noble protector who defended Partenope from the eruptions of Vesuviusbut after the advent of Maradona he is no longer alone in the city pantheon, he had to share the throne with the curly-haired Argentine, or rather merge with him in a new epic figure that watches over all neighborhoods: “San Gennarmando” with the body of San Gennaro and the head of Dieguito. But, as the author explains, in Naples the law of the nativity scene applies which embraces everything and excludes no one.
All articles by Serena Dandini.
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