Christmastime in Naples: Jesus, Mary and Ronaldo

Even today, Maradona is nobly featured in nearly every presepe shop on the street

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Rio's Christ the Redeemer statue is lit up with Hungary's national colors in Rio de Janeiro, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the coronation of Hungary's last king, Charles IV, the last ruler of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

Andrew Keh | NYT

Last Updated : Dec 22 2018 | 1:07 AM IST

Up and down this cramped pedestrian street there are little clay statues of Cristiano Ronaldo, unmistakable in their form: legs spread shoulder-width apart, arms shooting at the ground, hair gelled into a luscious wave.

There are also fat Ronaldos; weirdly skinny Ronaldos; Ronaldos with faces that resemble “The Scream”, by Edvard Munch; and many, many other Ronaldos that, in general, look very little like the actual Ronaldo.

Together, the diminutive Ronaldos represent an ever-growing segment of the colorful Christmastime panoply on Via San Gregorio Armeno, a historical street in the heart of Naples, Italy, that has been known since the 1800s as a spiritual home of artisans specialising in traditional nativity scenes, or presepi.

Many consider the traditional figurines from these Neapolitan workshops — intricate models of biblical figures crafted from wood, clay, wire and fine cloth — to be refined works of art. Yet casual visitors to the street these days might be more likely to encounter the clay statuettes of celebrities and pop culture figures that now dominate the famous street’s storefronts and curbside tables.

And in a soccer-crazy city like Naples, it is natural that soccer players, and the clay representations of them, have begun to receive top billing.

“It’s hard to explain, but it’s like a visceral faith,” Marco Ferrigno, a fourth-generation artisan who owns one of the most famous workshops on the street, said of the city’s soccer obsession. “So players can become idols — to the extreme, sometimes.” Alongside all the baby Jesuses and the different Ronaldos, then, holiday shoppers can find handcrafted figurines of Francesco Totti taking a selfie, Kylian Mbappé with his arms folded across his chest, Lionel Messi pointing two hands to the sky and almost every current member of Napoli, the beloved local team.

The statues can reference recent games, major accomplishments, trademark gestures or humorous incidents. The transfer market and league standings can dictate stores’ inventory. Artisans can glorify players or antagonise them.

The sidewalk stalls feature enough soccer players to populate a statuette World Cup, and the street, in turn, has developed a divided identity: part sacred museum, part tourist trap, part art gallery, part miniature Madame Tussauds.

“The market demanded it,” Isabella Esposito, 54, whose family has owned a store on the street since 1950, said of the dense display of soccer player sculptures in front of her store.

It was not always this way. Nativity scenes became prominent in Naples in the late 1700s as an art form besides painting that the city’s nobility could patronise. Over the next century, the city’s presepi took on a distinct style: dense, ornate and full of life, situating religious figures like the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus on Neapolitan streetscapes alongside other generically pastoral characters, like pizza makers.

According to Marino Niola, an anthropologist at the Suor Orsola Benincasa University of Naples who wrote a book in 2005 called “Il Presepe,” the nativity scene tradition experienced a dip in popularity after World War II. Niola said it was no coincidence then that the nativity scene — which he called “a ritualistic toy to play a metaphysical game” — started making a comeback in the mid-1990s, once artisans on Via San Gregorio Armeno began introducing pop culture figures to their inventory of statuettes.

In the beginning, of course, there was Diego Maradona.

In 1987, the Argentine superstar led Napoli to its first Italian league title — an event locals jokingly compare these days to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. And a couple of years later, Maradona became the first soccer player to appear in the city’s nativity scene shops. (A national political scandal in 1992 known as Mani Pulite was another early muse for the city’s nativity scene artisans.)

Even today, Maradona is nobly featured in nearly every presepe shop on the street, always with flowing hair, always with short shorts.

“He was an idol, and becoming a figure in the nativity scene was a form of sanctification,” Niola said of Maradona.

Not everyone has enjoyed the developments in the industry. Vincenzo Nicolella, artistic director of the Neapolitan Association of the Presepe, said he was concerned that the universe of acceptable nativity scene characters was expanding too rapidly. Since the 1990s, traditional shops have prominently featured figurines of politicians, actors, singers and even, more recently, Instagram influencers alongside the soccer stars. Traditional nativity scene figures, meanwhile, are often relegated indoors and out of plain sight. Nicolella grew particularly agitated last year when he noticed Star Wars characters sold in the shops.

“An intervention is necessary to say, ‘Hold on, please keep your hands off the presepe,’” he said. “We cannot forget that we are speaking of a high quality artistic tradition.”