Rione Sanità: the narrative belly of contemporary Naples

Sanità has inspired and permeated literature in different but always intense ways. In its narrow streets, in its crumbling noble palaces, in its crowded bassi, writers have found:

• the natural theatre of urban realism, which doesn’t beautify but reveals
• the mystery of a city that coexists with its dead — and celebrates them
• the narrative power of the people, with their dialect, rules, and codes

Authors like Erri De Luca have evoked Sanità as a space of resistance and secular sacredness. Elena Ferrante, though not always naming it directly, has absorbed its essence in her portrayals of working-class neighbourhoods under pressure.
Others have made the rione their full stage: playwrights, journalists, poets writing from the heart and for the heart.

The literature that comes out of Sanità is oral, collective, visual. It consists of handed-down tales, lived lives without filters, language that cuts and caresses.
It’s a writing embodied in the urban fabric: in the laundry lines, the children playing in the street, the sounds rising from the courtyards.
In recent years, the neighbourhood has become not only inspiration, but protagonist — narrated by those who live there, who work there, who choose to stay and transform it, even through words.

To write about Sanità today means writing about a changing Naples, a city looking at itself in the mirror, rewriting its identity.
It is one of the few places where literary language meets civic language, where storytelling becomes action, and narrative intertwines with activism.
The rione is not just a literary object: it’s a forge of new narratives, often unheard, often uncomfortable, but necessary.
In every word that describes it, there is a fragment of truth, and in every truth, a challenge — for the reader, and for those who live it.

Works and voices that have narrated the rione

• “Il giorno prima della felicità” – Erri De Luca
  In this novel, Naples is made of underground secrets, catacombs, and silences. The orphaned protagonist grows up in a context that strongly echoes Sanità — a place marked by resistance, memory, and shared solitude. The catacombs become a metaphor for survival and identity.

   

• “My Brilliant Friend” – Elena Ferrante
  Though the neighbourhood Ferrante describes is never explicitly named as Sanità, the emotional and social landscape of the rione clearly resonates: large families, vibrant dialect, street hierarchies, hidden violence, and culture as a means of escape. The duality of marginality and ambition is strongly present.

   

• Roberto Saviano – Journalistic and narrative accounts
  In both his journalism and fiction, Saviano frequently touches on Sanità as a nerve centre of urban contradictions, alternating between civic anger and narrative fascination. The neighbourhood is seen as a crossroads of criminality and popular resilience.

   

• Nuovo Teatro Sanità – Original stage productions
  More than on the page, in recent years Sanità’s narrative has taken shape on stage: texts born in the street, written and performed by young local actors, telling reality with a voice that is direct, brave, and contemporary.

   

• Emerging Neapolitan writers
  More and more local authors are choosing Sanità as an ethical and narrative setting for stories about adolescence, redemption, family, and popular spirituality. Among them: Valeria Parrella, Pino Imperatore, Peppe Fiore.

This is just a glimpse into the narrative power of Rione Sanità — a neighbourhood that never stops generating stories, for those who read them and for those who are still writing them.