A Savvy Travelers Guide to Italy's Other Great Art City

Wall Street Journal

3 days ago

Art-loving visitors to Italy tend to follow a well-trodden path through Rome and Florence. But during high season, lines at the Vatican and the Uffizi Galleries can be punishingly long. By the time you finally catch a glimpse of Caravaggio's 'Bacchus,' you might be in need of a drink yourself.
There is an alternative. The grand port city of Naples—though best known now for pizza, the mafia and as a launching place for passengers to Capri and the Amalfi coast—has also been a Mediterranean cultural mecca for millennia, back to the days of the ancients.
A mere day trip away, you can find historic treasures in the ruins of Pompeii, whose lavishly decorated villas were preserved when neighboring Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D.—a brilliant snapshot of ancient Roman artistic refinement and taste.
Nearly 2,000 years later, Naples' own surviving masterpieces still thrill. Founded in 470 B.C., it is among Europe's oldest cities, and by the 17th century, was a hotbed of artistic activity, home to painters like Caravaggio, José de Ribera and Artemisia Gentileschi. That Baroque legacy is still palpable.
On a recent trip, I went in search of 'Baroque Naples,' having studied that iteration of the city in college art history classes. But once I was on the ground, it soon became clear that Naples' wonders exceed any one artistic moment.
Looking down across the city and sea from my first stop, the hilltop Museo di San Martino, I immediately saw the appeal of Naples, both glorious and gritty. White sailboats dotted the bay and clusters of drab apartment towers, draped in drying laundry, climbed the inland hillsides. In between, the city spread like a carpet toward the slopes of Vesuvius in the distance.
A former Carthusian monastery, San Martino is replete with treasures. What struck me most were the luxurious personal quarters of the prior, with their colored marble floors and frescoed walls and ceilings. The pope's private Vatican chambers aren't open to the public, but they certainly don't have a sea view.
The city's golden age dawned in 1734 when Naples and Sicily became an independent kingdom under King Charles of Bourbon, a great-grandson of Louis XIV of France. Charles launched an immense building program, whose legacy includes royal palaces adorned with the vast art collection his mother bequeathed him. Charles also greenlighted the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum and built one of Europe's first opera houses, the Teatro San Carlo, in just eight months.
'Naples doesn't really do small,' explained Sylvain Bellenger, former director of the Museo di Capodimonte, a museum housed in a massive pink and gray palace that is just one of three built by Charles in and around Naples. (Another, Reggia di Caserta, is a Unesco World Heritage site just 30 minutes outside the city.)
Even larger than the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, the Museo di Capodimonte is currently undergoing renovations—but still has 50 galleries containing enough masterpieces by the likes of Masaccio, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian and Correggio to merit repeat visits.
When the other galleries reopen this fall, visitors might be surprised to discover pieces by Louise Bourgeois, Andy Warhol and Candida Höfer, many referencing either Naples in general or the Capodimonte in particular.
Should you choose, like me, not to venture to Pompeii, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli ably scratches an itch for antiquity. Three floors of classical sculptures are chockablock with artifacts, including the famous Farnese Hercules, acres of elaborate Roman mosaic floors and delicately painted walls brought from Herculaneum and Pompeii.
One irreverent surprise: A small gallery of erotic sculptures and ancient sexual aids. (Prudes and parents, fear not: There's a warning at the entrance.)
Among other niche museums worth a stop is the Museo Nazionale della Ceramica Duca di Martina, in the lush gardens of the Villa Floridiana. And the Gallerie d'Italia, whose collection ranges from the 17th century to the first decades of the 20th, has been newly installed in the circa-1940 Banco di Napoli, a boldly muscular (read: Fascist) celebration of classical architecture.
Eager to check a duomo off your list? Naples has one, too. In its San Gennaro chapel's splendid treasury, a new curator is fond of mixing modern art amid the saintly relics. A show of contemporary ex-votos (on view through Sept. 30) features diminutive devotional works by artists such as Mimmo Paladino, Igor Mitoraj and Yves Klein. It occurred to me inside that I'd never seen more people conversing out loud and in public with religious paintings and sculptures than I did in Naples.
Even in the offseason, visitors will want to pre-book tickets for smaller private chapels such as Sansevero, with its haunting suite of Baroque sculpture including 'The Veiled Christ' in which artist Giuseppe Sanmartino somehow summons a transparent veil out of marble. Also worth a stop: the tiny Pio Monte della Misericordia, where Caravaggio's iconic 'Seven Acts of Mercy' looms large over the high altar.
In the 1990s, the city launched Le Stazioni dell'Arte, an ambitious, ongoing public art project to transform its metro stations in partnership with architects and designers like Karim Rashid and Òscar Tusquets. Since 2012, the arts foundation Made in Cloister, has provided work and exhibition spaces to promote contemporary Neapolitan artists in a 16th-century monastery that was most recently a carwash.
More recently, London art dealer Thomas Dane opened his first international branch gallery in a chicly renovated 19th-century palazzo in Chiaia. 'I never expected to open [satellite] galleries,' he said. 'But…it struck me that if there was one city where artists would want to spend more time and explore, it was Naples.'