Exporting Naples

The city of Naples exerted a remarkable cultural hegemony in the surrounding areas during the nineteenth century, and increasingly extended its influence beyond the border, favoured by the massive migratory wave towards the Americas. Around the middle of the nineteenth century the city turned out to be the centre of a blossoming vernacular music genre which sparked interest in many parts of the world where it soon became a staple of the salon music scene. This paper intends to map the spread of the early Neapolitan songbook abroad into two phases, pioneered by the mandolin craze and the tarantella vogue: at first it was assimilated as a middle-class product valued by conservatory-trained composers; then it produced another kind of hybridisation favoured by migration and the “distance effect” tied to Naples. With the advent of recording, the fame of Neapolitan song reached its peak in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania. Increasingly shaped as a glocal product, Neapolitan song worked as a “brand” paving the way to the notion of “Made in Italy” and ultimately provides a major case study in the interdisciplinary field of transcultural studies.