Abstract

[The underbelly of cities. Legislative experiments, urban planning and literary suggestions in the Bourgeois Century]. In 1884, the city of Naples was struck by a tragic cholera epidemic. The disease brought to the fore all the atavistic ills of the center: lack of running water, lack of an adequate sewage system, and overcrowding. Capable of vividly describing the conditions of the Neapolitan plebeians, Matilde Serao’s prose is recognized as a masterpiece of verist literature. It photographs the human misery e and, at the same time, the problems associated with an ambitious building redevelopment pursued through exceptional legal instruments. The exemplarity of the Neapolitan case, however, should not make us forget that similar housing and social emergencies - with subsequent building speculation - had already been addressed in Haussmann’s Paris. In the same decades, other Italian cities adopted regulatory plans that served as a premise for a transformation of the traditional urban fabric.