Romantic Naples. Literary Images from Italian and European Travellers in the Early Nineteenth Century

As an urban space that becomes ideal and symbolic, Naples is a stronghold of imagination. Mount Vesuvius, the Gulf and also Pompeii, Herculaneum, Portici: the City gets lost in its own stories. Neapolis as a true mermaid, an irresistible and fatal temptation; on one side, the craddle of a very high and wise humanity, on the other, a landscape of decadence and the homeland of demons. More than a “paradise inhabited by devils”, it is a “ruined paradise”, as consecrated by Percy B. Shelley in his f