Napoli and the loss of innocence: Three theatrical hypotheses

The layers of Neapolitan culture have pinned down the representation of the city to two shifting paradigms: Napoli as a nourishing mother, pregnant in luxurious views of her Gulf and generous products of her land, and, on the opposite side, Napoli as a whore and a witch, a dark sterile entity that devours her children. Both ways, female markers have characterized the construction of Napoli’s cultural identity in the imagery of her intellectuals, story-tellers, and writers. This article will analyze such female reincarnations through the theatrical work of three of the city’s major authors: Eduardo de Filippo’s Filumena Marturano (1946), Roberto de Simone’s melodrama La Gatta Cenerentola (1976), and Annibale Ruccello’s Le cinque rose di Jennifer (1980). Through the metaphor of the lost virginity of the female body, and using different stage languages including drama, comedy, music, and fairy tales, Neapolitan theatre has used tradition and local culture to project Napoli into a wider contemporary intellectual debate. This, I deem, was made possible by the fluid and hybrid nature of “being Neapolitan” which consists of deeply grounded linguistic, religious, culinary, and performative roots and, at once, of a keen awareness that those same roots travelled hundreds of miles and originated from foreign sources, marking Napoli as a quintessential multicultural, proto-European city.