entry
Jan 2010
City Walls, Piazza Mercato,
Carmine Church & the Porta Capuana Castle
If by "city walls" you mean the ancient Greek or Roman ones that surrounded Neapolis, there is nothing left of those above ground in modern Naples. There are, however, some fragments that have been excavated and left open for viewing; the most prominent one is the section of the Greek wall visible at Piazza Bellini. The rest has disappeared under —in some cases— natural catastrophe, such as mudslides (a prominent one occurred in the sixth century), or was simply torn down or built over in the typically palimpsest approach to urban planning that has characterized Naples in its long history.
The medieval walls
are a different story. Starting with the Angevins in the
14th–century and continuing well into the Spanish and even
Bourbon periods in Naples, the protective wall around
Naples was constantly under some phase of construction and
renewal. That changed in the late 19th– and early
20th–century, during the Risanamento,
the great urban renewal of the city. Massive portions
of the medieval walls were torn down; some bits were left
standing as historical markers, and segments of the wall
were simply incorporated into modern buildings.
The most obvious historical marker
is the part of the wall, fortress and pillars (photo,
left) at what used to be the south-east corner of the city
wall across from Piazza Mercato and the Church of
the Carmine (photo below, left). There is not much left of
the fortress, and the ruins you see are often referred to
simply as "part of the old wall down by the port". In
reality, this is what remains of the Castello del
Carmine, now on the main road that runs east along
the industrial port of Naples. It was built by the Angevin
ruler, Charles III of Durazzo, in the 1380s. It was a true
fortress and at the center of battles during the Angevin
and subsequent Aragonese
period. It was expanded, as well, under the Spanish in the
1560s. It was also one of the strongholds of conspirators
during Masaniello's
revolt, which led to a very short-lived
(5 days!) first "Neapolitan Republic" in 1647. It played a
strategic role, as well, in later military campaigns,
namely the Neapolitan revolution of 1799 and the Bourbon
resistance to the army of Garibaldi
in 1860. The pillars seen in the photo are all that
remain of the Carmine Gate, one of the main entrances into
the city along the south wall in the late Middle Ages. The
structure was demolished in the early 20th century to make
room for road expansion along the port.
| update
Aug 2015
to above paragraph: DEATH ROW
These structures (above) may also be called the "Aragonese Towers" because they were modified greatly during that period (see link in paragraph). That was what the TV report called them the other day in commenting on current work to spruce and shore them up in anticipation of somehow working them into a tourist "itinerary" for that part of the city. Extra grisly treat for the tourists! —during all the sprucing and shoring, they discovered an entrance long since walled up and sealed. The opened it and found "death row", where condemned prisoners waited before being walked across the way to Piazza Mercato to be executed. Presumably, this included such notabes as Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel and, alas, countless others. |
Directly across
the street is Church of Santa Maria del Carmine
(photo, left) at one end of Piazza Mercato
(Market Square), one of the most historic sites in
Naples. The church itself was founded in the 12th
century by Carmelite monks driven from the Holy Land
in the Crusades. The historic name of Piazza
Mercato is Piazza Moricino. It was the
site in 1268 of the execution of Corradino, the last
Hohenstaufen pretender to the throne of the kingdom of
Naples, at the hands of Charles I of Anjou, thus
beginning the important Angevin reign of the kingdom.
In 1647 the square was also the site of battles
between rebels and royal troops during Masaniello's
Revolt, and in 1799 the scene of the mass execution of
leaders of the Neapolitan Republic.
If you walk north into the city
from that point along what used to be the line of
the eastern wall of the medieval city, you will
probably get lost, but, after judicious zigging and
zagging, you will eventually come to Porta
Capuana and Castel Capuano (photo,
right), so-named because this was the point in the
city walls where the road led out to the city of
Capua. The castle is at the end of via dei Tribunali
and housed the Naples Hall of Justice until quite
recently (when that facility was moved to the new Centro Direzionale).
Castel Capuana was built in the 12th century by
William I, the son of Roger
the Norman, the first monarch of the Kingdom
of Naples. It was expanded by the Holy Roman
Emperor, Frederick II of
Swabia and became one of his royal palaces.
Under the Spanish viceroyship of Don Pedro de Toledo
in the 16th century, it became the Hall of Justice,
the basements of which served as a prison. Over the
entrance to the castle you still see the crest of
the Emperor Charles V, who visited Naples in 1535.
The castle has undergone many restorations, one as
recent as 1860, and thus no longer retains a great
deal of its original appearance.
Today's
Porta Capuana (photo, left), in spite of the name,
is not the ancient gateway to the decumanus maximus,
the main east-west road that once led out of Roman
Naples to Capua. When the city was extended eastwards,
the construction of the new Aragonese
city walls meant relocating the original gate, which had
been closer to the castle. The present gate was built in
1484. It is still there and you can drive or walk
through and around it. The most
interesting examples of how the medieval
walls have simply been incorporated into more modern
buildings occur if you keep moving along that same
line of the eastern wall to the point where it
turned left to run along the northern side of
medieval Naples, along what is now via Foria. At
that corner is an enormous building now housing
municipal office space but with the inscription Caserma
[barracks] Garibaldi still prominent on the
façade. That ex-barracks was the medieval monastery
of San Giovanni a
Carbonara, which, itself, was built using
the corner formed by the meeting of the eastern and
northern walls of the city as two sides of the
monastery and then building the rest behind that
barrier.
As you walk west along via Foria,
keeping an eye on the dense row of buildings that
now stand where the wall used to be, the most
obvious thing is that modern office and apartment
buildings are not only much higher than the original
wall, but that, in the case of one school, as high
as what was the acropolis of the original Greek
city, itself; the city sloped dramatically upwards
in that direction. Piazza Cavour and the Archaeological Museum
(at the far end of the wall before it turned to form
another corner and run back towards the sea) are
below the highest point in the city, where the
Greeks put their acropolis. That height is no longer
evident because of the modern buildings in front of
the ancient cliff. However, many of the buildings
along via Foria have used part of the medieval wall
at their base. Why waste a good 100 feet of solid
wall? Put in a few windows and doors, and you've got
yourself the first few floors of one side of a
building. The San Gennaro Gate (photo, left)
of course, is in that section of wall and is not
only still open, but is still a main pedestrian path
in and out of the old city.
The medieval western
wall of the city, which, itself, followed the
line of the ancient Roman wall, was simply knocked
down by the Spanish in the 1500s when they expand the
city beyond the ancient confines and moved up the hill
towards the Sant' Elmo Fortress. The long straight
road, via Toledo, laid by the Spanish in that period
is well outside the ancient city. The Spanish moved
Port'Alba, originally one of the main gates in the
medieval western wall of the city, a few hundred yards
to the west (where it remains today), such that it
opened onto the new Spanish section of the city. By
that time, the old west wall no longer served any
defensive purpose and much of it went the way of all
old walls in Naples —torn down, ploughed under, built
over, and, in some cases, reincarnated as parts of
newer buildings.
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