The many very large and very old monasteries
and residences of the nobility in the Naples of once
upon a time have long since been transformed into
museums, hotels, hospitals, apartments, police stations
and even the City Hall. What each one of these buildings
now needs —and I intend to take this up with the mayor—
is an H.G. Wells-type Time Machine (such as the one
shown on the right!): a chair but at once a precision
masterpiece of Victorian craftsmanship, comfy and
velvet-padded but yet agleam with crystals and gears and
burnished brass levers. You could sit there and fiddle
with the controls and have it, for example, take you
back one year per second until you get to the point at
which there is no building at all and you are on an open
field. Don't make it longer than one or two seconds per
year, though; you don't want to hang around a given time
too long in the twinkling succession of years because at
any given moment in Naples there will excited soldiers
running around or maybe angry mobs ransacking around
you. At the very least, you'll get mugged. You want a
taste of time and travel, yes, but you don't want
trouble. With that caveat, then, most buildings in
Naples would give you one fine ride! The Grand Hotel
Caracciolo in Naples (photo, above) certainly would.
It's a new addition to the Mercure Gallery hotels in the
Accur chain and has been open for about a year and a
half. The hotel gets good reviews even though it's in a
seedy part of town. The super-starred luxury digs are on
Via Carbonara only about a ten-minute walk from the
train station —maybe five if you run, which you probably
should.
Technically,
the name of the building is the Palazzo Caracciolo di
Santobuono, and your trip back to the
point when nothing was on that spot would land you in
the early Angevin rule of Naples; that is, the late
1200s, when the French House of Anjou had just wrested
the kingdom of Sicily from the previous dynasty of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen.
Charles I of Anjou (1226-1285) built some sort of a
structure on this site, which at the time was outside
the old city walls. It was the field where jousting and
duels took place, and Petrarch, himself, says that this
was where people could settle their differences "without
running afoul of the law." Later, Charles' grandson,
Robert of Anjou (1278-1343), gave the property to
Landolfo Caracciolo, the famous Neapolitan monk and
exponent of the ideas of John Duns Scotus.
In
1584, the property —now sheltered within the expanded
Angevin and, later, Spanish walls— passed to Giovan
Antonio Caracciolo, prince of Santobuono, who rebuilt
the structure as we we more or less see it today. The
nobility were hounded out during the turmoil of Masaniello's revolt in 1647
and for a short while after Masaniello's death the
building was the headquarters of the revolutionaries,
who thought they could hang on as the Serene Royal Republic of
Naples, protected by the French, an idea that came
to naught once the Spanish rulers of the vice realm
regrouped their forces.
In 1692
the property found its way back to its owners, the
family of Caracciolo di Santobuono. When the Spanish
rule of Naples ended in 1700, the power void was filled
by a short period of Austrian
rule, and in 1712 Prince D'Elbeuf, who had come to
command a cavalry regiment for the Austrians in Naples,
took up residence there. He became known as the first
modern excavator of Herculaneum.
In 1799, the building was the residence of French
General Championnet in the French Republic's support of
the young Neapolitan Republic
(which lasted just a few months). The building was also
one of the residences of Murat
and his family during the "French Decade" (i.e.
1808-14). After that, the building went through times of
decay alternating with periods when it served commercial
or military purposes.
The property
was not directly in the path of the Risanamento,
the urban renewal of the city between 1885 and 1915; thus,
the building was spared. Also, in WWII, it was close to
the train station, a target for Allied air-raids but was
not so damaged that it couldn't be patched up. Now, it's a
hotel. Go in and ask for the H.G. Wells suite. Mention my
name. Have fun.