ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the creative industries in early modern Naples began by pointing out the contradiction between the positive image of Naples as a cultural capital and its negative image as a city based on parasitic revenue. Indeed, the image of Naples as a hub of intellectual and cultural creativity is in sharp contrast to its representation as a 'parasitic' city, as affirmed in traditional historiography. Finally, cultural industries, by being linked to a symbolic economy, have become the object of a complex economic analysis that has overcome a naive vision of economic rationality as a simple calculation of profits and losses. While contradictions between the political and commercial character of the theatrical institution exploded, a more general saturation seemed to emerge in the musical industry. Theatres gradually became institutions of a modern public sphere, in which content and taste free from absolutist control could become a cultural commodity.
