The Bourbon Middle Ages: Neo-Medieval Architecture and the Politics of the Risorgimento

Tommaso Zerbi

Starting from the assumption of a powerful return of the Gothic — a “neo-Gothic revolution” — as a reaction to the shockwaves of the Age of Revolutions, this project explores the interactions between architecture, political crisis, and the reception, revision, and revival of the Middle Ages in the Italian Mezzogiorno under Bourbon rule. Spanning from the Kingdom of Naples and the Kingdom of Sicily in the eighteenth century to the dismantling of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies with Italian unification, it presents an apparent anachronism; after all, the House of Bourbon ruled in Italy long after the end of the medieval period. The same era witnessed a significant surge in classicist architecture. Yet this endeavor sets out to offer a counter-narrative to the reworking of the classical by illuminating the ways in which, in a time of political crisis and social turmoil, monarchism cried out for another ally: the Middle Ages. It suggests that medievalism and architecture expressed values crucial in exercising and normalising power amidst epochal challenges to the monarchy and to the monarchical model more broadly. The project aims to counter the marginalization of Southern Italy’s neo-medievalism in art and architectural histories, offering a deeper interpretation that recognizes its cultural and political agency. Yet, seen from a geo-political perspective, it is not just concerned with Southern Italy but is deeply engaged in the transnational dialogues between the South and Sicily, using medievalism as the lens through which to reconceptualize the intricate relationship between the two. The study is divided into three parts, each examining the evolving tension between architecture, medievalism, and reactionism in the face of epochal crises. The first part covers the period until 1816. It aims to reconstruct a history of the reappraisal of the Gothic in early modern Naples and explore how the arrival of the revolution in Naples and the establishment of the short-lived Parthenopean Republic in 1799, followed by the First Bourbon Restoration, ushered in a new phase for the Gothic Revival and reactionism. The second part spans from 1816, the year of the Second Bourbon Restoration and the merger of the Kingdom of Naples and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, to the Sicilian Revolution of 1848. The third part covers the period from 1848 to the Italian unification and the end of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Both ecclesiastical and secular architectural enterprises, either permanent or ephemeral, are taken into account. Case studies include the Church of Saint Mary of Graces in Caserta (c. 1801–1805), the Neapolitan pavilion for the wedding of Ferdinand II of Bourbon with Maria Cristina of Savoy (1832), and the reconstruction of the Church of Saint Francis in Gaeta, commissioned after Pius IX’s stay in the city (1848–1849). By unveiling how revivalism was wielded as a device of coercion, discipline, and power in relation to notions of catholicism and monarchism, “The Bourbon Middle Ages” ultimately aims to advance knowledge on the timely relationships between responses to the past and material and political cultures.