Naples is the most mysterious city in the world. It is the only city of the ancient world that has not perished like Ilium, Nineveh, and Babylon. Naples is a Pompeii that was never buried. It is not a city: it is a world – the ancient pre-Christian world – that has survived intact on the surface of the modern world.
Curzio Malaparte
My dominant emotion was a kind of excited puzzlement. I was like a person happy to be lost, for the metropolis was so involuted, so multilayered, that my mind could not begin to discern any spatial logic in it. The facades of magnificent palazzi fronted on alleys so narrow that they would never again be seen in their totality. The grey walls of conventual compounds screened superb churches from any common awareness of their existence. And certain interiors had been subject to infinite subdivision, a crypt turning into a maze of chapels, the chapels into a host of even tinier tombs, the tiny tombs into cookie tins filled with human skulls, scapulars, broken tibia, rusty ex-votos.
Dan Hofstadter
The real Neapolitan is not necessarily a Neapolitan. He can be from anywhere in the world, English, French, Spanish or American. If you feel that Naples is a universal capital then you, too, can be a real Neapolitan.
Marius Kociejowski
It really is Christmas every day in the heart of the Centro Storico in Napoli. And this is no mere idle observation, for the message embodied in the crib scene is that the sacred, the divine, grace, hope, wonder, the beatific vision – however you want to describe it, is not abstract, or confined to some distant historical moment or personage, but a living reality finding expression in each and every moment no matter how unexceptional or humble. This conjoining of the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’ strikes me as much the same idea that the Mahayana Buddhist seeks to communicate with the immortal phrase – Samsara is Nirvana. Few places evince this coincidence of apparent opposites – love and hate, chiaroscuro, day and night, life and death – so vividly, so exuberantly as Napoli. In celebration of my recent return to this fine city and in honour of the magnificent art of the presepi makers, some of whom I had the pleasure of meeting, I present the Festa di Pastori – a work fittingly 9 months in the making. Presto altro da Napoli!
