Rested but not quite yet revived, we went in search of sustenance. One of the mainstays of the Spanish Quarters is that it seems that it is in the constant need of repairs, and every few blocks there is a building that is engulfed in scaffolding. Across the street from our little B&noB there was such a building, and on its ground floor we located a busy little cafe, Trattoria Mareno. As it was a Monday morning the place was buzzing. It’s main coffee counter, literally a bar, was lined with men and women in business suites, hurriedly sucking down their morning joe and yelling at each other. There was a small dining room that was also pretty full, and outside, beneath the scaffolding, was a small outdoor setting, empty of customers. After we had ordered our breakfast from a friendly large man with alopecia totalis we settled outside, to keep out of the hubbub.
While we were waiting for our warmed up pastries and coffee to arrive, we started noticing something that gave us an inkling of how brilliantly the city works, the interconnectedness of all things Napoli. Every 5 or so minutes, a server carried a tray of covered coffee mugs and sometimes pastries out the cafe’s door and proceeded up or down the street, disappearing behind corners or ducking into doorways of nearby shops or apartments. A few minutes they would reappear either with empty trays or used mugs, presumably the dirties from the previous day’s delivery. We noticed that down the alleys and Via Toledo other such minions were carrying their precious cargo, and so Naples jolts itself awake. My God. A city that has evolved to this level of brilliantness… what other wonderful things will this place reveal to us?
Pretty much immediately, it revealed sfagliateli. In the pastry counter it looked like slightly fancier croissant, but, oh, it was so much more. On his first bite, Frank’s eyes widened, he barely was able to keep his jaw from going slack, and from wholesale melting straight under the table. I took a bite too. Oh my. Layers upon layers of rich fluffy pastry with slightly crispy edges, and in the center, smooth and creamy custard. The cappuccino wasn’t too shabby either.
*I must note that the pastry we had was a “sfagliatella frolla,” using shortcrust dough, which is less labor intensive than the original sfagliatella ricca,” whose layers are created by rolling out dough over a huge table, covering it lard or butter, and then rolling it into a log, then cutting it up. I think if we had tried “ricca” first time out our brains would have melted.
We wandered rather aimlessly for a couple hours after that, looking at this and that along Via Toledo, Piazza Municipo and down to the port. We checked out the Galleria Umberto I. It was impressive, if a little oppressive. Perhaps because after the crowds on Toledo outside, it was too quiet and didn’t give an impression of being too healthy economically. Completed in 1891, named after the king of Italy at the time of construction, in style it mimics it’s much older cousin in Milan, Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II (built in 1861) and was a late addition to this type of shopping centers. Still, it was pretty cool.
At noon, we made our way to our appointed rendezvous with Agata and Arnold, at the imposing entrance of the Castel Nuovo.
After much fanfare and exclamations of “What are the odds?” we proceeded inside to buy tickets from 2 local old gentlemen. Their gaze of disinterested disgust at being interrupted from what I’m sure was a very important conversation was later confirmed as the customary greeting of ticket sellers in Naples.
Castel Nuovo was originally constructed in 1279, up the road from the old castle, Castel dell’Ovo, where the air by that point was probably getting a bit stale, seeing as the foundations date back to 600BC, and legend has it, built on an egg.
Looking around Castel Nuovo didn’t take us very long, especially with the 3rd floor (the section I probably would have found most interesting, the apartments of the kings and other residents) and roof closed for renovation. But oh, if there is ever a place I would not want to spent wandering in at night, this is it. The ghosts of its villains and victims surely still roam its halls.
First we took a peek into a small ornate chapel under a portico just off the courtyard. Elaborately decorated with a painting of the Carmine Madonna above the alter, this was the Chapel of the Lost Souls of Purgatory. Many a condemned Napoletano paused here for their last communion on their way to execution.
To the left of the portico, we went up the stairs and entered the Hall of Barons. It is an auspicious name, initially bringing to my mind images of perhaps a kind of parliament, full of grand and heated debates. This was of course probably aided by the room’s current furnishings. Up until 2006 it was used as the chambers for the Naples City Council, and it’s still sometimes fulfills this purpose.
Before it’s role as the council’s chambers it was the throne room to a variety of Napoli’s kings and queens, and was witness to a number of remarkable events, way too many to mention, but out of all of them I found these 2 the most worth mentioning.
It was here that in December 1294, the unfortunate Pope Celestine V resigned in the desperate hopes of being able to return to his hermitage. He was the last pope to resign until Benedict XVI in 2013. He was also the last pope to be not elected by a papal conclave (where they’re locked in). He was also the only pope to be crowned twice. I
Celestine V could not by any means be deemed a vain-glorious man. Pietro Angelerio started out life as a son of farmers, but he as he exhibited spiritual and intellectual talent he became a Benedictine monk at 17. Soon after, seeking to become an ascetic, in 1239 he moved to a cave on Mt. Morrone, and became known as Pietro da Morrone. 5 years later, seeking even greater solitude he moved to remote Mt. Maiella. It was here that he developed a monastic rule and found an order called the Celestines. By then monastic orders were a dime a dozen, and the Catholic church had put the kaibosh on anyone wanting to start a new one. Pietro knew this and went directly to the current pope to circumvent this by getting him to agree to slot it under the Benedictines. His strict style, inspired by the privations of John the Baptist, was popular, and he soon found himself to be “Superior-General” of 36 monasteries and over 600 monks.
Once the success of the order seemed to be assured, Pietro promptly resigned and went back to his mountain. There he stayed, in penitent prayer, for 40 odd years. In the meantime, the Catholic Church was in a bit of, shall we say, mess. Pope Nicholas IV died without a clear successor in 1292. 11 cardinals, divided into 2 battling factions, dithered for 2 years without naming a successor. Mayhem ensued, riots, plague, murdered pilgrims, looted churches, etc.
Pietro made a vital mistake in the summer of 1294. In an effort to help the cardinals come to a resolution, he wrote them a letter advising them that they better get their act together pronto and elect someone, or else God would punish them. He knew this, he went on to claim, because God had told him so. Pietro was promptly nominated as pope by the senior cardinal, and to the surprise of pretty much the entire known world, an 80 year old hermit, considered by many a living saint, was suddenly pope. When news came to him that he was the new papa, he allegedly tried to run away, but was eventually persuaded to come to Naples and be enthroned on July 5th, 1294.
Why Celestine V didn’t rule from Rome, but instead from Naples, I’m not quite sure. Not surprisingly, he was considered a particularly inept pope, heavily influenced by King Charles II of Naples. He wasn’t stupid, so he knew he was in over his head, and after 5 tortured months resigned in the Hall of Barons (though it wasn’t called that yet) on December 13, 1294. His decree that a pope could resign was one of the only decrees of his that wasn’t pretty much immediately reversed.
His hopes to resume his solitary life were dashed when his successor, fearing political enemies could use poor Pietro against him, ordered him to accompany him to Rome. Again, without success, Pietro tried to run away, but was rounded up and placed securely in prison, where he died 10 months later. He was canonized by the Catholic Church in 1313, however his legacy was controversial at the time. In 1308, Dante wrote in his Inferno, regarding his visit to Hell’s anti-chamber:
I saw and recognized the shade of him
who due to cowardice made the great refusal.”
While Celestino V wasn’t named, it was later confirmed by Dante’s son that the writer meant the unfortunate Pietro da Morrone.
And now on to the second event of note that took place here, just shy of 200 years later, when Ferdinand I, known locally as Ferrante, had his ultimate revenge on those he considered the traitors of his realm. What he did was the stuff of brutal legend.
To truly do the background of the event any kind of justice would force me down a rabbit hole so deep and convoluted a conspiracy theorist would have trouble connecting all the the pins with the red thread. Suffice to say, Ferdinand I, having already put down one rebellion in 1460s ran into some money problems a few years later, when the Turks invaded the kingdom of Naples in 1480. The local population, with no support from the king or local nobility, didn’t raise a feudal force. Ferdinand had to hire an army, and this cost money. A LOT of money. He was so broke that he was selling family jewels and precious manuscripts and books from his library. The natural thing to do of course was to raise taxes, and this did not please the barons at all, who already considered their tax burden too high.
The barons conspired amongst themselves, and brought in foreign actors near and far, including the pope, who had promised that upon their success he would show up and crown a new king of Naples. Ferdinand I, however, wasn’t without allies, and after combining forces with Milan and Florence, beat back the hordes in 1486.
The war was over, and Ferdinand made all the proper sounds that he wanted to make peace. It was an auspicious time for a wedding! In his 60s now, he announced that his granddaughter was to marry the son of one of the barons, Count Sarno. All the hoi-polloi was invited. The king had, to all indications, made peace with many of the plotters, including his own personal secretary Petrucci, hunting and socializing with them.
The nobles gathered in the hall, dressed to the nines, drank and listening to music while they waited for the ceremony to begin. My, were they in for a surprise. The king and his granddaughter never arrived. Instead, to the shock of all, troops stormed in, doors were locked, and the slaughter began. The ensuing nightmare was of unspeakable scale. I couldn’t find the exact body count, but it was substantial. Entire noble families were whipped out, flung from ramparts, fed to the moat’s crocodiles, or thrown into the deepest dungeon and left to starve. Sarno, Petrucci, and others were later tried, executed, and then dismembered and put on display as a warning against future rebellion.
Ferdinand I, being a special brand of crazy as well as a special brand of evil, decided to have some of his old enemies taxidermied, dressed up in their old fancy clothes, and displayed, ostensibly to entertain his future guests. Oh yeah, dude was bat-$!+.
Ferdinand I was by far not the only murderous monarch of Naples who made his home in Castel Nuovo. Joanna II, who ruled from 1414 to 1435, was the last ruler of the house of Anjou. Coming to the throne at the age of 45, legend has it that she would select men to sleep with, and then flush them down a trap door in her chambers into the sea beneath the castle, where they would be devoured by crocodiles.
Crocodiles also apparently would crawl up tunnels in the dungeons, lured there even, by the jailers, to gobble up unfortunate prisoners who the crown didn’t want to honor with a public execution. Crocs were an ongoing theme in various legends, rumored to have followed a ship’s wake all the way from Egypt and settling in the Castle’s deep moat. The legends were reinforced by the fact that for several hundred years a stuffed 3 meter long crocodile hung over the main gate of the castle, until it was moved to a city museum in 1875. Theories and legends of when and how it got there are many, most to do with with the awful kings, but the truth is probably much more benign, if slightly weird.
According to a 17th century tourbook by a local historian, Pompeo Sarnelli, a Spanish soldier brought it back from Egypt as an offering to an image of the Virgin Mary that hung in the Palatine (main) chapel of the castle, reputed to protected women during labour. Apparently there was a tradition of offering stuffed crocs to this icon, however the fact that this thing was over 3 meters long made it exceptional. Originally hung in the chapel itself with the icon, in the 1600s during repairs on the chapel after it was damaged by a gunpowder explosion, someone thought it fitting to hang it over the main gate. Recent carbon dating has shown that this particular crocodile is the oldest example of a taxidermied vertebrate in Europe, somewhere between 1296-1419.
And so it’s time to move on. Below the Baron’s Hall is the old armory, where there are glass floors under which you can observe the remnants of 6th century villas and graves. Beyond that are the legendary dungeons, but there’s not much to see there now, and definitely no primordial bitey bitey creatures. The Palatine chapel, now a modern art gallery was rather boring.
On the second floor next to the chapel was a gallery featuring 19th century paintings of Napoli life and history. Unfortunately few had labels, and almost none of them had English translations. They were intriguing though, and perhaps someday I’ll get to go back with a knowledgeable guide who could tell me what they’re all about.
Lastly, I should mention the 15th century brass door which is at the entry of the above mentioned gallery. The door commemorated Ferdinand I’s first victory of the barons in 1462, and was for a long time the main door of the castle. It was taken as spoils by the French in the 1490s, but then the French battled and lost with the Genoese on their way home. The Genoese sent the door back to Naples. During the battle the door, stored on one of the ships, was struck by a cannon-ball, which is still there to this day. It’s pretty cool.
Time for lunch.
**I have to say that getting facts straight for this post was particularly difficult. Sources are few, translations are bad, and I had to patch quite a bit of this together. If someone reading this finds errors and can direct me to correcting them, I am more than open to it. Just let me know. 🙂
Do SvidANIA 