14 - Town and country in the kingdom of Naples, 1500–1800

Summary

The history of early modern southern Italy or Mezzogiorno has been read since the eighteenth century in terms of a contrast between the capital, Naples, the seat of royal authority and of the supreme magistracies, a centre for the development of a powerful bureaucracy, and a cultural pole endowed with a university, museums and libraries, and the provinces, viewed as a vast countryside oppressed by feudal powers. This dualism has been a matter of debate since 1734, when Naples became the residence of an independent monarchy after more than two centuries of foreign domination. The city was praised as the expression of a new reforming central power, but its provincial hegemony was denounced as the cause, together with feudal oppression, of the country's economic retardation. Nineteenth-century historiography tended to continue this polemic, which was further nourished by the way the Neapolitan Republic of 1799 opposed the martyrs of the Revolution, children of the Enlightenment, to the provincial counter-revolutionaries whom it saw as avenging centuries of rural subordination to the capital's interests, exigencies and exploitation.

In the light of this historiographic tradition, relations between town and countryside have attracted little attention and have been largely ignored; discussion tends to focus on Neapolitan domination of a poorly differentiated provincial ‘country’.