entry
May 2003 add photo & update June
2014
The San Martino
Vineyard

The
Museum of San Martino
is one of the most evident landmarks in Naples —a
huge, white ex-monastery perched on the Vomero hill,
visible from almost everywhere in the city and from
all points on the waters of the Bay of Naples. What is
not so evident is that the area directly below the
museum, extending around the slope to provide a
260-degree panorama to the east, south and west is a
20-acre oasis called the Vineyard of San Martino.
The vineyard rises steeply from 100 m (300
ft) above sea level to 200 m (600 ft) through a series
of terraces, starting from in back of the buildings
along the street named Corso Vittorio Emanuele and
stopping directly at the wall of the museum itself.
Originally, the grounds were part of the monastery, a
vast area set in isolation above the city. That
situation prevailed for centuries until the late 1800s
when the newly unified Italian state passed a series
of laws expropriating a great amount of property
belonging to the Catholic church in Italy and, thus,
essentially closing many monasteries. Since the late
1860s, San Martino has been a museum owned and
operated by the state.
The vineyard is in private hands,
however, and the owner seems intent on keeping it
intact, isolated and as green as possible. The division
of the vineyard from the old monastery in the late 19th
century unfortunately led to the lack of an integrated
plan to care for the grounds, particularly where run-off
from rainfall on such a steep slope is concerned. There
have been a number of earthslides over the last century,
with water building up behind some terrace walls and
then eventually bursting them. Restoration, however, of
a large section of the terrace walls below the museum is
in progress, and much of the property is still under
cultivation as a genuine, producing vineyard. The most
striking thing about the vineyard is that it rests above
an urban area of over a million, yet it is pastoral,
almost surreal —an unexpected patch of green and quiet.
update: June 2014. This marvelous
vineyard is now the site of activities promoted by Piedi
per la Terra (Feet for the Earth) a non-profit
social organization that runs such things as summer camps
for children on the premises (see this link).
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