Naples 1343

Starred review from August 30, 2024

The choice to go to graduate school may be motivated by many factors. For historian Feniello (medieval history, Univ. of L'Aquila), it was a journey to find the roots of violence in his Neapolitan community, a place where gang wars closed the school where he was a teacher, and murders were left purposely unsolved by the police. This quest led him back to the 14th century for this book, his first to be translated into English. From the sparsest of historical documents, his book unravels not just a particular crime but a culture. The text has a fascinating meta quality; it's as much about the process of reconstructing a nearly 700-year-old event as the event itself. Starting with a few scant paragraphs written over centuries documenting a 1343 attack on a cargo ship, the book delves deep into the archives to reconstruct everything from the political climate of the era to the weather conditions and the failed harvest that made for desperate times. Then it takes readers back to the present. VERDICT This history of place and culture reads like a detective story. Certain to intrigue historians, cultural anthropologists, and general readers alike.--Bart Everts

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2024
A historian traces the origins of organized crime in southern Italy to medieval politics. Feniello begins his narrative with an incident that happened on the street in Naples: the execution of three young men with ties to the local mob. Turning history into a brooding philosophical essay, Feniello wonders about the "source of all this savagery" and whether it has its origins in "something...so deep-rooted that it has carved its way into the viscera of time, allowing the weed of corruption to grow and germinate." Mixed metaphor (do weeds regularly grow in viscera?) and all, he moves on to discuss an incident in the 1343 of his title, when Neapolitan freebooters seized a Genoese merchant ship, beheaded its owner, and divvied up the spoils--an act worthy of the gibbet, that, but one that Feniello attributes to the roiling politics of contending realms and some very poor policies, including taxing the poor in a time of plague and famine. Those doing the taxing may have had ducat signs in their eyes, but the people had nothing: "Southern Italy was screaming with hunger." Feniello then charts the growth of antimonarchical resistance and the entrenchment of political power in a handful of local families, giving birth to "a hungry new Neapolitan, a man of both clan and family, a man quick to draw his sword, both solitary and violent." Feniello's thesis would seem to be something of a stretch in time, though not in kind: most historians trace the rise of the Mafia to resistance in Sicily, not Naples, against French and Spanish occupiers, though the basis of power in family ties is right. Correct or not, Feniello's wandering narrative waxes a bit too purple for comfort and often strays from the point. Of some interest to students of medieval Italian history, less so to those of organized crime.

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