A theatrical "chronicle" of the contagion. The Neapolitan plague of 1656 in Carlo Rota's languishing Partenope

Abstract

Published in 1682, but written shortly after the outbreak of plague in Naples in 1656, the Partenope liberata, by the jurist Carlo Rota, is a singular "tragic drama". It was conceived by the author as an adaptation of the chronicle genre to dramaturgical codes and aimed to represent the health and social catastrophe that had occurred a few years earlier. The text, almost ignored by critical studies, deals with the complex relationship between actuality and literary form, and "tells" sub specie theatri the story of a plague epidemic that was strongly alive in contemporary memory. The essay examines the interferences between the narrative scansion of historical events and their stage version, in the double interpretation of the phenomenology of contamination, understood as both hybridization between two expressive genres and as a factual and symbolic representation of the trauma that struck the seventeenth-century metropolis.