Why go
Teatro di San Carlo shows the importance of performance in the royal city, while Capodimonte porcelain traces a craft encouraged by Charles of Bourbon. The Accademia di Belle Arti and the School of Posillipo point to a different, nineteenth-century artistic Naples. These are useful threads when choosing among the city's many collections.
The full story
Naples's churches, castles and palaces were built and changed across medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods. The city's artistic life did not end with those monuments. In the eighteenth century, excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum helped fuel interest in the ancient world and neoclassical forms. Charles of Bourbon founded the Royal Factory of Capodimonte in 1743; porcelain from that tradition can be seen in the Capodimonte collection. He also founded the drawing academy that became the Accademia di Belle Arti. In the nineteenth century, the School of Posillipo developed a landscape-painting tradition, and works by artists active in Naples entered the academy's collection. Teatro di San Carlo, dating from the eighteenth century, adds another strand: this was a city where royal patronage supported performance as well as visual art. A focused museum visit can make those links clearer than a rapid sequence of church façades.