If you stand at the west end of the National Museum, you are at the northwest corner of the city of Naples as it existed in the mid-1500s after the great Spanish rebuilding of the city under viceroy Toledo. Most of the urban renewal of the period had actually been within the city behind you and along the coast. Much activity, in fact, had been directed at expanding the city walls up the Posillipo hill to the west and strengthening the fortifications along those walls. If you imagine yourself then walking out through the city gate and looking north, the well-known Laffrery map from 1566 shows that you will be staring at farmland, cultivated all the way back to the Capodimonte hill; at most there are a few scattered farmhouses. As you step off in that direction, you'll walk up what is left of the Vomero hill as it slopes down from your left; then you'll descend into a small valley and cross it until the terrain rises to Capodimonte a short distance away.

If you stand at the same spot a century later, the Baratta map of 1670 shows the walls to be gone and the northern area developed considerably, at least up to the foot of the Capodimonte hill. The building that will some day house the National Museum is now there— from 1585—and there is already something “familiar” to modern eyes about the area. The small valley just north of where you are standing is called the “Sanità”; it filled up in the demographic explosion in Naples in the early and mid-1600s, when the city went from 250,000 inhabitants in 1607 to 450,000 by 1660. (The population would then decrease in the wake of the great plague of 1656.)

The expansion to the north was dictated (1) by available space and (2) by the discovery of paleo-Christian remains in the area—especially the Christian catacombs and the ancient church of Santa Maria della Sanità; the original church had been buried many centuries earlier in a tremendous series of mudslides.

Even in a city and age driven by the Spanish fervor to build churches, the Sanità was exceptional. By the early 1600s, 16 large churches had been built in the area, most of them with adjacent monasteries or convents. It was essentially a race to build churches and living quarters for the faithful as they flowed out of the crowded city into a more spacious area to be physically closer to the origins of their faith.

The area continued to be built up in the 1700s, but then a strange thing happened. In the early 1800s, the French, under Murat, built a wide boulevard from the city out to the Bourbon Palace at Capodimonte. The road was elevated many meters above the surrounding area of the Sanità, such that your carriage ride took you over the area extending to both sides. The road was called Corso Napoleone. Eponyms come and go, and today the street is via Santa Teresa degli Scalzi, changing name along its length to corso Amadeo di Savoia Duca d'Aosta, but the fact remains that your passage from downtown to the area of the catacombs and then up to Capodimonte takes you over the Sanità and not into it. You can’t get down into it without purposely turning off and doing so.

Today, turning off and doing so is something that most people tell you not to do since the Sanità is an area of social unrest, high unemployment, and all the rest. The area is run by the camorra (the Neapolitan version of the Mafia) and even the cops don’t like to venture into it unless they are accompanied by lots of other cops. It is an area where the residents will tell you that there is a lot of good to be said for the camorra and almost nothing good to be said for the state. For some reason I am reminded of Lewis Mumford’s remark that the clearing away of the winding medieval streets of Paris by Napoleon III in the mid-nineteenth century did away with the last physical barrier that protected the common citizen from the power of the state. Here we are 150 years later in Naples, and the Sanità really is such a physical barrier, at least in the minds of some.

The very isolation of the Sanità—from the fact that traffic passes over it and not through it—makes it relatively tranquil. There are some villas set amongst trees and vegetation, lending an unexpected pastoral quality in places. The area contains, as well, a number of attractions, including the San Gennaro dei Poveri hospital, an institution built in the wake of the plague of 1656. (The hospital was the true forerunner of the great Royal Poorhouse, the Albergo dei Poveri, built during the later Bourbon dynasty.) Also, the Sanità is where you find the uniquely grotesque Fontanelle cemetery with its display of skeletal remains. If one chooses to turn off and go down into the Sanità, it isn't really that easy. There is one vehicular road leading down from the main road. Or you can walk, but that isn't too easy, either; there is also one lift from the main road for pedestrians to get in and out of the area. It was built in 1937 and is located at the point from which the above photo was taken. In absence of that friendly mechanical contrivance, you can trudge the long way around, along that one vehicular road, or you can walk down a stairway from the lower slopes of the Vomero hill to the south. Or you can jump.