Naples is beautiful because it changes, not because it keeps
In his fundamental stay in Naples in 1925, Adorno already had the opportunity to argue with those who wanted to stiffen the Campania capital in what he defined: “an illustrated postcard, a substitute without history”.
A definition that does not seem far from the one that perhaps he would have attributed to the broadcast of Rai 1, made by Alberto Angela, broadcast on Christmas evening.
An indisputable success with the public, with more than 4 million spectators. But not so if it was an equally successful communication. The city that emerged from those tracking shots without crowds and without a soul was the city of all time, precisely: a substitute without history.
If we go back to the Rai display cases we will find ten broadcasts on the Neapolitan capital similar to what was broadcast: Palazzo Reale, Capodimonte, the Fontanelle cemetery, San Severo Chapel, three or four tracking shots from the top of San martino, the inevitable stairways to descend into the belly of the city, or to go up into the halls of the monumental palaces, and, finally, the amazement of the catacombs of San Gennaro, ending with the precious pieces of the saint’s treasure.
But in 2021 are we always and only there? Do we use two hours of Rai 1 at Christmas to repeat the usual ejaculations from tourist agencies in Japan?
Does Naples as a metropolis speak of nothing else today? A city that is now being scanned by television cameras and cinema machines finds nothing more for its sex appeal than the usual catalog, which even Stendhal snubbed two centuries ago?
Wouldn’t it be time to talk about the city as the only truly great urban aggregation that is proposed as a stage for our imagination?
Those who go to New York find the thrill of the already seen, even if they go there for the first time. In fact, New York is so intimate and familiar for its infinite multimedia representations, that it excites precisely because of that: to see, meet, feel exactly the flavors, colors, smells that have been told to us a thousand times. The yellow taxis, the Rockefeller center, Central park, the clubs of Soho, Broadway: you go to New York to be the protagonists of the permanent film of that city. And is Naples not like this now? Don’t Sorrentino, Genovese, Capuano, Martone drag us along those streets, those alleys, those squares, those pizzerias, those Bassi where people are the work of art?
Angela’s program seemed like a crafty and cloying way to make an impression, but heartless, with those crowd-free tracking shots.
But the point that struck me about that story is the museum vision of the city, a representation of a pure sequence of what has been, without daring any emotion about what it is or even more what it will be. The archaeological museum is one of the most powerful machines of the time, in which past and future are mixed, and where it is possible to ignite one’s curiosity, the desire to go to Naples through it digitally. Isn’t this a record of Naples at the time of the pandemic?
In the decumani, between via dei Tribunali and S.Giacomo dei Librai, out of about two hundred shops and boutiques, there are no more than 5 global brands, while the rest is all local craftsmanship, for better or for worse: creativity that walks. Isn’t this the Naples to share in the communication society? A city where ten crews come to tour from all over the world every month, twice as many as in Milan, more than London.
On this it would be worthwhile to strike up a real discussion: is Naples the one you see or the one that talks about? The city you use or the one you imagine? The still spectacle of the gulf or, as Benjamin wrote “the most feverish city I have ever seen beyond Paris“?
Mayor and Governor are putting together an argument on this fever, which should be shared with the community.
De Luca has laid the knot of the eastern area of the city, thinking of a move – mobilize the regional apparatus in that area – to give a boost. It would be a great move: to open the eastern front to bring Vesuvius into the metropolitan area by connecting the urban center with the strip that reaches the coast.
The mayor finds himself as commissioner of Bagnoli to put another similar idea on the table as soon as possible, which rebalances the city precisely on the side of professional residential care: research, training, technologies, advanced services.
An extraordinary construction site that offers Europe a Mediterranean power: a city that reaches Punta Campanella from Monte di Procida, federating communities, cultures, traditions, combining the archaeological areas of Pompeii and Herculaneum with university and research platforms, arriving at a real a unitary and autonomous strategy rather than a smart city strategy of Brain life, a high-quality area of the city.
In the meantime, this could immediately become a communication and connection system, with a single regulatory plan of memories and connectivity, which programs the deployment of 5g on this scale, which in the meantime passes through assistance and entertainment systems to guarantee development and safety. , and then you connect it to the fiber cabling.
A construction site at the height of a city that is confirmed as extraordinary for the change and not the contemplation of what has been.