NAPOLI, DE VERGETEN HOOFDSTAD VAN DE MUZIEK

Naples, Music's forgotten capital
Utrecht, 23 August/ 1 September

The most delicious cuisine in Italy, the most beautiful bay in Europe. But also: traffic chaos, refuse wars and organized crime. Neapolitans themselves describe their city as a beautiful woman with dirty feet. Life is lived passionately there, in bright colours and with intense emotions.

GRAPHIC IMAGE: Naples itself is contardditions. Naples is lights and shadows, it’s the splendor of the Baroque and the clothes hanged out to dry. Naples is full and empty. It’s full in the outside (full of cars, of people, of voices, of noise...) and completely hollow, empty in the inside, in its subsoil. Naples is its volcano, which takes and gives alternatively. It’s sacred and profane, it’s passion and blood. Naples is music, it’s the sound of dialect in which the words remain suspended as they’re cut in their last letters. Naples is food and wine, abundance and lack. Naples is “too much”.
The graphic image plays with all these contrasts. It matches bright colours (red of the volcano, light blue and blue of the Mediterranean Sea) with traditional, vintage images. The uncompleted and rigid design of lettering (with letters cut in their shapes) matches with curved "spaghetti" shapes (a remind to the hanging clothes you can easily spot in Naples "vicoli"). While the shape of the lettering pays a homage to those of Mount Vesuvio (a well-known symbol of the City) and to Neapolitean dialect (in which words sound musically cut in their final letters), the whole design has been deeply inspired by the real essence of Naples, charming and disturbing at the same time.

“I exist only because inside of me and above all else I am only and above all a Neapolitan. Naples exists inside of me, and always will. Fortunately for me there is this treasure that I have inside of me and, when I need it, then I pull it out.” (Sophia Loren)

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