Street Fight in Naples: A City's Unseen History - Softcover
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. Their ancestors came from all over the early Mediterranean to the wide bay and its islands, shadowed by a dormant volcano. Not all of them found what they were looking for, but they made a great and terribly human city. Peter Robb's Street Fight in Naples ranges across nearly three thousand years of Neapolitan life and art, from the first Greek landings in Italy to his own less auspicious arrival thirty-something years ago. In 1503 Naples became 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. 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 where in 1606 the greatest painter of his age fled from Rome after a fatal street fight. Michelangelo Merisi from Caravaggio found in its teeming streets an image of the age's crisis, and released among the painters of Naples the energies of 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.
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Review:
Remarkable ... [an] atmospheric and erudite portrait of a fascinating city (Sunday Times)
Finely crafted ... offers is a vivid sense of the infinite layers in a city older than Rome that was once the biggest in Western Europe (The Economist)
Never fails to take one's breath away (Financial Times)
Robb joyfully flouts the staid chronology of the conventional historian ... I have rarely read a more vivid account of the city's often menacing claims on a visitor (Times Literary Supplement)
Book Description:
Finely crafted ... offers is a vivid sense of the infinite layers in a city older than Rome that was once the biggest in Western Europe (The Economist)
Never fails to take one's breath away (Financial Times)
Robb joyfully flouts the staid chronology of the conventional historian ... I have rarely read a more vivid account of the city's often menacing claims on a visitor (Times Literary Supplement)
A vivid memoir which brings Naples and its extraordinary history to life
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
- Publication date2011
- ISBN 10 1408820005
- ISBN 13 9781408820001
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages416
- Rating
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