By inviting Naples and the masterpieces of the Capodimonte Museum to Paris, the Louvre is inviting the entire history of Italian art. If the Neapolitan word for play is piazzare, from pazzia, madness, and if Neapolitan children take everything seriously, then painting in Naples could well be, as the great guest Erri de Luca wrote, "an overflow of great seriousness".

In La Grande Magie (The Great Magic), the Neapolitan playwright Eduardo De Filippo tells the story of a shady conjurer who manages to convince a woman that her husband, far from leaving to marry someone else, remains locked in a small box. And that, if the charm of this personal reclusion was to be preserved, the precious box must not be opened at any cost. For the Étés du Louvre, Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, who has already staged a ghostly production of the play at the Théâtre de la Ville, is once again bringing this strange reality produced by our imagination to life in the Ghosts of Naples by De Filippo, which haunt the Grande Galerie. Extending this magic trick, the French museum is realising the same kind of dream utopia, enclosing more than seventy masterpieces from the Capodimonte museum within its four walls for six months, and programming concerts of the finest operas of the Neapolitan school, from Alessandro Scarlatti's Giuditta to Paisiello's Don Chisciotte della Mancia.


Excerpt from Emmanuel Daydé's article to be published in Art magazine N°108 Absolument.

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