Villa Comunale
Jose' walks in the Villa Comunale Park
Statue of a Satyr in the Villa Comunale Park
La Villa Comunale is a place I had visited before many times on previous trips to Naples. I had heard that restorations were completed on the park around the time of the G7 (or 8?) meeting in Naples. I found the park very clean and graffiti free. The statues all seemed very clean, almost new (they're not). This is as it should be and a welcome change from many other public spaces in Naples, which unfortunately have reverted, after a brief period of cleanliness and order under former mayor Antonio Bassolino, to trash and graffiti depositories to some extent.
It was hot and humid as all heck the day my colleague Jose' and I visited the park. Fortunately, we ran across a public drinking fountain very tastefully spewing forth cold water.
The water in Naples tastes very good. Neapolitans routinely credit their water for their unrivaled coffee and pizza. Maybe it's the volcanic soil that somehow conditions the water, but the same recipe there and somewhere else will not result the same. It really must be the water.
While strolling through the park, I came across a curious fountain. The statue in the middle of a fountain depicts an older male, seemingly a Greek or Roman philosopher and a younger male. The younger male is reaching into the robe of the older male right around the area of his crotch. The older male seems either to be restraining or guiding the hand of the younger. To my way of looking at it, the statue means to at least suggest a homoerotic intention. As you can see in the photo below, Neapolitan families around the statue and fountain seemed oblivious to any moral turpitude emanating from the statue. So who am I to say?
I have been unable to discover the name or what the statue depicts. However, I did find out in the process of trying to find out that there is another statue in the park of the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, naked and embracing. These kind of homo statues in an American public park. Hard to imagine.
Hmm.
Naked men groping? No problem.
Fontana delle Paparelle
A Statue of Neapolitan intellectual Giambattista Vico
peeks out from behind a gazebo in the Villa Comunale.
Giambattista Vico was an anti-Cartesian Neapolitan professor of Rhetoric at the University of Naples. He proposed a cyclical view society and history. His statue can be found, pigeon on head and all, in the Villa Comunale.
Statue of Giambattista Vico in Villa Comunale Naples,
IT
An Allegory? Detail of the Vico Statue Pedestal
© 1995 and following by Casa di Dino Cardone