¡Nápoles millonaria!

The great Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben says that Neapolitans are experts on holding broken things together; on keeping a broken family, neighbourhood, community, country, or continent together. Eduardo de Filippo tells us about this and more in a work written and premiered at the end of World War II.

Naples, 1942: a city like so many others where there is also a war underway between dignity and destitution. Under such harsh survival conditions, who can resist the arguments of material and moral bankruptcy? How is it possible to sustain and endure a life continually threatened by fascism, bombings, hunger, poverty, sickness, and a lack of the most basic goods? And all of this at a time of desperate vitality and love of life, within the tragedy inherent in living in times of war, of war’s aftermath, of epidemics. This is an exaltation of play, poetry, and humour; of the personal ethics personified by Gennaro/Eduardo. As all great comics have known, a lack of material things is the script for true comedy.

Strehler, another great, said in a posthumous tribute that Eduardo's work pays homage to the exemplary nature of simple, ordinary people who, through their actions, illustrate the way to good democratic traditions.
Antonio Simón

¡Nápoles millonaria! [Napoli Milionaria!] is one of Eduardo de Filippo’s finest creations and a landmark in 20th century European dramaturgy. It is a work about the need to recover human values. It talks about very specific things –World War II, the city of Naples and the working-class Iovine family – but everything that happens is timeless and universal. Any war is a period of darkness. We only think about survival, about ourselves and our own aims. Other people don’t count. When this happens, we have to stop, reflect, search our conscience and try to start over and patch up mistakes and wounds. “Wait until morning” are the famous closing words of the work. For Eduardo, the only salvation for human beings is “doing good.” We are all in the same boat and, sooner or later – no one knows when – we will need help from someone. In the end, in his comedies and tragedies, Eduardo remains a secular humanist. He looks for forgiveness, hope and light in the midst of darkness... He seeks redemption and peace, because, as he so aptly puts it: “The war is not over”.
Juan Asperilla