“…from 1850 onwards, landscape painting will only be that of cheap stencils, reproducedcountless times, of low technical quality and vulgarly coloured, or of daguerreotypes or, finally,that of the postcards produced after the advent of photography...", Lucio Fino, View painting in Naples in graphics from the 17th to the 19th century, 1989. If the Grand Tour of the 18th century was in fact aimed at the cultured aristocrat and the early nineteenth century at the smallbourgeois in search of escape, the second half of the century is marked by an increasingly serial increase in mass tourism, as can be seen from the various magazines and city guides of the time, marked by the criterion of cheapness and massification in the iconographic transition from engraving to lithography and finally to photography. Which does not always mean qualitative decadence,indeed!Just think of the evocative, sometimes refined, iconographic apparatus of national and local magazines or city guides who, starting from the mid-19th century, used woodcut on end wood, thealready tested lithography, photoengraving, and then move to photography in the early 1900s,practically re-proposing a series of stereotyped views of the city." (Nunzia Iannone, NAPLES BETWEEN ENGRAVING AND PHOTOGRAPHY(1850-1930), University of Naples Federico II,< /span> on line.)
Of this Naples which opens up to the general public and which builds its modern myth as a romantic and modern city, these photo albums are a pure authentic, original and fascinating testimony.