Naples: the City of the Sun and Parthenope

This essay reveals the innermost secret of the city of Naples through an archaeoastronomical investigation of the religious and philosophical motivations behind the founding of its ancient Greek centre, Neapolis, built in the 6th-5th centuries BC by Cumaeans and other Greek colonists. Neapolis seems to have been designed in such a way as to recall, in the geometry of its streets and in its peculiar geographical-astronomical orientation during the solstices and equinoxes, the cult of Apollo (the Sun god of the Greeks) and Parthenope (the tutelary numen to whom the city was dedicated and who recalls the mythical Cumaean Sibyl). The plan of the ancient Greek city appears inspired by Pythagorean cosmology in that it can be schematised with the harmonic proportions of the golden section and the number ten, numbers that symbolised the "cosmos". Neapolis was therefore conceived as a microcosm, or rather, as a city-temple, with the divine sun at its centre, worthy home of the oracular priestess Parthenope. The decumans and the cardines of the historic centre, the Neapolitan culture, the churches and the cathedral of Naples still preserve the memory of the entire solar tradition of Neapolis in their geometries, symbols, chants, sweets, mosaics and relics. (125 Coloured Figures. FedOA – Federico II University Press, Naples; Cavoliniana: monographs of the Society of Naturalists in Naples. Nicola Scafetta, professor at the University of Naples Federico II, is an expert in Physics of Complex Systems and Sun-Earth interactions. Foreword by Federico Rausa, professor of Classical Archeology at the University of Naples Federico II. Editorial patronage of the Society of Naturalists in Naples.)