Vico Pero / Giacomo Leopardi

Leopardi and the city.

Friends of Naples enthusiastically welcomed Eugenio Giliberti’s diffuse public art project “You are here Vico Pero / Giacomo Leopardi / Inhabiting Artist Project”, dedicated to the city of Naples and to Giacomo Leopardi, who lived there in the final years of his life, and organised by the Fondazione Donnaregina per le Arti Contemporanee – Museo Madre, Fondazione Morra, Dafna Gallery and Intragallery, in collaboration with the Centro Nazionale di Studi Leopardiani of Recanati, the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, the Comune di Napoli, the Terza Municipalità of the Comune di Napoli, the Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli, the Architecture departments of the Università Federico II and Università Luigi Vanvitelli, and the Associazione Costruttori Edili Napoli ACEN.

Vico Pero, in the Stella district, a stone’s throw from Via Santa Teresa, the street that leads from the Museo Archeologico Nazionale up to Capodimonte: it was here, between 4 and 9 May 1835, that Giacomo Leopardi moved with his small court, made up of his Neapolitan friends Antonio and Paolina Ranieri and the patriot cook Pasquale Ignarra. It was Leopardi’s last residence, his favourite and the longest-lasting of his Neapolitan homes. Contrary to what many believe, it was in the house in Vico Pero, and not in Giuseppe Ferrigni’s villa at Torre del Greco, that Leopardi died of dropsy on 14 June 1837, while a terrible cholera epidemic was raging in the city.

Around this purpose the project unfolds in several moments, one of which saw the modest building at Vico Pero 2 transformed into an imposing artistic installation by Eugenio Giliberti, involving the entire façade of the building on Via Santa Teresa degli Scalzi, travelled every day by hundreds of citizens and tourists on their way to Capodimonte.