Galleria Umberto I

Interesting facts

In 1896 Mario Recanati opened Naples' first cinema inside the gallery, screening films by the Lumière brothers.

For more than half a century shoeshine boys, the famous sciuscià, worked under the dome; the last veteran of the trade died in 2018.

The gallery was named after Umberto I partly to honour the king's presence in Naples during the cholera epidemic of 1884.

The neighbourhood it replaced had suffered nine cholera epidemics between 1835 and 1884, which drove the decision to tear it down.

Demolition of the old tenements began on 1 May 1887, barely six months before the foundation stone was laid.

Each of the four buildings around the cross has five floors: shops and cafés on the lower two, offices, homes and hotels above.

The Salone Margherita beneath the gallery drew writers such as Gabriele D'Annunzio, Matilde Serao and Edoardo Scarfoglio in its Belle Époque heyday.

John Horne Burns drew The Gallery from his own time as a US soldier in Naples after the city's liberation in 1943.

A museum of coral, a craft long tied to the Bay of Naples, occupies the second floor of the gallery.

Why it is worth it

The Galleria Umberto I is Naples's answer to Milan's great arcade: a cross-shaped street of shops and cafés roofed in iron and glass, standing directly opposite the Teatro di San Carlo and opening onto Via Toledo. It was built between 1887 and 1890 — the foundation stone was laid on 5 November 1887 and the gallery was inaugurated on 19 November 1890 — and named after King Umberto I. Its design was led by the engineer Emanuele Rocco, with Antonio Curri and Ernesto di Mauro following him on the project, while the iron-and-glass vault was the work of Paolo Boubée.

The building belongs to the Risanamento, the vast rebuilding of central Naples that followed the cholera epidemic of 1884. The site had been occupied by six-storey tenements in poor repair, with bad sanitation and taverns of dubious reputation; the new gallery was meant to replace them with light, air and a modern mix of shops, cafés and social life, with apartments on the upper floor. The style is the eclectic "Umbertino" of the young Italian kingdom, richly ornamented and self-confident.

Inside, the scale is what strikes first. The arms of the cross are about 15 metres wide and up to 147 metres long, and the glass dome over the crossing, held by sixteen metal ribs, rises to 57 metres. Eight copper female figures in the pendentives carry lamps. The marble floor at the centre shows the signs of the zodiac and the winds, a mosaic laid in 1952 by the Venetian firm Padoan to replace the original pavement, worn by traffic and ruined, like the glass roof, by wartime bombing. On the main front facing the San Carlo, allegorical statues of the seasons, the continents, commerce and industry, the telegraph and steam crowd the façade, a catalogue of what the nineteenth century admired in itself. Below ground, the Salone Margherita was for two decades the heart of Neapolitan café-chantant nightlife.

The gallery is part of the historic centre of Naples, inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, and it has a place in literature: the American writer John Horne Burns set his novel The Gallery (1947) among the people who passed beneath its dome. Come for the view straight up into the dome, and for the moment of stepping out of it to face the portico of the San Carlo opera house.

Getting there

The Galleria Umberto I is in central Naples, in the San Ferdinando quarter, with entrances on Via Toledo, Via San Carlo, Via Giuseppe Verdi and Via Santa Brigida. Naples International Airport (NAP) is about 6 km away. The nearest metro stop is Municipio, on Lines 1 and 6. The gallery is a public passage.

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From the encyclopaedia

Galleria Umberto I is a public shopping gallery in Naples, southern Italy. It is located directly across from the San Carlo opera house. It was built between 1887 and 1890, and was the cornerstone in the decades-long rebuilding of Naples—called the risanamento —that lasted until World War I. With a dome 57m high at the tip of its spire, it was designed in the Stile Umbertino by Emanuele Rocco who employed modern architectural elements reminiscent of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan. The Galleria was named after Umberto I, King of Italy at the time of construction. It was meant to combine businesses, shops, cafés and social life—public space—with private space in the apartments on the third floor.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia