Two Tales of One City: Justice and Epidemic in 1764 Naples

From fall 1763 to summer 1764 a great famine and a subsequent contagion spread throughout the Kingdom of Naples. Massive crowds of miserable, unoccupied and hungry people sought refuge in the capital city, hoping to find assistance. In response, the government not only strengthened welfare and charity institutions but also implemented repressive measures against vagrancy and begging. These government decisions led to the creation of “a veritable system of police whose various functions had previously been confusedly divided between military and judicial bodies”. Given the increasing rate of poverty, the rising prices of material goods, and the growing demand for food from abroad, a range of social groups – from the nobles to the underprivileged – developed a new interest in the distribution of land ownership and in the organisation of agricultural work. Consequently, ordinary people gained new confidence in sharing their reflections on economic reform, which included restricting feudal and ecclesiastical control over their landed property in order to increase efficiency, and taking measures to liberalise internal and external markets throughout Europe, in order to make trade more inclusive and transparent. In those same months, an important trial took place. The alleged criminal was the Augustinian friar Leopoldo di San Pasquale, who had been arrested by the hierarchies of his own religious order on charges of financial fraud, heresy and sexual immorality. He responded by accusing the heads of the convent (Santa Maria della Verità of Naples) of subjecting him to a series of inhumane cruelties, claiming to have been “buried alive” (“seppellito vivo”). In this chapter, I attempt to demonstrate how these two events – the trial against Leopoldo and the famine – contributed to reshaping the public space in Naples in the 1760s. The outbreak of illness and food emergency stimulated an explosion of publications (plays, poems, sonnets, pamphlets, devotional booklets, ballads, satires and the like) in which a range of social actors took part in the building of imaginative worlds (with various plots linked together), revolving around the economic and social crisis. These publications undermined the government’s control over the public sphere, often by accusing authorities of incapacity and hypocrisy. At the same time, the trial against Leopoldo reached a peak of tension, and the whole city, shaken by hunger and the plague, began to share stories inspired by what was happening in the court. Within this widespread narrative, the specialised rhetoric of the courts ceased to be obscure and instead became intelligible to a larger part of the population.