San Lorenzo
October 02, 2006
The church of San Lorenzo Maggiore is one of the most important and interesting churches here in Naples.
Here are some photos of the exterior as seen from the Piazza San Gaetano.
The yellow facade of the church is in the Baroque style, but the church itself was a product of a much earlier time -- the period of Angevin church-building that lasted from the 13th to 15th centuries.
I think I mentioned something about the Angevins in a previous post. They were a branch of the French royal family who ruled around here during the Medieval period and, as representatives of a "civilized" France that had descended into "barbarian" Naples, they had a lot of anxieties and obsessions, one of which consisted of pasting the French fleur-de-lys into every nook and cranny of the city.
For example, here is a (rather blurry) look at a painting from the period, which shows the Mother of God against a field of Lilies of the Kings of France.
Another of their obsessions was the building of churches ...
Under Angevin rule, nearly every important church in the city was rebuilt, including the cathedral, and many new churches were constructed, including the church of Santa Chiara, which at that time was one of the largest churches in Italy.
I am sad to report that no photos were permitted inside (more on this below), but there are many here. As you can see from these photos and from my photo taken from the cloister below, the Angevins built San Lorenzo in a style that they imported from the north -- namely, the French Gothic of the High Middle Ages -- which makes this church and others like it in Naples very unusual for this part of Italy.
Just as interesting as the church itself are the excavations beneath it ...
The Piazza San Gaetano sits on the site of the agora of the old Greek city and on the site of the forum of the Roman one.
The spot occupied by San Lorenzo itself was the location of the Greek and Roman market, which was a large rectangular building consisting of several dozen market stalls and a round tholos in the center. In the fifth century or so, the hillside above the forum collapsed, sending a huge mud-slide down onto the surrounding buildings and completely submerging the market. Because of the mud-slide, the remains under the church are completely intact and have been recently cleared out so that you can visit them.
Photos below.
Pictures were also forbidden here -- though, of course, you could buy all of the postcards and guidebooks that you wanted in the gift shop -- but at this point, I figured that I had paid my ten euros and that I deserved to take some pictures. Some places don't want you to take pictures because camera flashes will damage paintings in the room, but there were no such paintings here. San Lorenzo just wanted more money ... and what kind of church has a gift shop?
In the second photo above, you can see one of the shops in the market that archeologists have identified as a "laundry" because of the washing and rinsing basins that it contains. Other shops were clearly bakeries, money-changers, etc., etc., as you could see from implements that were frozen in time inside them.
One thing that I thought was particularly interesting was the diagonal brickwork in the walls of the shops.
Probably the best thing about this visit was that one of the streets that ran alongside the old market building was open so that you could walk along the original paving stones of the period and look into each of the shops, just like people did at that very spot two thousand years ago.