Via Mezzocannone: the street of Neapolitan university, a case of transformations for the bourgeois city

Today Via Mezzocannone stands on the western boundary of the Greek city; this limit was soon exceeded by the expansion of Neapolis. The limit became a path and various religious orders settled on the east. Among these, the Jesuit convent was transformed into the Royal University in the second half of the 18th century. The growing functional needs of the Neapolitan university led to the acquisition of the other neighbouring convents as well. From the 1880s onwards, there were many proposals from Neapolitan architects and engineers, all of which redesigned Via Mezzocannone. The design of a new university was led by Pier Paolo Quaglia and Guglielmo Melisugo. A new building was built, and a street’s eastern wing was created: a long neo-Renaissance façade provided the university double access. The university became a permeable structure to the bourgeois city, recounting the memory of Naples on its historicist façade. But it is also an exemplary case of the Neapolitan city’s layered palimpsest. In fact, it is a case study called Naples Digital Archive Moving Through Time and Space, operated in cooperation between the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome and Interdepartmental Research Centre on the Iconography of the European City of the University of Naples Federico II. Through the creation of a Historical GIS, the research connects cartographic sources with guides to Naples, creating a virtual narrative of the city in the modern age.