The story of the Baroque as a passion for life and as a passion for art. It is an event that involves the city of Naples and its environs in a dense programme of exhibitions in six of the city’s museums and numerous other initiatives that encompass art, architecture, music and theatre.

Back to Baroque documents the progress made by scholars over the past thirty years since the three great exhibitions staged by the Superintendency between 1979 and 1984, examining aspects, events and genres that characterized the artistic culture of Naples from Caravaggio´s arrival there in 1606 to the activities of Luigi Vanvitelli and Ferdinando Fuga (1750) and Charles III’s departure for Spain.

Back to Baroque is intended ti focus attention on the many deeply rooted attitudes and practices that characterized Naples in the Baroque era, with consequences that reverberated through the years that followed and up until recent times. Ever since the early seventeenth century, the city was riven by the constant contrasts of vice and virtue, poverty and excess, criminality and nobility. Naples was experienced and perceived as a vast stage where the human condition was played out, a ″great theatre of the world″ where natura e artificio, history and legend, reality and fantasy were inextricably entwined, where the stars and the supporting players switched roles and intermingled in situations both common and strange, oscillating between joy and tragedy, between fanciful frivolity and profound reflection.

The Baroque thus becomes both a metaphor and a concrete manifestation of the condition of Naples and Neapolitans, old and new, past and present, passion and fear, hope and disappointment, just as it appeared to the countless Italian and foreign visitors who travelled there between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries.