Heart-Stealing baroque (Spacca -) Napoli
The sun finds it way through the velvet black shadows. Posters advertise operas I won’t get to see. Padre Pio forever in the background, his face found in taxi cabs, on walls, in churches, in caffes. Chiaroscuro lighting from sunlight mixed with shadows. My Rian, he’ll remain beautiful forever in the sun here.
Hanging bronze dye pasta, bufalo mozzarella from campania, rows of inviting rum-soaked baba cakes filled with rummy yellow cream, tiny wild strawberries, Sfogliatelle.
Stunning churches, colorful architecture, dark and ancient looking alleyways filled with street theatre and trash on the street… the extremes of modern Napoli.
A baroque awning, layers of brick from different centuries, buildings and façades built on top of each other, a neapolitan girl on her mobile, another caffe beckoning the passersby.
Hanging fruit and ripe red campania tomatoes and an early pasieggetta.
Ancient pillars in residential neighborhoods, forming millennia old foundations.
Another beautiful church front and a charming caffe.
Bursts of color and brightness and the scent of glorious coffee floating in the air at every turn.
I always seem to find the caffes… I always feel like I’m on some unspoken mission to drink the best coffee.
When the little girl walked by I knew I had to capture her in that moment of contrasts and colors.
There is so much to see, just to read on the walls.
I like when the graffiti becomes art.
Back to this fellow. I remember his likeness on other walls on other visits to Naples.
Mirrors and antiques and the scrawlings every where.
A delightful music shop.
Spaccanapoli, the old Greek section of Napoli, Italy is a recurring fascination of mine.
A closed boulangerie with a broom leaning against the store front. Painted pastoral scenes on plates. Rusted piping and peeling posters. Grafitti in bright colors.
Caffe chairs sprinkled throughout the back streets of Spaccanapoli.
Two “lovers” embracing in front of an iconic “second hand shop” full of Neapolitan treasures overseen by a curious little dog.
The simple cafe tables and chairs in front of artisan shops and caffes with a sculpture of an old man in the background.
Every day life in an alleyway; people, a truck delivering goods, empty vegetable and fruit crates, the golden mustard apartments and hanging laundry.
I love the corners and crevices and surprising bursts of yellow in between the rust.
The quintessential graffiti of Naples, as ancient as the tags and scribblings on Pompeiian walls.
The old guard and the ‘new art’.
More graffiti, and the vespas and cars and Neapolitans seem all the more nonchalant about it.
A whole street filled with beautiful second hand and rare book shops and musical instruments and conservatories. I never wanted to leave.
A gorgeously appointed restaurant, intimate, and romantic in a baroque neapolitan way. I could have lingered for hours with a glass of nero d’avola and flirted, but I had less than a day to shoot Naples because of all the rain prior to this day.
This is a wider shot of the restaurant. It looks like an opening to another, older world. I told you it was beautiful.
Even the scribbles are a crying out and bleed every color onto wood and stone and brick.
The priest or monk, graffiti iconography and protest.
I found this hollowed out frame and the lettering and font (name of the one time King) very delicate and beautiful looking.
I know Napoli isn’t for everyone. I know street grafitti on historical buildings can be a bit of a shock. But once you visit Naples a few times and fall into the rhythm of the city and of its people, the fright wears off and you begin to see the color is all the more bright in contrast to the shadows. If you are like me and find beauty in decaying things and centuries of history piled up on top of each other, you may just find yourself falling in love with the heart stealer of baroque Napoli.
All photographs shot on portra 400 and 800 – 35mm film. Shot in the Spring of 2013.
The Splendor of Napoli and the Isles of the Emperors
the splendor of napoli and the isles of the emperors
The bright and brash colors of the Spacconapoli neighborhood in Napoli, Italia (Naples, Italy) captured on velvia film slides, shot on one of my canon analog cameras.
The sharp contrast of the elegance of Bourbon architecture and Neapolitan artistry against the slow modern decay of the last 80 years in grafitti and weathered edges of life highlights a city steeped in dichotomies.
The Neapolitan soul remains seemingly intact however, divided between the threads of passionate art, beauty, the wild nature of the sea and Baroque gardens, and the soaring rocks and islands so utterly exquisite they are paradisos on earth… and in the looming apartments and close quarters of alleys making the piazzas the true heart of the local’s living room.
Travel on sea and breathe deeply in the clean bracing air as you wander miles of meadows and picaresque villages along the hiking trails of the Amalfi Coast, and the bejeweled isles of Capri, Ischia, and Procida. They are nature and ruin found in perfect harmony, timeless slices of heaven to be experienced best when in love with life.
And back in Naples, even among the crush of pollution and population, with the stain of the Camorra, even in the heart of this ancient superstitious city with countless rulers over countless centuries one simply cannot ignore the fascinating elements of history and beauty bound eternally in the treasures of Roman Naples, of Pompeii and Herculaneum, of the ancient Emperor isles, of the Renaissance and Baroque art everywhere, still lingering, surviving, — conserved in the museums and palazzos of the Campania that will forever be worth exploring and studying.
