Naples is always a shock. Beauty and squalor like nowhere else in Europe. The only city in Europe whose ancient past still breaks through its layers of history in the irrepressible life of its people. People from all over the early Mediterranean found a seductive and fertile beauty in a wide bay dotted with islands and shadowed by a dormant volcano. Not all of them found what else they were looking for, but they made a great and terribly human city. Peter Robb's Street Fight in Naples completes a trilogy begun with Midnight in Sicily and A Death in Brazil. It ranges across nearly three thousand years of Neapolitan life and art, from the first Greek landings in Italy to the time of his own less auspicious arrival thirty something years ago.
It looks at what happened to Naples when in 1503 it became the Mediterranean capital of Spain's world empire and the base for the Christian struggle with Islam. Naples was a metropolis matched only by Paris and Constantinople, an extraordinary concentration of miltary power, lavish consumption, poverty and desperation. As the occupying empire went into crisis, exhausted by its wars against Islamists in the Mediterranean and Protestants in the North, the people of Naples paid a dreadful price.
Naples was the teeming city where in 1606 the greatest painter of his age fled from Rome after a fatal street fight. Michelangelo Merisi from Caravaggio found in Naples an image of his own sense of the age's crisis, and the human reality of his painting released among the painters of Naples the energies of a great age in European art. Crisis deepened and painting became more radical. And in the middle of the seventeenth century everything erupted in the violence of a revolt by the dispossessed. The people of an occupied city had brought Europe into the modern world.
