Destination Purgatory
Along the ancient road of the Tribunali, in Naples, is the church of Santa Maria delle Anime del Purgatorio ad Arco. The visit to the monument is an immersion in Baroque art, including works of Massimo Stanzione, Luca Giordano, Andrea Vaccaro, Dioniso Lazzari.
Going downstairs, however, you can access the “Purgatory”: a large unadorned church where the baroque excess disappears and gives way to a conceptual dimension. Every detail, down there, reminds of the aesthetics and poetics of Christian Boltanski, particularly the works in which the French artist prepares environments of extreme formal elegance, uses the notion of “lost time” and the category of “memory” through photographs from common family albums, pictures of dead people, objects and evocative phrases.
In the lower church, a cult intimately linked to the notions of “memory” and “lost time” was also born. It is the cult of the “Anime pezzentelle”, or anonymous human remains (skulls and bones found in mass graves) as adopted by the people and re-interpreted by the faithful as intermediaries for their special prayers. Only a few people can freely access to this purgatory, those who, by virtue of special biographical merits, obtained by the priests the “piece of the faithful”: they are the guardians of the “Anime pezzentelle”, which bear flowers and other gifts.
The public, however, can visit the underground at fixed times, accompanied by a guardian. Since May 2011, the underground houses a sculpture by contemporary artist Aniello Scotto, the title is “Can you eat poison and give birth to death.”
July 26, 2015