Palimpsest-Naples

Naples is the largest metropolis in Southern Italy, a place where the ancient coexists with the medieval and the modern, creating a palimpsest that eludes, more so than elsewhere, the logic of stratification. The city is the focus of research activities by the Bibliotheca Hertziana intended to explore the city’s complexity, call into question standard historical approaches, and re-format and re-frame scholarly discourses.
Traces of Naples’s long history are embedded in the various layers of its urban texture. A criterion of continuity in the sense of overlapping strata cannot, however, always be used to understand its evolutionary chronology; in a way that is more evident and articulated way than other urban sites, Naples resembles a palimpsest. Indeed, the evolution of the urban scape has often been partial and discontinuous, and the traces of previous stages have not been completely effaced, either consciously or otherwise. Thus, the ‘stratigraphic sequence’ is readable at a simultaneous level, rather than by a top-down sampling through superimposed layers.
As a former capital and cultural and economic stronghold of the post-unification Italian state, the city has been the focus of sustained attention and a continuous exchange of ideas on the part of both local and European scholars. Nevertheless, the historiographic reception of Neapolitan art and culture has been characterized by a certain inelastacity. For instance, nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalistic perspectives have determined the image of a ‘colonial’ Naples dominated by a succession of foreign dynasties that supposedly shaped its arts and monuments according to ‘canons’ established in their native lands. On the other hand, the recurring idea of a subordination to the major centers of art production, both in Italy and abroad, has overshadowed Naples’s originality, even beyond the national borders of Italy.
Though starting within the broader frame of interest in Southern Italy – a deeply rooted tradition at the Hertziana – the project Palimpsest Naples aims at innovatively contributing to the research field on the capital of the Campania region by providing a platform for the observation of the cultural heritage of Naples and for debating approaches and methodologies of historical research that are aligned with new perspectives and connected to the burning questions of the moment in the humanities.
Fellows and members of the Institute’s research staff who participate in the project are individually engaged in actively investigating specific aspects, such as the creation and use of royal and sacred space; Naples’s multilayered cityscape as a mirror for identity through which aspects of the past were – and continue to be – selectively recovered; and distinctive features of Neapolitan art and cultural environment. Furthermore, attention is placed on historical phases that appear to have been less explored in recent historiography and criticism, such as the early and high Middle Ages, the twentieth century, and the contemporary scene.