«Secret Naples», the free book with Il Mattino on December 21st
Gabriel García Márquez said that every man has a public life, a private life and a secret life. Even the cities – especially those where the dust of a thousand legends has settled – have a secret life, which is made up of traces, of mysterious paths, of ever more fleeting memories. For years, with the popular weekly column «Virgil’s Egg», which accompanies the pages of «Il Mattino» every Sunday – we have been trying to shed light on these paths, entering the labyrinths of the most mysterious, secret and elusive Naples. And being enchanted every time in front of a casket that hides much more than it reveals, which hides much more than it shows.
“Secret Naples” – the book that will be distributed for free, Tuesday 21 December, with “Il Mattino” – responds precisely to the need for distant light on the less explored places of one of the most mysterious metropolises in Europe, “the only city in the world ancient – as Curzio Malaparte wrote – that it did not perish like Ilium, like Nineveh, like Babylon: the only city in the world that has not sunk in the immense shipwreck of ancient civilization. Naples is a Pompeii that has never been buried ».
Stories narrated and photographed (the author’s images accompanying the texts are by Sergio Siano). From the mysteries of the mermaid Partenope, who gave the city its name, to the secrets of the great poet Virgil, celebrated from the Middle Ages onwards as a magician and poet of miracles. From the enigmas related to the blood of San Gennaro to the basement of the ancient center where the prince of Sansevero, Raimondo di Sangro, developed his amazing inventions, anticipating science by at least a hundred years. From the esoteric triangle of Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, which in 1590 was the scene of a horrible act of blood (the murder of the young princess Maria d’Avalos and her lover, the Duke of Andria Fabrizio Carafa, by her husband , the prince of Venosa Carlo Gesualdo, famous madrigalist) to the great archaeological enigmas set in Posillipo. From the “devil of Mergellina” (the mysterious painting made by Leonardo da Pistoia for bishop Diomede Carafa and kept in the church of Santa Maria del Parto in Mergellina) to the curse of Gaiola, with its white villa asleep by the sea, which has become famous for its incredible events that are set there and the tragic fate reserved for those who, over the years, have owned it. From the mysteries of the Veiled Christ, the masterpiece of the young Neapolitan artist Giuseppe Sanmartino placed in the center of the nave of Cappella Sansevero, to the dark and less known face of the city’s castles. From the legend of the “crocodile that tore the lovers to pieces” to the secrets of the Holy Grail that could be kept among the artistic treasures of the Maschio Angioino. Above all, the dazzling beauty of Partenope, the city founded, according to the myth, by the mysterious Siren who gave it its name, and which will keep alive, firm, as long as the magical Virgil’s Egg under Castel dell’Ovo remains intact. All this, and much more, is “Secret Naples”, a journey into the depths of Parthenus, in search of those characters, places and legends that give Naples its unmistakable imprinting, and that the identity of a people and a territory .
Like the dancer of the Thousand and One Nights, Naples reveals itself little by little: a veil, then another, yet another, up to the last veil, behind which there is the magical heart of the city. “Secret Naples” will accompany Neapolitans and tourists by the hand – with a simple, journalistic and informative language – in search of its most fascinating, but also inaccessible corners (such as the Crypta Neapolitan, where the myth of Virgilio Mago was born).
As Giuseppe Montesano writes in the introduction to the book, «You cannot discover the treasure of Naples without hearing its tales, the stories that populate every corner of this city and that resonate in every person. Infinite stories that lie beneath the surface, and lie beneath the crust as the bubbling lava is closed in the red and fluid belly of Vesuvius, but ready to break the crust and flow into sinuous rivers and streams ». Because in Naples there is no stone, alley or palace that does not tell, to those who want to hear them, wonderful stories: stories of light and darkness, stories of love and death, stories of spells and curses. Neapolitan stories.
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