From 09.02.2023
Porta Capuana, Naples, Italy

Bioisms discovering small stages in the private sacred street theatres of the dead called altarini.

The edicole votive are born in the twenty-eighth century with a very practical need: in those years the first street lighting systems with gas lamps were born in all European cities. These systems were continually vandalized to take advantage of the darkness and do something that in Naples, still today in popular circles, is called pulling the rope: in the dark a string was pulled between the two ends of an alley so a person walking at night, not seeing the rope, stumbled, fell and was robbed. In this mechanism of pulling the rope, lighting was a problem because it made the rope visible.

The ingenious thought was to couple the lighting system with a sacred image because thus, with the great respect in Naples for religious images, these lighting systems were protected.

A second evolution of edicole votive (votive shrines) was the emergence of another necessity: in the late 1700s there was a Napoleonic edict whereby cemeteries were built outside the city for a reason of salubriousness, so first the 366-pit cemetery that is from eighteenth-century and then the Poggioreale cemetery, cemeteries were built outside the cities.

Because they were spaces away from city life, people had difficulty visiting the deceased, which before was easier and was done in churches. Therefore the memory of the dead of a specifi alley, who were outside the city’s walls, was associated with the sacred image and the souls of purgatory were born: statuettes that were born from the flames and represented the dead of that street. The birth of these figurines did not come from a need to visit the dead, but it was to pray for that soul so that they would serve years in purgatory and could go to heaven. So it was a commitment that people had every day to save the soul of a loved one. Later with the invention of photography they were replaced more and more by photos of the dead of that alley. There is a great bond of fondness between the alley community and the votive shrines for example a votive shrines in the Spanish quarters with all the photos of the dead of that alley and with a blank space with reserved place written on it (a person who had not yet died but wanted to be near the family photos). These votive shrines are often taken care of by Catholic associations that however are not the official ones of the church, in fact this of votive shrines is mainly a pagan phenomenon, because it has nothing religious but is almost idolatry.

By now, alley life still has traces, but severely compromised since the 1980s still surviving in more popular neighborhoods like Porta Capuana.

These shrines generate a strong bond because they create a takeover of the care of the street by the inhabitants.

This story is very interesting because is very much related to the Neapolitan way of life: Naples is always connected with death and it is also an interesting story about how to take care of things. A combination of factors that have contributed to the restitution of the city's history that includes poverty, the way people get by, people's respect for the sacred, devotion to the dead, respect for death, all things that are just characteristic of the city.