Marvelous Majolica Tilework
and the Farnese Collection

We were well rested after an early night and got to the Cloister of
Santa Chiara just as it was opening. It's lovely claim to fame is the tilework on the benches and columns of the cloister. They are the most charming collection of paintings you could hope to find, completely secular and simple. Each panel provoked a little sigh and I could have taken pictures of everyone one of them. The sketches drew on themes such as hunting, dancing, village life, and travel. You could imagine the nuns taking refuge in this sun-filled square and also taking refuge from the often-intense monastic life of religious worship. There were no "Him" and "Her" here, only beauty and light. Also, I imagine that Naples, though smaller in the past, was no less frenetic and chaotic.

Of course, Ira remembers a Naples in which he and Jim drove. We laughed over the idea of doing the same thing today. Traffic moves, but at a grudging pace, each car driver, pedestrian, and Vespa rider gives ground only on protest, and will gladly fill every inch of space. There doesn't seem to be any heat or anger to the constant honking and maneuvring. This morning, near Via di Tribunali, they had stopped traffic to move a big planter and all of these impatient Neapolitans, so quick to take an advantage of a second, waited without complaint in the knowledge that if they were stuck, then everyone else was stuck too.

The National Archeological Museum proved no less charming than the tilework. The paintings of Hercaluneum and Pompeii were more delicate than Ira remembered or I had imagined. Seeing the day-to-day art of the people who lived in Roman times is much different from Roman Art (though there was a lot of that at the museum as well). Instead, simple paintings, preserved for thousands of years by sudden tragedy, played across our imaginations. A couple in a wedding painting looked like a gentler version of "American Gothic. An astonishing and beautiful array of animals, leapt, crept, and slept on frescoed walls. Simple architectural sketches of yellow brushstrokes on a red background made Ira come back to ensure that I shared in his joy of them.

And of course there was plenty of imperial Rome at the Archeological Museum too. The Farnese Hercules is an impressive, oversized specimen. This is the "original," the copy of a long-lost Greek bronze. We had seen another copy at the Palazzo Farnese in Rome on a previous trip. There he looked perfectly at home in what is now the French Embassy. Here, he's surrounded by friends of his size and scale, as a row of double-sized gods and goddesses ranged along a big room. I don't think there's another collection of antique sculpture to rival this, certainly not in Rome and in neither Rome, London, nor Paris. Greece, fittingly enough, may have the equal to this collection.