The mysteries of Naples never cease to amaze us. After surprising us with the story of the Munaciello, immersing us in horror with the secret history of the Girolamini, and introducing us to the mysterious girl of Capodichino, NEAPOLITAN LEGENDS, from Phoenix Publishing, returns with a second extraordinary comic book volume, where we'll meet the Witch of Port'Alba, enter the walls of the fascinating Palazzo Penne, and explore the dark Palazzo Donn'Anna, whose windows hide secrets buried for centuries.
The volume will be presented in Naples on Friday, December 20, 2019 at 18,45:20 p.m. at the IOCISTO bookshop in via Domenico Cimarosa XNUMX (piazza Fuga) in Naples. Talking about it with the authors Emanuele Pellecchia, Francesco Saverio Tisi and Gianluca Testaverde (who, together with Luigi Iannelli and Alessio Monaco, curated the illustrations), there will be the writers Luciano Galassi and Luigi Bartalini, moderated by the journalist Marco Perillo.
“There are stories that are worth telling over and over again. From mouth to mouth, in different ways and forms, so that they are not forgotten. Stories, traditions, especially in Naples and Campania, are all we have. They are a buried treasure capable of always surprising us, they are the salt to arouse interest in our land. And they are capable of elevating us from the miseries of the present, of making us dream, of taking us elsewhere and of telling us about the ancestral events of the human being. The fight between good and evil above all, always alive and ineradicable, although the asphyxiation today would seem to make us think otherwise. This is why Neapolitan legends are not just local stories, the kind that are told to children or those that are passed down on a Halloween night around the fire to keep us awake at night. They are stories that take us back to a higher level, to a search for meaning, and they tell us about a rich and glorious past that does not want to fade”, explains Marco Perillo in the preface to the volume.
“To recall these ancestral events there are them, the places, true bastions of time, whose stones are custodians of memories. The first of these is Port'Alba, where the story of Maria, the feared red-haired witch, takes place, who will meet a horrible end and whose anathema will echo to this day. Then there is the ancient Palazzo Penne, a jewel of the late Middle Ages that belonged to Antonio Penne, grand seneschal of King Ladislaus of Durazzo, built, according to legend, thanks to the help of the devil, because its owner wanted to surprise the woman he loved. Love and death are the reason that brings us back to the last place of this volume – and therefore to the last story. Palazzo Donn'Anna is a sumptuous residence never completed there on the sea of Posillipo. Palazzo della Sirena was originally the scene of the blind jealousy of the vicereine of Naples, Donn'Anna Carafa della Stadera, princess of Stigliano, capable of making her niece Mercedes Las Torres disappear, guilty of having played with too much passion, in the palace's theater, the role of a slave in love with her master, played by Gaetano di Casapesenna, a young man of rare beauty who ended up in Donn'Anna's sights. The sound of the sea breaking on the rocks below the palace still transmits tales of ghosts, of lovers killed without mercy, of traps and black tricks that perhaps refer to another woman protagonist of terrible legends, the medieval Joanna I of Anjou".
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