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The stage of the SSC Napoli

Napoli's Diego Armando Maradona (ex San Paolo) Stadium, inaugurated in 1959, is the third largest in Italy, after Milan's Meazza Stadium and Rome's Olimpico. Situated in the Fuorigrotta neighbourhood, it measures 110 by 68 meters. It was remodelled for the 1980 European Championship and again for the World Cup hosted by Italy in 1990, when a covering and a new 330-seat press stand were installed, the track and lighting systems were redone and the stadium was brought up to FIFA safety standards. With an 8-lane track, three sports gyms, a boxing gym, a fitness gym and a wrestling and martial arts gym, Diego Armando Maradona Stadium has become Naples' major sports centre.

The sectors of the Diego Armando Maradona Stadium

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Napoli's Diego Armando Maradona (ex San Paolo) Stadium, inaugurated in 1959, is the third largest in Italy, after Milan's Meazza Stadium and Rome's Olimpico. Situated in the Fuorigrotta neighbourhood, it measures 110 by 68 meters.

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Mount Vesuvius, a volcano near the Bay of Naples in Italy, has erupted more than 50 times. Its most famous eruption took place in the year 79 A.D., when the volcano buried the ancient Roman city of Pompeii under a thick carpet of volcanic ash. The dust "poured across the land" like a flood, one witness wrote, and shrouded the city in "a darkness...like the black of closed and unlighted rooms." Two thousand people died, and the city was abandoned for almost as many years. When a group of explorers rediscovered the site in 1748, they were surprised to find that-underneath a thick layer of dust and debris-Pompeii was mostly intact. The buildings, artifacts and skeletons left behind in the buried city have taught us a great deal about everyday life in the ancient world.

Life in Pompeii

Greek settlers made the town part of the Hellenistic sphere in the 8th century B.C. An independently-minded town, Pompeii fell under the influence of Rome in the 2nd century B.C. and eventually the Bay of Naples became an attraction for wealthy vacationers from Rome who relished the Campania coastline.

By the turn of the first century A.D., the town of Pompeii, located about five miles from the mountain, was a flourishing resort for Rome's most distinguished citizens. Elegant houses and elaborate villas lined the paved streets. Tourists, townspeople and slaves bustled in and out of small factories and artisans' shops, taverns and cafes, and brothels and bathhouses. People gathered in the 20,000-seat arena and lounged in the open-air squares and marketplaces. On the eve of that fateful eruption in 79 A.D., scholars estimate that there were about 12,000 people living in Pompeii and almost as many in the surrounding region.

Did you know? Mount Vesuvius has not erupted since 1944, but it is still one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world. Experts believe that another catastrophic eruption is due any day-an almost unfathomable catastrophe, since almost 3 million people live within 20 miles of the volcano's crater.

Mount Vesuvius

The Vesuvius volcano did not form overnight, of course. Vesuvius volcano is part of the Campanian volcanic arc that stretches along the convergence of the African and Eurasian tectonic plates on the Italian peninsula and had been erupting for thousands of years. In about 1780 B.C., for example, an unusually violent eruption (known today as the "Avellino eruption") shot millions of tons of superheated lava, ash and rocks about 22 miles into the sky. That prehistoric catastrophe destroyed almost every village, house and farm within 15 miles of the mountain.

Villagers around the volcano had long learned to live with their volatile environment. Even after a massive earthquake struck the Campania region in 63 A.D.-a quake that, scientists now understand, offered a warning rumble of the disaster to come-people still flocked to the shores of the Bay of Naples. Pompeii grew more crowded every year.

79 A.D.

Sixteen years after that telltale earthquake, in either August or October 79 A.D. (more recent evidence suggests the eruption took place in October), Mount Vesuvius erupted again. The blast sent a plume of ashes, pumice and other rocks, and scorching-hot volcanic gases so high into the sky that people could see it for hundreds of miles around. (The writer Pliny the Younger, who watched the eruption from across the bay, compared this "cloud of unusual size and appearance" to a pine tree that "rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches"; today, geologists refer to this type of volcano as a "Plinean eruption.")

As it cooled, this tower of debris drifted to earth: first the fine-grained ash, then the lightweight chunks of pumice and other rocks. It was terrifying-"I believed I was perishing with the world," Pliny wrote, "and the world with me"-but not yet lethal: Most Pompeiians had plenty of time to flee.

For those who stayed behind, however, conditions soon grew worse. As more and more ash fell, it clogged the air, making it difficult to breathe. Buildings collapsed. Then, a "pyroclastic surge"-a 100-miles-per-hour surge of superheated poison gas and pulverized rock-poured down the side of the mountain and swallowed everything and everyone in its path.

By the time the Vesuvius eruption sputtered to an end the next day, Pompeii was buried under millions of tons of volcanic ash. About 2,000 Pompeiians were dead, but the eruption killed as many as 16,000 people overall. Some people drifted back to town in search of lost relatives or belongings, but there was not much left to find. Pompeii, along with the neighboring town of Herculaneum and a number of villas in the area, was abandoned for centuries.

Rediscovering Pompeii

Pompeii remained mostly untouched until 1748, when a group of explorers looking for ancient artifacts arrived in Campania and began to dig. They found that the ashes had acted as a marvelous preservative: Underneath all that dust, Pompeii was almost exactly as it had been almost 2,000 years before. Its buildings were intact. Skeletons were frozen right where they'd fallen. Everyday objects and household goods littered the streets. Later archaeologists even uncovered jars of preserved fruit and loaves of bread!

Many scholars say that the excavation of Pompeii played a major role in the neo-Classical revival of the 18th century. Europe's wealthiest and most fashionable families displayed art and reproductions of objects from the ruins, and drawings of Pompeii's buildings helped shape the architectural trends of the era. For example, wealthy British families often built "Etruscan rooms" that mimicked those in Pompeiian villas.

Today, the excavation of Pompeii has been going on for almost three centuries, and scholars and tourists remain just as fascinated by the city's eerie ruins as they were in the 18th century.
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Mount Vesuvius, a volcano near the Bay of Naples in Italy, has erupted more than 50 times. Its most famous eruption took place in the year 79 A.D., when the volcano buried the ancient Roman city of Pompeii under a thick carpet of volcanic ash.

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A Day in Pompeii - Full-length animation

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Il Madre · museo d'arte contemporanea Donnaregina si trova nel cuore storico di Napoli, sulla "via dei Musei", a pochi metri dal Duomo, dal Museo Archeologico Nazionale e dall'Accademia di Belle Arti, lì dove si sviluppa l'antico quartiere di San Lorenzo.

Il museo trae il proprio nome dall'edificio che lo ospita, il Palazzo Donnaregina, che come tutta l'area in cui sorge deve la denominazione al Monastero di S. Maria Donnaregina, fondato dagli Svevi (XIII secolo) e poi ampliato e ricostruito nel 1325 dalla Regina Maria d'Ungheria, moglie di Carlo II d'Angiò. Dell'antico complesso conventuale rimangono oggi solo la chiesa omonima, che si affaccia su piazza Donnaregina, costruita in epoca barocca, e la chiesa trecentesca di Donnaregina "vecchia", in stile gotico, che ha ospitato mostre ed eventi speciali organizzati dal Madre.

Risalente al XIX secolo, l'edificio è uno splendido esempio di stratificazione storica, tipica di tutto il centro antico di Napoli. Originariamente il corpo di fabbrica del palazzo occupava quasi interamente una delle insulae prodotte dall'intersezione di cardi e decumani dell'impianto viario greco-romano. A metà dell'Ottocento l'edificio è stato acquistato dal Banco di Napoli che lo trasformò per adibirlo a sede del Banco dei Pegni. Tra il 1845 e il 1872 l'edificio venne ampliato con l'aggiunta di due ali, e la sistemazione della parte frontale su via Settembrini, dove venne posto l'accesso principale con la creazione dell'androne e dei due blocchi scala. Dopo l'aggiunta di un volume edilizio in cemento armato nei primi anni del '900, nel secondo dopoguerra il palazzo ha subito notevoli alterazioni architettoniche, cui si sono aggiunte, dopo il sisma del 1980, alcuni interventi di rinforzo strutturale. Negli anni '80 l'edificio fu ceduto in locazione al Provveditorato agli Studi di Napoli per poi tornare al Banco di Napoli come Magazzino stampati. In seguito ai gravi danni e dissesti statici provocati dall'alluvione del 2001 l'immobile venne abbandonato.

Acquistato nel 2005 dalla Regione Campania per destinarlo a museo per l'arte contemporanea, ne è stata concessa la disponibilità alla Fondazione Donnaregina a titolo di comodato d'uso gratuito e di servizio. Il palazzo è stato perciò restaurato e adibito a museo su progetto dell'architetto portoghese Álvaro Siza Vieira, Leone d'oro alla carriera 2012; con la collaborazione dello dallo Studio DAZ-Dumontet Antonini Zaske architetti associati di Napoli, oltre alla parte prettamente espositiva, sono stati realizzati una biblioteca, una mediateca, un'area bookshop-caffetteria, per un totale di 7.200 mq, di cui 2662 sono destinati ai diversi livelli di esposizione.

Il 10 giugno 2005 il museo Madre ha inaugurato i suoi spazi con l'apertura degli allestimenti site-specific nelle sale del primo piano; tra il 2005 ed il 2006 l'intero edificio è stato completato, con l'apertura al pubblico delle sale del secondo piano, che ospita parte della collezione, e quelle del terzo piano destinate alle esposizioni temporanee.

Il Madre è il testimone di una storia che ha reso la Campania un crocevia di tutte le arti contemporanee, rivolto a studiare e documentare il passato attraverso la sensibilità e i linguaggi contemporanei, e quindi in grado di agire nel presente e delineare il futuro.

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Il Madre · museo d'arte contemporanea Donnaregina si trova nel cuore storico di Napoli, sulla "via dei Musei", a pochi metri dal Duomo, dal Museo Archeologico Nazionale e dall'Accademia di Belle Arti, lì dove si sviluppa l'antico quartiere di San Lorenzo.

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by Tessitore Armando

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by Huang Luisa

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By Valerio Cimmino