Ascarelli. Una storia italiana

For some fifty years, those spanning the end of the nineteenth century and the years before the racist turn of the twentieth, the Ascarellis embodied the best and most efficient image of Naples. In the city of Vesuvius, where they lived and where their children and grandchildren were born, their surname (to which, over time, those of the Del Monte and Foà families would be joined) came to be combined with a great many words: work, sport, culture, religion, politics, art, genius and, above all, patronage. Their rise in the world of trade and industry coincided with the years of the so-called “Neapolitan Renaissance”, when a flourishing of sound business activity gave Campania a glimpse of the chance to free itself from the economic subordination into which it had sunk even before the Bourbons left the scene. Understanding why, in the space of just a few decades, oblivion enveloped and swept away the story of this family of Jewish entrepreneurs, whose vision of the world and of things went far beyond the boundaries of the time in which they lived, is just one of the many mysteries that continue to form the backdrop to a Naples of too many, often unjustified, contradictions, and of equally ungenerous stereotypes and prejudices