The article highlights the relationship between the spreading of luxury consumption in Naples during the 18th century, the integration of international markets, and the political attempts to establish indigenous substitute manufactures. The exotic taste for the new luxury, condemned by local economists as the main reason for the weakness of Neapolitan economy, because of its growing dependence on imports, is tested on a sample of post-mortem inventories. This source, widely used in historical research about material culture in the early modern period, sometimes contains information about both imported luxuries and indigenous “foreign style” goods, showing at a micro level the effects of that growing globalization of taste and market, that the central policy unsuccessfully tried to contain.

La Napoli settecentesca è, nell'immagine trasmessaci dalla letteratura illuminista, la capitale ipertrofica di un Regno povero. Residenza eletta dalla nobiltà feudale, sede della corte sovrana e di una estesa burocrazia, delle professioni del foro e della borghesia mercantile, essa concentra in sé la maggior parte delle risorse del Regno. Nello scenario della città capitale, queste risorse si trasformano in una luccicante messa in mostra delle proprie possibilità e del proprio status. La cultura del vecchio lusso di ostentazione si confonde però progressivamente con la diffusione di nuove mode e nuovi modi del consumo, che coinvolgono ampie fasce della società urbana, arrivando ai limiti inferiori del ceto artigiano e mercantile. Il volume analizza, attraverso fonti d'archivio (inventari post-mortem, lasciti testamentari, doti) le minute sfaccettature di questa società 'dei consumi' entrando nelle dimore settecentesche, attraversando la città delle botteghe, vagliando le primordiali pubblicità della stampa; e si conclude osservando dalla capitale dei lussi, vecchi e nuovi, la crescente subalternità del regno negli scambi internazionali.

The chapter challenges the traditional representation of Eighteenth century Naples as a parasite city. The case of innovation in ceramics shows an example of technical innovation that occurred in the context of the capital city, and indeed, had in it its raison d'être. Innovation was made possible by the accumulation of human capital and technical knowledge. Naples drew on an inexhaustible reservoir of skilled workers from the provinces who, from the sixteenth century onwards, promoted the development of the ceramics industry. The development of this craftsmanship with its original style features was exactly the product of the mix of styles and skills that were brought by artisans from different backgrounds. Naples, as the seat of a court with its widespread consumption of luxury, a port city and home to communities of foreign merchants, also attracted artisans and artists from abroad, from the areas of excellence of ceramic production. It was a place of concentration of knowledge and information. The attraction the city exercised over skilled craftsmen was not hindered at an institutional level; rather it was traditionally favoured from the sixteenth century onwards as Philip II made a clear policy of welcoming foreigners and not restricting the flow of people. Naples was a world city because it was a gateway to the Kingdom for the international goods from the sixteenth century onwards. It reflected consumption patterns that were increasingly oriented to foreign tastes, and not by chance, this forced innovation towards an imitation of styles and products from the East. In this context, the sovereign experiment was just one attempt to reproduce something that had already been established in general tastes and in the market. The success of this innovation was mainly due to the huge investment that the monarchy, like a big corporation ante litteram, made in research, and that no private entrepreneurs in the kingdom could have done. In order to introduce innovation, the monarchy used the same mechanism that traditionally had served the ceramic industry: migration. In the eighteenth century, the ceramics industry intensified and the movement of skilled artisans multiplied throughout the peninsula and beyond. In the pursuit of excellence, the monarchy used artisans from abroad with previous experience of testing porcelain. The urban location of the factory of Capodimonte refers to the city's role as a site of power and to the factory as a tool for political representation. However, Capodimonte produced a multiplier effect in the private world of manufacturing. It expanded the market and the taste for porcelain and for lower-cost imitations, though made with the traditional faience. It created new artisans who were more or less specialized. After the first closing of Capodimonte, the private faience factories, again operated by immigrant artisans, flourished. They provided inspiration and exchanged labour and ideas with the new factory of Capodimonte, and engaged in the attempt to emulate the English style of white ceramic. Innovation continued to be based on the emergence of new tastes and on the circulation of human capital, both mechanisms that the capital city, and notably Eighteenth century Naples, efficiently triggered.

The article deals with the sumptuary laws set in the kingdom of Naples from the second half of the XVI to the end of the XVIII century. During this long period, Southern Italy was under the Spanish rule until 1707, the Austrian ruled until 1734, and then became an independent state under the Bourbons. Sumptuary law is, like everywhere else, a way of the central authority to impose a social order: in the south of Italy this goal is pursued by formally disciplining social representation of both aristocracy and middle classes; this “egalitarian” approach derives from the political purpose of fighting aristocratic resistance to the establishment of a strong central power. Nonetheless, the aims of sumptuary law are various, according to the social, economic and political conjuncture. During the XVI century the religious inspiration of the catholic condemnation of luxury prevails. During the XVII century the economic and social purpose of limiting waste of human and monetary resources , necessary to the state for military and economic uses, prevail. The mercantilist aim of reducing the import of luxuries gets more and more important as well. Beyond the formal dictate of sumptuary laws lays a social and cultural transformation in the idea of luxury and in the boundary between private and the public sphere. The disappearance of sumptuary law in the XVIII century is considered a consequence of the erosion of a substantial definition of luxury, and of the affirmation of the private sphere as the base of a society where consumption hasn’t the political function of inertly representing a social and political order anymore, but is the expression of the formal freedom of the individual, whose only unwritten law is the fashion. Key words: sumptuary law, luxury, Kingdom of Naples

Given the durability and the effectiveness of a care system for the poor run by private subjects - corporations, fraternal and clerical orders - the historiography on modern Naples has relegated to the background the centralizing tendencies within assistance to the poor which occurred in the second half of the seventeenth century. Starting from the observation that such tendencies were not absent, but that they did not produce a substantial alteration of the traditional order, the paper investigates the reasons for the weakness of the central power, reconstructing the events of the foundation of the first great poor hospital by the Spanish viceroy in 1667. The S.Gennaro extra moenia Hospital was inspired indeed by the aims of a centralization and a secularization of care, and by a repressive approach to marginality and deviance. But its foundation and especially the attempt by the central government to ensure it tax revenues, produced a fierce conflict between city dwellers and central power, between an old and a new conception of the assistance to the poor. This conflict weakened the centralizing project to the extent that it threatened the social compromise upon which the Spanish power in the South of Italy was based indeed.

In the Kingdom of Naples smuggling seems to be the general rule of mercantile practices rather than a deviance of a few rule-breaking. As much on the maritime border as on the internal border, consisting of the set of institutions and operators in charge of tax collecting, sovereignty is weak and unable to translate its normative production in a set of effective rules. The current representation is that of a customs system which burdens the actors of trade. But a closer look at current practices of landing and placing of goods through primary documents, seems to contradict this picture, revealing a system based on a constant negotiation in order to conciliate interests, producing a factual corpus of habitual rules. The common representation, which seems to be the result of an idealized and "moral" conception of the market versus perverted or oppressive institutions, ends up with producing a kind of apology of such fraudulent practices as a necessary self-defense of Commerce by the intrusiveness of the institutions, so that the offense loses the connotation of "sin".