Editor’s note / Napoli

Where is the Vatican? Where is Rome? How far is Italy from Naples? And if Neapolitans are not Italians, according to some graffiti we read on the walls, what are they?

“Deep down we are Greeks”, someone said when I asked. And if this sounds strange, take a look under Naples. The city’s entrails are all ancient Greek. Then came the Romans. And on top of all this are the traces left by successive conquerors: Byzantines, Normans, the French Angevins, and so on.

Naples comes in layers; a mille-feuille city. It is not just the layers of history that rise from the bottom upwards; it is the present, too. Take Spaccanapoli, for instance, the thoroughfare that cuts through the middle like a memory. A street forgotten there since antiquity, a few levels below the rest of the city; a wedge that reminds you of what was and fuses it with what is. Time here is neither a line nor a circle. It is a moving walkway that takes you back and forth in random order. This is why our creative director, Dimitris Papazoglou, saw to it that the element of time looms large in this issue. In the succession of photographs and meanings, the present keeps alternating with the past and the future. “See Naples and die”, writes René Habermacher in his text for the joint project in which he and Nikos Yfantis tried to depict the feminielli from memory. Luckily, he saw Naples but did not die, and so we have a beautiful and tender feature that stands apart from the rest of the issue to build its own story.

In Naples the ancient and the contemporary coexist. The ruin stands as proud in its rags as the imposing villa next to it. Art blooms everywhere like the smoke from a recently fired shotgun. A rich issue full of strong personalities like Erri De Luca, the unique writer with the tender language and the sharp political thought. Like Lia Rumma, the powerful lady of art with the legendary life. A city made of myths, horrors, stories and people like artist Christian Leperino. Or like Inès and Alessandra, who bring beauty into the daily lives of others. A city full of the living who roam around on their scooters day and night, and full of the dead who are quietly resting in the catacombs under its houses and streets. Full of inspired figures like father Antonio Loffredo, who dreamed of changing an entire district’s fate and succeeded, along with Leperino and others. Like the young women from Edit Napoli, Domitilla Dardi and Emilia Petruccelli, who established a design fair out of nowhere. A city where tradition lives in harmony with the contemporary, as it is explored by Tom Hall in a feature worth reading, for it is something between a philosophically minded journal and a press report.

It is no accident that this issue runs to 200 pages. This is because the city overflows from all sides, no matter how you try to contain it.

Here, even the access to the sea gives you food for thought.

Leaf through the issue. Even better, read it. It has surprises. It also has some fascinating Fashion, just like the city it describes.

In the words of Erri De Luca in his lovely interview to Anastasia Kamvyssi, “Naples is legendary—a word that contains both the magnificent and the atrocious. It owes that to its history, its geography, and its people.”

Lina Stefanou