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  • Becoming Neapolitan: Citizen Culture in Baroque Naples
  • Caroline Castiglione
Becoming Neapolitan: Citizen Culture in Baroque Naples. By John Marino (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) 342 pp. $60.00

In Becoming Neapolitan, Marino offers a multifaceted perspective on public rituals in Naples between the mid-sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries. The study is a sweeping excursion into a variety of sources, many of which are available only in Italian. It thus brings into view the urban panorama of one of seventeenth-century Europe’s least understood cities. Naples was the largest city of the Spanish Empire, a densely inhabited immigrant destination, where as many as one-third of the residents were born beyond the city’s walls. With a population of 360,000, Naples dwarfed most cities in Italy; it was as large as Paris until it was decimated by the plague in 1656. It was both a religious boom town (with more than 150 churches and monasteries built in the first half of the seventeenth century alone) and “the most vice-ridden city in the whole universe,” according to Cervantes and other authors of Spain’s Golden Age whose literary imaginings could not ignore the city that Marino calls the “jewel of the Spanish crown” (27).

Naples did indeed glitter in the seventeenth century, but to its Spanish masters, other metaphors also applied. Its coat of arms was, appropriately, an unbridled horse; it shook its Spanish rulers often, even throwing them off from time to time. Becoming Neapolitan examines how Naples was simultaneously wild and loyal to Spain, linking this precarious balance to the rich ritual life that permeated urban culture and contributed, according to Marino, to the stitching together of a civic community that could coalesce despite considerable social divisions and animosities. Naples was governed by Spanish viceroys who cultivated the tightest bonds of loyalty with the city’s nobles. The nobles, in turn, distanced and distinguished themselves from the popolo, a more socially disparate, middling group of professionals, merchants, and guildsmen who were the social superiors of the impoverished “plebs.” Nobles cultivated a civic-mindedness based upon Christian virtue and reason, qualities that made them (in their own view) more fit to rule than the other groups but also required them to participate in the politics of the city.

While Spanish policy played these diverse groups against each other, leaving them in a continual state of disagreement, the sheer quantity and quality of the city’s pageantry managed to facilitate a semblance of civic cohesion. Depending on the observer’s mode of calculation, early modern Naples may have had anywhere from 178 to 230 feast days per year, or as one viceroy blithely referred to their number, “a little less than infinite” (83). Attempts by authorities to limit holidays were believed to invite divine wrath, including the plague of 1656, which killed two-thirds of the city’s population. Marino richly documents the ebb and flow of feasts, which Spanish rulers attempted to co-opt as ceremonies in which loyal subjects could demonstrate their fidelity to the Crown. Civic dramas sometimes erupted in violence (most notably in the rebellions of 1585 and 1647), but forbidding celebrations out of fear [End Page 107] of rebellion could inspire rebellion as well. Although political ceremonies were rigorously choreographed events, the inauguration of a new viceroy could engender sincere rejoicing when his predecessor had been particularly despised. Marino’s study juxtaposes the aims of rituals with ceremonial outcomes to provide a comparative perspective on the meaning of civic rituals for their diverse participants.

The festivities of St. John the Baptist receive close scrutiny, since they illustrate the potential for ritual to bring the whole of Naples together, albeit in remarkably divergent forms of participation. The religiously inspired focused their devotions on the liquefaction of St. John’s blood. The noble elites favored St. John’s feast, which offered them the opportunity to participate in the orderly and decorous march of the viceroy and to revisit the ceremonies later in numerous printed festival books. The popular classes reveled in the fireworks and the naked St. John’s dance, followed by naked bathing in the Bay of Naples, a “rebaptism” and...

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