Anyone visiting Naples soon discovers that this city has for centuries existed on the fine line between reality, theatre, deception and wonder. It is not merely a city of mysteries, legends and esotericism: for centuries, it has also been an extraordinary ‘capital of the fake’. An ambiguous distinction, certainly, but one that speaks volumes about Neapolitan ingenuity, its irony and its ability to continually reinvent itself.
Until a few years ago, strolling through the narrow streets of the historic centre, it was easy to come across stalls overflowing with counterfeit bags, shoes and clothes. A phenomenon that had made Naples famous throughout the world. Today, paradoxically, part of that craftsmanship has been ‘reabsorbed’ by the legitimate economy: many fashion and luxury brands have in fact chosen to entrust their manufacturing and assembly to workshops in the Naples area, recognising the quality of their workmanship.
But the tradition of counterfeiting in Naples is much older. As early as the Middle Ages, tales circulated of skilled forgers operating in the Kingdom of Naples. The chronicles even mention a workshop, probably run by an Armenian craftsman, famous throughout Europe for producing ‘perfectly authentic’ wills, parchments and notarial deeds. In a cosmopolitan and chaotic city like Naples, the line between original and imitation has always been surprisingly blurred.
The real boom in ‘Neapolitan forgeries’, however, came in the 18th century, following the archaeological discoveries at the Herculaneum Excavations and the Pompeii Archaeological Park. The whole of Europe was swept up in the Grand Tour craze, and thousands of foreign travellers arrived in Naples eager to buy ancient artefacts to take home as cultural souvenirs.
It was then that a veritable industry of archaeological forgeries emerged. Statues, Roman coins, frescoes, oil lamps and small artefacts were artificially aged and sold as authentic antiquities. According to some theories, even the famous archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann is said to have purchased in Naples some of the artefacts later attributed to the mythical Troy, including the famous ‘Treasury of Priam’. A legend? Perhaps. But perfectly consistent with the city’s ambiguous and theatrical atmosphere.
At this point, I would like to share a brief personal experience. For years I have been dealing with fake news and online disinformation, particularly that disseminated by seemingly authoritative sources. It was precisely this passion that led me to visit various museums dedicated to forgery and deception, including the Museum of Forgery and Deception in Verrone, the sadly defunct Museum of Forgery at the University of Salerno and the Fälschermuseum in Vienna. A friend and I even thought of setting up something similar in Naples.
Word spread quickly and I was contacted by a man who claimed to possess an extremely rare 19th-century counterfeit Roman coin. For a few hundred euros, he was willing to sell it to me along with a photocopy of an article published, he claimed, in 1881 by the daily newspaper ‘Il Roma’. The article told the story of two German tourists who had been swindled in Naples after buying a coin bearing the absurd inscription ‘XV n.a.C.’, meaning ‘fifteen years before Christ’: an impossible date, as it referred to an event that had not yet taken place.
The story was so absurd that it became irresistible. I spent whole days in the newspaper archive leafing through old copies of the paper without finding any trace of the article. At that point I realised the masterstroke: they weren’t selling me a fake ancient coin, but a fake of a fake passed off as genuine. A deception within a deception, perfectly Neapolitan.
And perhaps this is precisely the secret of Naples: a city where the boundary between truth and representation is never clear-cut, but becomes storytelling, irony and spectacle. A city that, for centuries, has transformed even the fake into art.
