Carlo Desideri: Napoli mare

If each narrative, as Algirdas J. Greimas states, has thresholds, then cities too have entrances, borders and contours. Naples has often been conquered from below, taking advantage of its ancient Greek aqueduct to enter the city; in fact Naples has an underground and conspicuous contour with no light, made of age-old, dark waters. For centuriesmits beauties have been approached by the sea, then inland journey being long and tiresome. And if the old heart of the city beats without the sun and sea, as in Caravaggio’s paintings and Anna Maria Ortese’s novels, its contours, even the most distant ones like those of the splendid Campi Flegrei, are rather flooded by light. \...\
Carlo Desideri has done a radiograph of its coasts and novelists, pursuing through his photographs those places which have been endlessly described by writers and voyagers. This is obviously the book of a flâneur, of someone who likes to wander: although walking in Naples is tiring – because of its traffic, crowds, noise and smog – this city is still one of the few in the world where the act of walking is infinite. Layer after layer and over the years, Naples reveals itself as an ever changing place, always new. Or is it just in the eye of the observer that repetition takes shape as tradition, renovation and quotation, in an endless and kaleidoscopic form of reproduction?
Carlo Desideri’s book is the portrait of this much spoken phoenix, yet never grasped. |…|
Another possible one is Naples as a broken clock, which marks the time only once a day, as in Domenico Rea’s writing. Certainly we must accept that this place of endless wandering and imagining never ceases to project itself all over, often in spite of itself.

(from Antonella Cilento’s introduction)