Description
Book SynopsisNaples is always a shock, flaunting beauty and squalor like nowhere else. It is the only city in Europe whose ancient past still lives in its irrepressible people. In 1503, Naples was the Mediterranean capital of Spain''s world empire and the base for the Christian struggle with Islam. It was a European metropolis matched only by Paris and Istanbul, an extraordinary concentration of military power, lavish consumption, poverty and desperation. It was to Naples in 1606 that Michelangelo Merisi fled after a fatal street fight, and there released a great age in European art - until everything erupted in a revolt by the dispossessed, and the people of an occupied city brought Europe into the modern world.Ranging across nearly three thousand years of Neapolitan life and art, from the first Greek landings in Italy to the author''s own, less auspicious, arrival thirty-something years ago, Street Fight in Naples brings vividly to life the tumultuous and, at times, tragic history of Naples.
Trade ReviewRemarkable ... [an] atmospheric and erudite portrait of a fascinating city * Sunday Times *
Finely crafted ... offers is a vivid sense of the infinite layers in a city older than Rome that was once the biggest in Western Europe * The Economist *
Never fails to take one's breath away * Financial Times *
Robb joyfully flouts the staid chronology of the conventional historian ... I have rarely read a more vivid account of the city's often menacing claims on a visitor * Times Literary Supplement *
