Article about Donatus Buongiorno published in academic journal

My efforts to find out more about ancestor painter Donatus Buongiorno in Naples were thwarted at many turns, including his alma mater, the Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli (Academy of Fine Arts of Naples.)

After a few false starts, and iffy leads to uninterested people, I finally hit pay dirt when my New York paintings conservator Luca Bonetti asked a conservator friend in Rome (Antonio Iaccarino Idelson, who doesn’t know me but thank you, Antonio!), who provided the name of Luciana Festa, who teaches stone (sculpture) conservation at the school.

See her talking about a recent project restoring Syrian sculptures here.

Luciana was the BEST. She talked to the school’s archivist and others before I arrived (a rarity among Italians, I’ve learned, who generally didn’t do anything until I was standing in front of them), and she sent answers to many of my questions in advance, which helped me plan the best use of my time on the ground.

We met for lunch and she provided the depressing explanation of why the school has no records of Donatus Buongiorno’s tenure in the 1800s: big fire after WWII bombardment by Allied forces burned up their archives. Mea culpa, mi dispiace. Not for the first time in Naples, I found myself apologizing for the actions of my army in the 1940s.

So I will provide the records “back to them!” I plan to submit a report of my ancestor’s career for their re-constructed archives.

Here’s the obligatory, blurry selfie of the two of us.

Headed back to the apartment, I arrived at Stazione Garibaldi to the most taxing experience of my trip.

The ascensore (elevators) and scale mobile (escalators) were out of service, and men in uniforms with reflective safety vests were pointing people to the stairs. I couldn’t understand the guy’s explanation and figured I was being subject to an infamous Italian sciopero (labor strike).

The damned station is at least 150 feet underground and features four sets of elevators and four sets of stairs criss-crossing each other in a single, giant well that is open from the ground level to the tracks. I don’t like heights. The first time I exited Garibaldi station, I experienced nasty vertigo on the very long escalators out—which is why I had switched to using elevators (where you can’t see how high you are.)

This is the best photo I could find that is copyright-free (Thank you, Alpha 350.) Google other photos to get a stronger impression of how steep and dizzying these escalators and stairs are (45-degree angle.)

I said to myself, “Janice, pretend you have to do this to save your life, and just do it. Don’t look up, don’t look out, just look down at the stair treads until there are none left.” Resigned, I inhaled deeply and started up. It took about 10 minutes and wasn’t that bad, though I did have jelly legs for the rest of the evening.

I found out later the station was hit by a power outage.

During the 30 minutes that I was on the train, the whole city had been hit by a violent, windy thunderstorm—power lines down, roofs blown off, etc.

It was even reported in the New York Times, several friends from New York told me, with the mayor of Naples, Luigi de Magistris, calling it “an atmospheric earthquake,” whatever that is.

The lights in the station (of which there were plenty, no fewer than usual) must have been running on emergency generators. When I realized that, I wondered if the train had been running on generators, too, and quickly changed my attitude to “sure glad the damned thing made it into the station.”

I’ve worked for railroads, and I’ve taken their safety classes. I can tell you—enthusiastically—that I would be satisfied to never in my life experience walking in a train tunnel, in the dark, between tracks, with train personnel instructing me how to avoid hitting the third rail—thank you!

As the seven members of our party each arrived back at the apartment throughout the afternoon, we traded stories of waiting out the storm in museums, seeing loose pieces of roofs on the sidewalk in our neighborhood, and, for the family members who had returned to the apartment before it all started, closing the outside metal shutters and grilles on the windows, because the wind sounded strong enough to blow out the glass.

Later that night, we went out for pizza, and everything was more or less back to normal, surprisingly. Napoli has survived volcanoes. Not much else affects Neapolitani, apparently.

Back to Via Cesare Rosaroll and the slummy Troisi apartment with the whole gang. (See previous post for details.)

Lots of stunned silence—for the apartment and for the crappiness of the neighborhood in general.

We walked up Vico Cappella a Pontenuovo, a narrow street parallel to Via Cesare Rosaroll and Via Carbonara, to get a feel for an old neighborhood of Naples.

I’ve lived in un-modernized, cruddy tenement buildings in New York City, so this neighborhood didn’t faze me that much. Actually, I think it’s less bad than many inner-city neighborhoods I have seen (in the U.S. and all over Europe.) Some family members who are used to better housing were nonplussed.

What I did find wearying—claustrophobic, actually—after a week in Naples, and not just in this neighborhood, was the canyon-like narrowness of any street that was more than 200 years old and the overall darkness of buildings, sidewalks and streets, since the “local stone” is black, volcanic ash. Like this:

My favorite detail on Vico Cappella a Pontenuovo was the Spiderman motor cycle repair shop built into yet another tower of the former medieval wall of the city. See photo.

We saw these towers all over the neighborhood. Sometimes they were incorporated into later, substantial buildings, such as the well-known Garibaldi Barracks on Via Foria, and sometimes they had been turned into homes (!), such as the one shown below.

After the off-putting tour of the morning, we had a nice lunch to let everyone decompress, then we split to go several ways in smaller groups.

I headed south and west back into the old quarter to see Capella (chapel) Sansevero.

Giuseppe Sanmartino’s Veiled Christ is a stunning sculpture worth the money and effort, but the whole “attraction” is more cloyingly “touristy” than any other sights I had seen in Napoli, including the largest museums. I felt a tiny bit hustled, so I went into a “real” church afterward to relax for a few minutes.

Then I walked down the hill, explored a few new streets, and found myself on the musical instruments street that I had seen a week before with my Dutch friends. The “old” neighborhood is small enough that you can’t avoid repeating streets, I learned.

I headed to Piazza Dante and grabbed the metro to Garibaldi.

Sunday afternoon: family members arrive—two from Rome and three from Spain, joining one from Rome and one from Germany! The whole gang is now in Naples. We catch up on each others’ travels and make plans for dinner.

We can’t find the restaurant we chose from a guide book and “settle” for Avellinese food. It was fabulous.

A few nights later, when in Solofra, which is in Avellino, we ate at a “Neapolitan” restaurant. We couldn’t tell the difference, honestly.

Except that this category of not-pricey restaurants seems to always be overly lit, though I’m happy if they don’t have a t.v. blaring. (There’s often a calcio/soccer game on the t.v., but usually with the sound off which helps in ignoring it.)

Julie and I got up early Sunday morning and booked it to the Capodimonte Museum, as the 19th-century apartments of the former palace residents are only open two hours a week, and I was determined to see every 19th-century painting in this city that Donatus Buongiorno would have seen while he lived here—in case I could identify copies, inspirations, etc.

There were no “finds” regarding his painting career, but there was a major find regarding a police action Buongiorno initiated in New York City in 1907. He reported a studio theft to the police—that a “Van Orley” painting had been stolen, a portrait of Protestant reformer John Calvin, which Buongiorno and an Italian art dealer had imported from Italy to sell in the U.S.

Buongiorno wasn’t treated very respectfully, as the casual racism and yellow journalism of reports in the New York Times and New York Sun reveal (“artistic hair,” “very broken English”.)

Bernard van Orley (c. 1487–1541) was a leading artist in Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting and a designer of Brussels tapestries and stained glass.

He (and/or his workshop) made many portraits of European royalty, including seven of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, after he became King of Spain, and… on this Sunday morning, I discovered that the Capodimonte Museum has one of them! (The museum also has a substantial tapestry series based on van Orley drawings and, presumably, Buongiorno would have seen those, too.)

This confirms how Buongiorno would have known about van Orley, but I still suspect he “got taken” on the imported painting, as I find no record of a Calvin portrait by van Orley, though the two mens’ lives overlapped and van Orley was, against the tide, a Protestant.

So the plot thickens, and I have one more fact to add to the stew.

Many thanks to my cousin Julie Holm who shot a better photo of this painting than I did and is letting me post hers.

Dinner?

My grandfather told us (in his 1970 self-published memoir) the street where his family lived, but not the building/apartment number. I hired several people to pursue different avenues to get that elusive number, and one paid off.  (Shout-out of thanks to Vincenzo Regina of Istituto Araldico Genealogico del Regno di Napoli.)

5:00 p.m.: I announce to my cousin Julie, “I just got the notice from my hired researcher. Maria Michela Buongiorno (Troisi) died in her home located in Vico Santa Caterina a Formiello n. 3.”

We immediately look up that address on Google Earth.

It’s bad, people. It’s a tiny hovel of a doorway, a few crooked steps above the street, across from a toilet paper store. (Seriously, the store is even labeled “paper” on Google Earth.) Currently not occupied and possibly for rent or for sale (see sign in photo)—anyone, anyone? Not directly on Via Cesare Rosaroll, but in a nearby alley. No wonder Domenic Troisi (my grandfather) had no complaints about a 4-room tenement flat in New York City (in 1907) and so enjoyed his later, self-built, 4-bedroom home in Williamsport, Pa., in the 1920s. The man did well for himself in the U.S., eh?

5:01 p.m.: Julie says, “Let’s go look at it. Right now.”

Update, later in the evening: Wrong door. The grilled door on the right is to the building’s common hallway and stair to upstairs apartments. (Totally dark, filled with trash.) The apartment is the OPEN door to the left—where you can see the current occupant’s refrigerator just inside (on Google Earth, but she has moved it since.) It’s the size of a small Manhattan studio apartment—no smaller than some I’ve lived in—but 4 inches above the street, with a single wooden door between her and and a public street while she sleeps. What you see in the photo below is about the full width of the entire 4-story building, by the way, so the apartments upstairs may not be any wider.

The currently inhabitant is a woman from the Dominican Republic (to the left in the photos, the woman to the right is her friend who lives elsewhere) who has lived in Italy 20 years. She very graciously chatted with us a few minutes, while cars whizzed by my back a few inches away and cousin Julie discretely took a few photos. (Thanks for the use of your photos, Julie.)

Troisi cousins note that the apt matches Domenic’s description for magazino in the front, living quarters behind a curtain in the back. You can see an alcove with curtain to the right of her friend in the doorway photo. The current tenant has an electric refrigerator and nary a wood stove in sight. We did not ask if her toilet is still out in the hall (which our grandfather reported in his memoir).

The last photo shows a chapel on the street that we think must be the one Domenic referred to in his memoir.

By the way, the “toilet paper store” across the street, which I jokingly identified based on stacks of toilet paper in the Google Earth image? Sells only paper. We confirmed it. I feel compelled to include the photo as proof.

See posts by my other family members on Facebook for photos and videos taken during daylight on the day we all visited together, including this good overview by my sister Loraine. Thanks, Loraine.

My first view of Vesuvius! From the archeology museum. (The weather’s been cloudy. Views have been lousy ’til now.)

Taken from an open window on the top floor. My Dutch friends who are with me are outraged that this room containing frescoes from Pompeii has windows that are open to the elements as we stand here. “Don’t they know anything about climate control and conservation?!?!” (Yes, they do, but this is not a wealthy country like The Netherlands….)

In the week before my family arrived in Naples for our “roots tour,” I viewed every collection of 19th c. paintings in the city, part of ongoing research of my ancestor painter Donatus Buongiorno—wanting to “see what he saw” and understand his visual education.

The collection at this mid-sized gallery includes a “famous” maybe-Carravagio, 17th- and 18th-century paintings that would have informed Buongiorno’s work, as they were most likely on view somewhere else in Naples (possibly Museo Pignatelli) when he lived and studied there. This gallery, opened only a few years ago, is a re-arrangement of paintings owned by a Neapolitan bank.

Plus, the gallery is in a former palazzo, and I’m always a sucker for architecture.

Rooms of more recent art contained late-1800s pieces by Buongiorno’s contemporaries and teachers from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli, including a beautiful bust of Domenico Morelli (by Vincenzo Gemito, number 8 in the slide show at the bottom of the website page), an influential art educator of Naples who was an instructor in painting at the art academy when Buongiorno attended and who later became the academy’s director.

Unexpectedly, I was jolted, and thrilled, to see pride of place given to a painting by Francesco Guarini (or Guarino)*, 1611-1651 or 1654, who was a painter from Buongiorno’s home town of Solofra, Avellino.

Giovanni Tommaso Guarini and his son Francesco Guarini painted the murals on the ceilings of their famous, 17th c. Neapolitan Baroque hometown church La Collegiata di San Michele Arcangelo.

If nothing else, having this painting in this gallery’s collection helps secure Guarini’s importance as a southern painter and draw some attention to him, and to Solofra, in the big city of Naples.

*There’s debate over the painters’ last names being Guarino vs. Guarini. Here is a Google translation of the last paragraph of the Wiki article:
It is not yet known precisely what the last vowel of the original surname of the artist is. Although this debate, reopened on the occasion of the celebrations for the four hundred years since the birth of the Solofrano painter (1611-2011), seemed to converge towards the final choice of “Guarini”, some scholars reiterate the thesis that it should instead call it “Guarino”. In the publications of various authors both definitions are used, therefore it is possible to define both Guarini and Guarino, without making mistakes.

As there is a Guarino in my Troisi family tree—Maria Vincenza Guarino, 1824-1866 or 1883, mother of Beniamino Mimi Troisi—I declare her to be a descendant of these two painters and, hence, another source of the substantial artistic abilities manifested by multiple generations of my family.