What a Woman Taught

The historical times of my novel Neapolis - The Siren's Recall were perhaps one the happiest for the thinking minds, if we take into consideration the differences and difficulties back then. Greek society was expressing the most advanced fruits of Western thought for the next eighteen centuries: the philosophers.
Among all, Socrates had marked such a strong turn that we distinguish Greek philosophers in pre- and post-socratics, just a bit different from what we do with BC and AD dates.
Socrates did not write anything on his own. All we know about him comes from his disciples, Plato being the first among them.

A Multilingual Land

Campania always was a meeting point for different cultures, and in IV century BC things were not different.
Oscans/Samnites were perhaps the most numerous people, but next to them we could find Greeks (mainly in Neapolis), the Romans who had started to enter the territory (indeed, Acerra had been annexed to the Mescian and Scaptian tribes by the very Quintus Publilius who is so importanto in Neapolis - The Siren's Recall, but Cumaa and Puteolis as well had been taken from the Samnites, and the wealthy Capua literally gave herself to Rome), the Etruscans, the Auruncans, the Volscans…
Any of these peoples spoke its own language, used its own writing, sometimes borrowed the alphabet from others. Is it surprising if Neapolitans gesticulate so much? :)
While writing my novels I also want to face this aspect: how would one live in a land where different ethicities with different languages lived so close together?
I admit that the reply was easier for me who lived in three places where still today there is a situation very similar to the one described.
Right now I live in the area of Barcelona, Spain, Catalonia's capital, where next to Spanish there thrives the Catalan, what remains of a language that, despite its numerous variations, was common to a wide territory from Valencia to Alghero in Sardinia. Influence of Catalan is nowadays recognizable in many spoken languages and dialects well beyond the borders I mentioned, and it would be silly to deny that, but its use has become the matter for political confrontation I don't want to meddle with. From the linguistical point of view, its codification makes it suffer, according to my external and humble opinion, of all the sicknesses of the so-called “dead languages”: lack of spontaneity, expression rigidity, little innovation, fonetical prejudices, etc.
I have also lived for two years in the Netherlands where, next to the official Flemish language, everyone talks a decent English. Foreigners have no problems in asking information or beginning their life in the country, and Dutch people are always nice to the foreigners and try to understand them.
Finally, the third place is Campania itself, an Italian region where, next to Italian, survives with no fear to be forgotten, even with no official economic support, Neapolitan. It survives as a local language, passed by the everyday's life as it is able to express directly, in full, concisely, the ideas of Campanian people.
Stamped for years as “vulgar” (according to the worst of the meanings), it is the language that expressed a first-class musical and opera traditions. Among the first songs coming to mind of foreigners speaking of Italy are 'O Sole Mio and Torna a Surriento; how shocking for them to learn that those are not Italian songs: they are Neapolitan!
Gifted with these experiences, it was easier for me to imagine that the open attitude of the Neapolitans towards foreigners always was the one you can experience while walking along the decumani (the narrow alleys of the historical center): they try to speak, to communicate at all cost, and if they can't use language, they help themselves with gestures, hands, which is a trait that makes you spot an Italian throughout the world.
It is not a little thing, some still see it as a lowly and vulgar thing (“Do NOT gesticulate!” keep on teaching “well-to-do” parents to theatrical sons), but it is a further communication channel, and a further possibility to know different people.
I am not proposing romantic sentences: there are scientific studies on the language development in human babies at different ages, and they show that younger children try to communicate with gestures as well as with sounds, and they finally drop the gestures channel only when they manage to successfully comunicate through speech. It is therefore natural to infer that where gestures language offers expression richness and immediateness, it may easily thrive.
Will you find all of this in my novels? In another post I will explain how I technically faced the problem to let my characters use different languages. In the meantime, I wish I titillated your curiosity on the topic.

About Love

From Preface to Neapolis - The Siren's Recall

One last, needed note, about love. In this novel a few stories intertwine. They are naturally seen and lived through the eyes (and the heart) of the author, though modulated through the requirements of the historical frame.
They are stories from another time, from a culture and a society very different from our our own, and that will hurt the susceptibility of many. Yet, if anyone would try to directly extrapolate by these stories the ways of feeling of the author, he/she would make a big mistake and would use a reading key at least misleading.
[…]
The characters you will know live the feeling abandoning themselves to it, not trying to drive or control it, because when they try that, they miserably fail. Just like we, the present-day and advanced western civilisation, are failing, trying to put a price tag or to give some usefulness to something that doesn't have them by its nature.
For this as well, if I managed to think about this topic in this way, I have to thang Naples, her soul of condescending mother for the juvenile loves of a son, of passionate and jealous lover, of sublime and refined poetess.

Livy Tells the Neapolitan War

As I already anticipated, our main source of information about the war between Rome and Neapolis is an “enemy” writer: Titus Livius (Livy). In this post I am commenting those excerpts where the Roman author tells how the Bellum Neapolitanum started.
Let us begin with the second part of “Ab Urbe Condita”, VIII-22:

Cicero tells…

When one wants that the most innocent sentences are historically sound, historical investigation becomes very crafty. Seldom I found myself reading texts apparently totally unrelated with the topic I wanted to verify, but these are those texts that, en passant, mention the key witness.
This happened with an apparently secondary character in Neapolis - The Siren's Recall, Herennius Pontius. At that time, Herennius was one of the most reknown and respected Samnite chiefs, indeed one of his people very different from the stereotype that history (written by the Roman winners) gave us about Samnites.

Parthenope's Face

Parthenope is not the most known of the Sirens.
The myth regarding the Sirens gives them different name depending on the author: Pseudo-Apollodorus mentions Peisinoe, Aglaope and Thelxiepeia, others name Terpsichore, Melpomene and Sterope or Chthon, Homer does not give them any name. Their very number varies between two and five. The myth naming them as Leucosia, Ligeia and Parthenope (“virgin-voice”) is thus just one among many but, as it happens, is the one I am most interested in.
In my novels Parthenope herself tells her tale. It is worth noticing that, with her sister, she was transformed in a bird-woman (not a fish-maiden as the medieval traditions tell) by Demetra's wrath, as she was unable to protect her daughter Persephone from Hades' lust. Actually Hades even behaved as a gentleman: he was really in love with Persephone, he married her and made so that she could not have stayed far from him. At any new fall the maiden has to get back to her husband, whilst she could spend spring and summer with her mother to till the fields.
The temptation to explain here the chtonian meanings of the myth is strong, but this is not the time. If you wish so, I will be glad to prepare another post. Now I have to get back to Parthenope.
So, a bird-woman. Do we have images of that?

Anabasis Alexandri

The Alexander's Expedition, by Greek historian Arrian, is the most ancient tale we have about the expedition undertook by Alexander The Great to conquer the Persian Empire.
Written in II century AD, it is a chronicle, thus devoid of any introspection: it is a collection of events with no explanation of their reasons; as such, it is a very objective work.
While the events in Neapolis - The Siren's Recall happen, on the Eastern shore of the Mediterranean a young leader educated by a philosopher (no less than Aristotle) subjugated, in historic battles, the greatest empire at that time.
One of the main characters in my novel is linked with the macedonian leader, and I had thus to learn what could historically have happened to him to later tell that from his point of view.
The excerpts from the “Anabasis” I referred to are tho paragraphs from the first tome

Presentation

Welcome!
In this blog I am introducing the historic novels that kept me busy with most of my writer activity since 2009. I am not a writer, so the novels are not the fruit of a pre-confectioned idea, but of a feeling towards the town of Naples I feel so tied with. Here I just want to share the experience collected to get to the books in their final version.
You can see this blog as The making of…
Here I am collecting the historical sources I accessed, their critics, there will be short excerpts of the text here and there… I believe it will be a merry and intriguing experience, and I count on the readers' contribution to progress on this adventure.
Yep, you know: appetite comes by eating (as we say in Italy), I loved so much to close these stories, and I found so many more hints for future ones, that I already feel ready to begin another one!
But, first things first, let's do the things as they should be done, and let me stay with my feet on the ground: at this time all I have is enough to write about these two novels: Neapolis - The Siren's Recall and Neapolis - The Horsemasters, and I can assure it is hot stuff. Are you curious? Well, you just need to start reading these pages: it is all history, real history, just a bit forgotten.

Philogelos

He who knows one's own limitations also knows that those limitations do exist. If he is gifted with goodwill, he can try and exceed them.
I don't think I am extremely “brilliant”: I am more an introverted and more prone to deep meditation than to laughter. My grandpa, who was a writer in Neapolitan language as a hobby, was gifted with a precious comedian style, infinitely stronger than mine! Yet, while writing Neapolis - The Siren's Recall, I felt the desperate need of that very comedian style.
Why?, one might ask. Can one find hilarious moments in a story as violent as the one a siege?
As a matter of facts, the Neapolitan spirit could find any moment good for laughter.
And I had a problem: I wanted to imbue that spirit in the story I wanted to tell, but I missed that very spirit. What to do?

Dedication

To Susy, the Weaver,
to Arianna, the Web.
For there's no Web without its Weaver,
nor there's a Weaver without a Web.
For with no Weaver and no Web
there is no Story to be read.
And with no Story, who am I
If not another passer-by?

Foreword

This blog is the English version of the one I have been editing since 2012 in Italian and that was intended as a logbook describing the work-in-progress of my historic novels about brilliant, little-known moments of the ancient Naples' history.
With time I grew conscious of the quality of the work done, and thought about expanding the readers' base to the English-speaking world, in search for the opportunities that this step would bring: English language publishers, movie writers, tourist trip organizers, you name it.
The blog covers different parts of my creative process, starting from the analysis of the Greek and Latin historical and literary sources all the way to the introduction of excerpts from my novels. The reason for such a wide approach to the novels is that my novels are really the fruit of all this massive work: the Greek and Latin sources often give conflicting versions of the events they report, and seldom they conflict with the reality of the times or places reported.
My novels are thus the result of the attempt to be inspired by those chronicles, give them a coherence, produce a novel that satisfied my taste. This whole work was a growing up and gratifying experience.
Of course, this whole effort was much stronger than what strictly needed to write the novels, not all that I found and read could find its way into them, nor it could be explained there: the novels are a plece where to tell one tale, not the history of Greek/Roman Neapolis. This blog is also the chance to recollect all that material for the curious reader, for he who wants to know more about it.
For such a reader, the main page is thus the one listing the bibliographic sources.
Next to this, to titillate your curiosity and wishing that you will appreciate it, there is a page of excerpts from the novels.
Another page describes the temporal evolution of this project.
I wish that you will like this setting and wish to know your opinion about it. Write in plenty!