In 1977, Luciano De Crescenzo parodied Nietzsche and turned a retired Neapolitan professor into the prophet of a wisdom of the heart.
His theory: humanity is divided between « men of love » and « men of freedom » — and happiness lies in the blend.
A Platonic dialogue transposed to a Naples street, the book captures the spirit of Naples without ever lapsing into folklore.
Luciano De Crescenzo, Così parlò Bellavista (Thus Spoke Bellavista), 1977; French translation, Éditions de Fallois.
It takes a certain nerve to crown one’s first novel with a title that parodies Nietzsche. Luciano De Crescenzo did just that in 1977 with Così parlò Bellavista — Thus Spoke Bellavista — and the nod to Thus Spoke Zarathustra already says the essence of the project: to the prophet of the Germanic peaks, the author substitutes a retired philosophy professor, a thoroughbred Neapolitan, who dispenses his wisdom from his living room, a good glass of wine within reach. The success was dazzling: nearly 600,000 copies sold in Italy, a translation across the world, and a film adaptation that the author himself directed in 1984.
The engineer turned storyteller
Luciano De Crescenzo (1928-2019) is a character worthy of his own books. Born in Naples, an engineer by training, he spent some twenty years at IBM Italy before giving it all up, at nearly fifty, to devote himself to writing. This path — the engineer who becomes the storyteller of his city — is no mere anecdote: it illuminates the double nature of his work, in which the rigour of the rational mind is placed at the service of the warmest southern orality. De Crescenzo would later become one of the great popularisers of Greek philosophy in Italy, as well as a filmmaker, actor and screenwriter. But Bellavista remains the inaugural book, the one that brought him to the general public.
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Men of love, men of freedom
The novel does not, strictly speaking, tell a story. It is the portrait of a city, the Naples of the late 1970s, captured through the figure of Don Gennaro Bellavista and his theory of the world. According to the professor, humanity is divided into two families: men of love and men of freedom. To the former belongs the « kingdom of love », whose capital is Naples: there one needs others, warmth, connection, presence. To the latter, the « republic of freedom », rather Milanese and northern: there one cherishes independence, order, chosen solitude. The division is in no way Manichaean: De Crescenzo takes care to recall that no people is all white or all black, that each blends both colours within itself, and that the recipe for happiness holds in one formula: half love, half freedom. Beneath the humour surfaces a genuine phenomenology of the Neapolitan art of living, tender and disenchanted at once.
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« The recipe for happiness holds in one formula: half love, half freedom. »
A Platonic dialogue in a stairwell
It is in its construction that the book proves most original, and this form matches its subject exactly. De Crescenzo — who casts himself as a character, the « engineer De Crescenzo » — built his text as a Platonic dialogue transported from the Athenian agora to a Neapolitan stairwell. Bellavista is a Parthenopean Socrates: he does not write, he speaks; he does not teach from a lectern, but through conversation, surrounded by his interlocutors — the concierge Salvatore, Luigino the poet, friends come from the North — gathered around a good bottle. This little coterie re-enacts, on the scale of a single building, the immemorial scene of the master and his disciples.
« Bellavista is a Parthenopean Socrates: he does not write, he speaks. »
Hence the alternation that gives the work its rhythm. The chapters answer one another according to two registers. Some are properly philosophical: these are Bellavista’s « lessons », dialectical jousts on love and freedom, on southern man, on the meaning of life — the side of the logos. The others are Neapolitan vignettes: anecdotes, street scenes, colourful portraits of Parthenopean daily life — the side of eros and of popular orality. The two planes constantly echo each other: the thesis is embodied in the anecdote, and the anecdote rises to the dignity of reflection. The whole stands halfway between the essay and the comedy. De Crescenzo used to say, moreover, that the book was born of a visit from Lombard friends, for whom he had improvised a kind of « propaedeutic course » in Neapolitan living: Bellavista, at bottom, is only that prolonged initiation.
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The little red horse
One episode sums up on its own this anecdotal side and the gap between the book and the film: the little red horse, il cavalluccio rosso. In the novel, it is only a fleeting mention — a father who buys his son a little wooden horse — but the scene itself exists only in the film, of which it has become one of the anthology pieces, carried by Riccardo Pazzaglia, co-screenwriter and a great figure of the Neapolitan scene. In the middle of a market, a handkerchief in one hand and in the other a scarlet plastic horse bought for his son, a man recounts how he foiled, by pure chance, the theft of a car radio. But each time a passer-by approaches and asks « Scusate, ma che è successo? » — excuse me, what happened? — he starts his tale again from the beginning, with the same ardour, endlessly, the whole crowd feeding him his lines. Nothing could be more trivial than the anecdote; nothing, however, more revealing of that Neapolitan art of making theatre, and almost epic, out of the slightest incident of daily life. The toy has since become a relic: on Luciano De Crescenzo’s death, in 2019, a shopkeeper in the centre of Naples draped in black the little red horse he still had on display.
The spirit of Naples, without the folklore
In Thus Spoke Bellavista, the tour de force lies there: to unveil the spirit of Naples without ever giving in to picture-postcard folklore. Here there is almost no Vesuvius, no pizza, no mandolin. Bellavista is not a novel that gives in to the ease of clichés; it is a novel that conveys far more: the spirit of Naples. What Luciano De Crescenzo gives us to read is an intelligence of the heart, a practical wisdom that sets against the cult of efficiency the primacy of connection, of slowness and of attention to others: a gentle resistance to the spirit of seriousness. And if the subject seems at first very local, it in fact aims at the universal, as one of the author’s most famous aphorisms sums up: everyone is someone’s southerner. The South, in Bellavista, is not a geography; it is a disposition of the soul.
« Everyone is someone’s southerner. »
The little red horse, il cavalluccio rosso, has thus become an emblem not only of Bellavista and of De Crescenzo, but of Naples itself. Two famous Neapolitan houses — Marinella, for ties, and Talarico, for umbrellas — have produced special editions bearing its image. Proof that popular culture can also feed fashion and daily life.
