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Naples is always a shock. Beauty and squalor like nowhere else in
Europe. The only city in Europe whose ancient past still breaks through
its layers of history in the irrepressible life of its people. People
from all over the early Mediterranean found a seductive and fertile
beauty in a wide bay dotted with islands and shadowed by a dormant
volcano. Not all of them found what else they were looking for, but
they made a great and terribly human city.
Peter Robb's
Street Fight in Naples completes a trilogy
begun with
Midnight in Sicily and
A Death in Brazil.
It ranges across nearly three thousand years of Neapolitan life and
art, from the first Greek landings in Italy to the time of his own less
auspicious arrival thirty something years ago.
It looks at what happened to Naples when in 1503 it became the
Mediterranean capital of Spain's world empire and the base for the
Christian struggle with Islam. Naples was a metropolis matched only by
Paris and Constantinople, an extraordinary concentration of miltary
power, lavish consumption, poverty and desperation. As the occupying
empire went into crisis, exhausted by its wars against Islamists in the
Mediterranean and Protestants in the North, the people of Naples paid a
dreadful price.
Naples was the teeming city where in 1606 the greatest painter of
his age fled from Rome after a fatal street fight. Michelangelo Merisi
from Caravaggio found in Naples an image of his own sense of the age's
crisis, and the human reality of his painting released among the
painters of Naples the energies of a great age in European art. Crisis
deepened and painting became more radical. And in the middle of the
seventeenth century everything erupted in the violence of a revolt by
the dispossessed. The people of an occupied city had brought Europe
into the modern world.
About The Author
Peter Robb is the author of the acclaimed bestseller
Midnight
in Sicily, which was published in October 1996 and won the 1997
Victorian Premier's Literary Prize for non-fiction, and was named a
New
York Times Book review Notable Book of the Year. Robb's biography
of Caravaggio, titled simply
M, was published in late October
1998 in Australia, and created considerable controversy on its
publication in Britain in early 2000. It won the 1999 National
biography Award. Robb's most recent book,
A Death in Brazil,
was published in October 2003, and won The 2004
Age
Non-Fiction Book of the Year and the 2004 Victorian Premier's Award for
Non-fiction.
Click here
to read the review of Street Fight In Naples.
