I won’t say another word about the beauties of the city and its situation, which have been described and praised so often. As they say here, See Naples and then die!
– Goethe, Italian Journey
Luciano D’Alessandro was a photojournalist and Naples was his city; many of the photos published in Vedi Napoli (See Naples) – were taken for the newspapers he collaborated with. Naples lives on in these pages, with the celebrations for San Gennaro and the political gatherings, life in the alleys and the tragic days of the cholera epidemic (in 1973!), the workers and the poverty of unemployment…
D’Alessandro cared about publishing books. Before this title, in 1969 he had published ‘Gli Esclusi‘ (The Excluded) a groundbreaking reportage on mental distress conducted in the second half of the 1960s, released by Il Diaframma. It was the same year as Morire di classe (Cerati – Berengo Gardin), realized in collaboration with Italian radical psychiatrist and mental health reformer Franco Basaglia, leading figure in the democratic psychiatry movement. Their work led to the the deinstitutionalisation of those incarcerated in Italy’s asylums.
But let’s go back to this book. In the early ’70s Naples was in a very serious situation of backwardness and misery. Building speculation was unstoppable and infant mortality considerably higher than in northern cities, life expectancy decidedly lower. Raffaele Cutolo founded the New Camorra.
These are the years the book describes in images.
Sergio Zavoli (writer, journalist, anchorman) writes in the introduction to this book:
‘Vedi Napoli’ is not really a book for tourists, nor for ethical institutions. We are dealing with an act of resentment, not a visual exercise of emotions.
As the subtitle on the cover says: Vedi Napoli ‘may seem amiable, but it is a hard book, made of bone’.
Quite surprisingly, the texts in the book are both in Italian and English.
Signed copy, complete of its red editorial bundle! (very rare)
