Constantly evoked but under-researched: the conundrum of vertical stratification in Naples

For centuries, Naples has been renowned for its dense, high-rise built environment and social promiscuity. Mass immigration and intense urbanization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-ries turned it briefly into one of Europe’s most populous cities. The direct legacy of this period is the city’s vast historic centre which today accounts for roughly 25% of its total population. The cross-class composition of this area underwent major demographic change after the Second World War as a result of middle-class flight to modern housing districts, the relocation of low-income groups to peripheral housing estates, the settlement of international migrant residents from the 1980s, and, over the last two decades, local cases of gentrification. Nevertheless, nu-merous buildings in the historic centre continue to be characterized by vertical stratification, in other words by the presence of different social and income groups on different storeys within the same apartment block. Long-standing exemplars of this stratification are the piano nobile (‘noble floor’), usually located on the first or second storey, with its palatial apartments in which higher income groups have tended to reside still nowadays, and the ‘bassi’, the single-room, ground-floor dwellings that have traditionally been home to the city centre’s poorest inhabitants and many of which have been rented out to migrant families in recent years. The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part of the chapter examines the history of vertical stratification in Naples, both in terms of how it emerged as a result of the city’s urban develop-ment and how it has been used as a trope over the last century by Neapolitans and outsiders alike to articulate the city's particular urban structure, internal differences, as well as its fraught rela-tionship with ideas about urban modernity and industrial capitalism. Debates about vertical strati-fication have thus been less associated with social hierarchy and inequality than with the notion of an ‘aberrant’ Naples lacking a modern class structure and beset by an inchoate public realm in which the everyday lives of the ground-floor populace have 'spilt out' onto the streets.