A book about the Neapolitan Song (in Italian): Gli spazi della canzone Luoghi e forme della canzone napoletana (coming out in September, for LIM/Fondazione Roberto Murolo)
Neapolitan Song is a world famous repertoire of popular music: born, as other urban genres, between the end of XIX and the beginning of XX century it has seldom undergone critical scrutiny. The book which will appear in Italy by the end of the year, tries to investigate Neapolitan Song in relationship to the urban metamorphoses of the city after the unification of Italy (1860) and in the light of the ideology the song brought in itself. The basic idea is that Neapolitan Song was part of a big project of modernization of the city which involved culture as well as city planning: the two worked in fact together, the second setting the streets free of the local folk culture in order to transform Naples into a real capitalist environment and, the first, providing the new social scenario with a proper form of entertainment. The Song grew as an important part of the identity of the local emerging bourgeoisie but it was, at the same time, taken up and continuously revised by the lower classes. The book tells the whole story of Neapolitan Song so far, investigating its different sub-genres, discussing its protagonists and the cultural industry that launched them, analyzing the meaning of the lyrics and the peculiarities of the music.
