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# Until 16 June the Quirinal Palace in Rome hosts the exhibition “Napoli Ottocento”, that is, “Naples, the Nineteenth Century”
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/v-rime-v-kvirinalskom-dvortse-do-16-iiunia-rabotaet-vystavka-napoli-ottochento-to-est-neapol-xix-vek/
- Published: 2024-05-02T12:30:06.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:33:54.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Coming Up, Art, Museums, Rome

At the end of the eighteenth century the discovery of the ruins of Pompeii, the great popularity of the Grand Tour among the aristocracy and the enlightened elite, the fascination with the incessant eruptions of Vesuvius and the love of romantic landscapes made Naples the third city of Europe, after Paris and London.

It was then that the tourist movement was born, of which we are the heirs. By the beginning of the nineteenth century there was hardly an enlightened state whose citizens did not travel across Europe with an obligatory halt in Naples.

But attention to Naples was not confined to the romantic vision. Under the influence of the French painters of Barbizon a fashion arose for idealising the whole image of the city, with its humble districts and its sights, its volcano and its islands. A new generation of creative travellers wished to see and to know the Neapolitans, and drew a romanticised, generalised portrait of them, strikingly unlike the reality of people living on the brink of destitution, and of their dull, monotonous existence.

By the end of the nineteenth century the artist found it easier to seek refuge in the past, which tourist culture had reinvented in such a way that its cruelty and sharpness seemed more bearable than they had been in fact.

Naples became the capital of nostalgia for an imaginary idyllic pastoral country. It was no longer Italy; it was rather a rediscovered Ancient Greece, a lost paradise created by artists, onto which they projected their fantasies and their regrets for the impossible dream of finding a land of desire, happiness and pleasure.

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