ABSTRACT
Naples was one of the largest and most celebrated cities in Europe in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, second only to Paris in population. Nonetheless, for all the pride of its admirers, Partenope was slowly declining from the high position it had held in the Renaissance. The Siren’s charms were mostly evident in the virtual realms of music, literature and eulogy. On the whole, Naples and the Kingdom presented a situation of political, economical and indeed geological instability that has been described at length by impassioned historians. To a large extent, the peculiarities of Naples as a city – a large, overcrowded, poor, economically dependent urban centre – were interwoven with its position as the political and intellectual centre of the Kingdom. This determined the specific turn that intellectual and scientific debate took in Naples, where awareness of the need for institutional and political change developed into a sort of Enlightenment avant la lettre.2 The middling class – the ceto civile, mainly consisting of professionals, lawyers and physicians, tradesmen and ‘artisti’ – struggled to gain political recognition, which also implied the recognition of ‘modern’ political, religious and scientific opinions, what was called ‘libertas philosophandi’. A sizeable section of the ceto civile openly admired the free Netherlands (libera Olanda) and approved of its successful revolt against the Spanish government.
