The little Spaniard and the bearded lady of the Abruzzi

Sir Flinders Petrie, who did more than any other scholar to bring Ancient Egypt and Palestine alive for us, once remarked that the perpetual joy of being a historian is that, whereas most of mankind are confined to one plane, the present, those who study the past have the freedom to sample life on all. It is like being in possession of a time machine, without any of its dangers. Many times and places thus beckon me, but today I am setting its controls to ‘Naples in the 17th century’.

It was an amazing place, probably the most populous city on earth, with nearly half a million inhabitants, and certainly the most crowded. The policy of the Spanish viceroys, to underpin their rule, was to force the nobility of the region to live and build themselves houses there, with countless peasants following in their wake. The rules obliging all to live within the city walls were strictly enforced. Only about one in five Neapolitans had regular employment, and this was the cause of Masaniello’s revolt of 1647, followed by a massacre, an event celebrated in Auber’s superb opera, La Muette de Portici. There were other disasters: earthquakes, fires, huge eruptions of Vesuvius and, above all, the plague of 1656, which killed 250,000 people. The corpses were piled up in a square just outside the walls, and then carried away to pits by convicts and the city’s 10,000 Turkish slaves using long pitchforks.

Despite, perhaps because of, such horrors, Naples was the busiest artistic centre in Europe. The urbanised nobility built and decorated lavish townhouses. There were 20,000 clergy in the city and during the century 500 churches and convents were updated, extended or built, and all decorated.