Piazza San Domenico
September 21, 2006
The Piazza San Domenico is one of the most interesting spots in Naples. Here, like elsewhere in the old city, layers of history are stacked one on top of each other, each layer leaving the previous one partly-visible below it. Byzantine, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque ...
It's also a great place for a late-morning coffee.
Photos below.
The big church in the photo is the Church of San Domenico Maggiore, a Medieval building commissioned by Charles II of Anjou, one of the Kings of Naples, in 1283 and completed in 1324. The adjoining monastery was home to, among other luminaries of the time, St. Thomas Aquinas. If it looks like it has a bit of a funny shape, this is because the apse of the church -- essentially, the back end -- is the side that you see from the square, rather than the front.
San Domenico Maggiore was built in a local variation of the Gothic style that is typical of Naples and those parts of Southern Italy that were ruled by the Angevins -- a branch of the French royal family -- in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. I'd have some photos of the interior for you, but I was wearing shorts yesterday and there was a caretaker guarding the door to make sure that tourists who are unsuitably dressed wouldn't go inside.
The surrounding buildings are various palaces built in subsequent centuries, most notably by the Princes of Sanseverino, who, like many Neapolitan aristocrats, were originally from Spain. There are lots of interesting stories about the family, most particularly about one Raimondo di Sangro, who was always playing around with cadavers and the like and was known to be, among other things, an alchemist and a sorcerer.
More on Raimondo later ... Creepy story.
Anyway, I'm posting photos of the palaces in the Piazza San Domenico so that you can see the color of the buildings -- this color scheme, with reds and oranges competing with dark grays and greens -- is pretty much how many old buildings in Naples have been painted, if they have been painted at all in recent years.
The odd-looking monument that sits in the center of the square is something called a guglia. There are three of these in the center of Naples and this particular one, according to my Touring Club Italia guidebook, is dedicated to Saint Dominic, the founder of the Dominican order, and was designed by Cosimo Fanzago, a famed local sculptor and architect who worked during the Baroque period.
The guglia has been so nicely restored that it looks kind of odd in comparison to the surrounding areas, whose condition is somewhere between "crumbling" and "already crumbled." A lot of Central Naples is in that kind of condition. You get the feeling that the Italian government could pour billions into repairing the historic neighborhoods in the city and it wouldn't make a bit of difference.
Things are in pretty bad shape around here ...