Book Description
Baroque Naples: A Documentary History, 1600–1800 presents documents on the history, culture, and art of the city during Naples’ golden age of prestige and prosperity under the Spanish Hapsburgs and Bourbons. Texts cover the history of the city and environs, contemporary travel guides, descriptions of the city’s art, architecture and classical inheritance, its literature, music and theater.
There are also chapters that offer texts by the famed Neapolitan economists, legal thinkers and philosophers of the age; a selection of religious thought; and examples of Naples’ contribution to the natural sciences.
The selections are preceded by brief introductions to the writers and the ideas presented in the texts. Sixty-nine selections include Enrico Bacco, John Evelyn, Salvator Rosa, Luigi Vanvitelli, Giovanni Battista Marino and the Neapolitan Marinisti, Pietro Trapassi (Metastasio), Giovanni Battista Della Porta, Antonio Serra, Giuseppe Palmieri, Gaetano Filangieri, Tommaso Campanella, Giambattista Vico, Fynes Moryson, and many others.
The volume also includes a general introduction, brief biographies and chronologies, 60 illustrations, 3 maps, bibliographies, and index.
Publisher comments
Baroque Naples, 1600–1800 is the fourth in the Italica Press's Documentary History of Naples Series. As befits the period, Jeanne Chenault Porter's book focuses on Naples as a cultural capital, one whose brilliant achievements in the arts and letters belied — and to an extent masked — the profound social, economic, and political problems of the kingdom of Naples and of the Ancien Régime throughout Europe. These would come to a crisis in the wake of the French Revolution and prepare the way for a century of “marginalization” from which the city is only now emerging. Thus, while no one can ignore the deep structural shortcomings of the city and its kingdom during the two centuries covered in the following volume, so too no one can deny the essential truth that the years 1600 to 1800 were indeed, “the Golden Age of Naples.”
