ABSTRACT
Innovation is upstream of the process of applying knowledge, and downstream of opportunity and convenience in exploiting growing demand. Although for many reasons Naples was represented as a parasitic city during the eighteenth century, as a parasitic city, it was a capital city, and certain features in the labour and goods market made innovation possible. This process was often supported by central policies of import substitution that favoured national manufacturing. It created new artisans who were more or less specialized. After the first closing of Capodimonte, the private faience factories, again operated by immigrant artisans, flourished. Mostly targeted at the Neapolitan market, Castelli ceramics were indeed exposed to competition from products from other towns of Central and Northern Italy and from abroad, mainly because of the incidence of costs and risk of transport to Naples. Brigitte Marin advances a similar argument in an article that in part critically revises the traditional view of eighteenth-century Naples.
