The Scream of Naples is a graphic project that I started in mid-2006 and completed in 2011.

The Scream of Naples is made of 90 mixed media drawings on local public transport tickets. Overtly inspired to Munch’s famous ‘The Scream’, the 90 pieces should be considered as one whole artwork.

Naples screams

In 2006, in an afternoon spent preparing my latests exams as an undergrad, I sketched a little face with an mouth open in the shape of an O. It was the memory of a documentary about Munch I had watched on the TV. That poorly-done sketch was made on the only piece of paper available: a bus ticket.

The ticket featured a blue ink print of the most traditional skyline of Naples: its calm bay, the Vesuvius as a background , Naples lying on the sea. That image, with its pale blue frame was indeed a stereotypical image of Naples - only good for postcards.

I put, in that picturesque and mostly fictional milieu, a screaming face: a scream that was, for me, inarticulate and meaningful at the same time: the description of the inexplicable anguish I was suffering. That was how I felt, in those years, in Naples. A ticket of the public transport service became a place where to look at my sorrow.

I kept collecting the bus tickets I used to move around Naples for many years after: at that time I was living and working in Naples. I kept on sketching those screaming creatures: sometimes funny, sometimes wicked. I drew them with the things I usually had on my desk: pens, pencils, ink for stamps (when at the office). With acrylic painting, oil leftovers when I was painting on canvases.

In those same years, Naples faced the terrible garbage crisis.

Unemployment was higher than ever and a sense of living in a wasteland was all around me. Naples was running out of oxygen or, at least, I felt like I hardly found my way to breathe. Those were also the years of the global success of Gomorra.

Naples, a city once cosmopolitan, was facing an unprecedented decadence.

I felt it so unjust that Naples were wrecking in front of the eyes of the world. That scream, was the sole way to express my feelings. The sole way to get acquainted with my sorrow and somehow to get rid of it.

Why 90 pieces?

I decided that I would have stopped at 90 pieces when I had more than 30 Screams already.

90 is the highest number of ‘Smorfia’, a numerological system that Neapolitans inherited from antiquity. It is something that belongs to Naples’ roots, to Pythagoras and ancient philosophies. I chose deliberately to stop as i wanted to clear reference to the ancient traditions of Naples, its imagery, stories and passions.

A link to an eternal Naples, to its legacy. Naples the timeless.

. . .

The gallery is here on Wordpress