Old and New Settlement Strategies in a Marginal Area of Viceregal Naples: Benedictines and Jesuits in the Vomero Uphill Road

Abstract

Visibility and accessibility have constituted the indispensable premises for the settlement of religious communities in the modern city. In particular, especially in the sixteenth century, the Neapolitan religious orders conditioned the urban development outside the city walls: in the last decades of the century, exactly in the extra-moenia areas, the new regular religious orders will be joined to the Mendicants in the laborious search for unbuilt estates or edifices to be re-adapted to monasteries, convalescent homes, and novitiates with the contribution of influential and wealthy subsidizers. Replacing theirselves to Viceroy authorities in the utilization of the hill slopes, the religious often will promote radical buildings renovations and the opening, even if with privatistic purposes, of roads and small squares in front of their estates. Through analysis of unpublished documents, this essay examines in depth the troubled events that leaded—between 1622 and 1627—to the foundation of a small Benedictine monastery in a farmstead along the Vomero uphill road. This event, totally ignored by Neapolitan architectural historiography, represents instead an extraordinary example of smart adaptation to a marginal site of the western urban expansion.