Sanità

The “Rione Sanità” was built in the XVI century, in a quarry that had been used as a burial place during the Greek-Roman period. The strong bond between the dwellers and death is one of the distinctive traits of the neighbourhood, as testified by places of worship such as the Fontanelle Cemetery. The cemetery, built in a tuff quarry,hosts the remains of the victims of the 1656 plague epidemic and those of the 1836 cholera epidemic. The abandoned bones of the paupers were “adopted” and preserved by the local inhabitants.

Nowadays a new plague has fell on the neighbourhood: social neglect. The Rione, born as a place of residence for the noble and aristocratic families, has become one of the poorest in Naples .At Rione Sanità there aren’t municipal asylums,there is one elementary school,there are only three middle classes, and one high school that is the first in Italy for school evasion.At Rione Sanità there is a wild fight between different mafia clans like Vastarella,Sequino and Savarese for the business of drug and estorsions.At the same time the neighbourhood welcomes a huge humanity with different geographical origins and different personal histories.This humanity lives deep relationships and express them by using a body language that reveals an unexpected gentleness for a place like that.The strength of feelings is capable to generates the wonder of the unexpected and to show the power of love.The Rione Sanità is solitude and love, irony and tragedy, faith and sin. The street and the home blend together, the private becomes public and the public hides the secrets of the private. The tuff caves like an amniotic sac isolate the union of these worlds from the rest of the city. Life and death interact daily, not always in agreement. The Rione self-destroys and regenerates at the same time,it lives, dies and is reborn through the lives that flow identical and monotonous in the beauty of recurring gestures. The contrasts generate surreal lives.