Fernando Fuga and the Albergo dei Poveri

While Vanvitelli developed the worldly Caserta, to Ferdinando Fuga
fell a more mundane but no less instrumental element of Bourbon
rule: the Albergo dei Poveri in Naples. Born a Florentine, Fuga came
to Rome to study at the Accademia di San Luca. He had proposed a
project for the Lateran facade as early as 1722 and participated in the
Trevi competition as well. His fortunes brightened when the
Florentine pope Clement XII made him architect of the papal
palaces.

Fuga enlarged the Corsini properties along Via della Lungara,
and for the papal summer palace at the Quirinal he extended the Via
Pia wing to an indeterminate length with what is called simply the
long sleeve,“La Manica Lunga.” He finished the stables at the
Quirinal, built a prison at San Michele a Ripa, extended the hospital
of Santo Spirito and designed its cemetery.The Palazzo della
Consulta, 1732–37, a multipurpose building opposite the Quirinal
Palace, is his most representative work, combining a carefully
coordinated plan behind a lively polychrome facade.
The pope’s big spending throughout the papal states was
understood as an opportunity to revive a slumped economy.
Monumental facades for unfinished churches, public fountains,
administrative offices, hospitals, even land reclamation and port
reconstruction were the signs of papal magnanimity, magnificienza,
well-balanced schemes for social well-being. A rich intellectual
climate, drawing in Clement’s case from Tuscan circles, sustained this
development. For example, Lione Pascoli, the pope’s economist,
developed a utilitarian understanding of architectural programs as
efficacious instruments of social policy.There was in Pascoli’s notion
little concern for style or form beyond clearly ordered space and
structure. Corsini’s enlightened circle advanced an erudite return to
the order of Renaissance and classical topoi and a rationalization in
all ways of thought.

Fuga, like Alessandro Galilei and Nicola Salvi,
propelled these values as architectural principles in his work.
Under Clement’s successor, Benedict XIV, Fuga’s career did not
falter. Indeed, the full range of his talents was exercised, from the
most spirited light baroque splendor of the new arcaded facade for
Santa Maria Maggiore to a sober Doric-style pavilion for serving coffee in the Quirinal gardens.They called it with self-conscious
cosmopolitan airs a caffèaus.This addition to the garden provided the
pope with a casual location for encounters, for example, with King
Carlos III of Naples in 1744, for which the palace throne room
would have been unwantedly officious. Fuga’s accomplishments were
even more obvious than Luigi Vanvitelli’s for they demonstrated
capabilities of adaptation to a wide variety of circumstances and
program, to site and to patrons’ tastes while solving difficult functional
and representational problems with brilliance and economy. Already
in 1748, Carlos had hand-picked Fuga, at the height of his fame, for
a mammoth job in his building scheme for Naples.
Regium totius regni pauperum hospitalium, the royal hospice for all
the realm’s paupers, better known as the Albergo dei Poveri, was
not a second prize to Vanvitelli’s Reggia but an integral component
of Carlos’s social, political, and architectural vision that in fact may
predate the maturation of the ideas for Caserta.
The population of Naples had grown dramatically in the
eighteenth century, necessitating a reorganization of its antiquated
charitable institutions. In the first years of Carlos’s reign, the idea of
a large, single, specifically designed hospice for the poor and
orphaned, like Rome’s San Michele a Ripa, was guided by a clear
program for the moral and economic health of the capital.The
Neapolitan hospice was to have been the largest in Europe, planned
to accommodate and sustain, equip and reintegrate eight-thousand
souls at a time.The Albergo dei Poveri addresses both the aesthetics
of magnificence in civil architecture and the functionality of a
framework for social sustenance.
Because the project relied upon the growing technical
proficiency of economic planners and even medical experts, Fuga’s
job as architectural designer was enriched if complicated by the
opinions of many special consultants. As in the case of Luigi
Vanvitelli’s evident qualifications, Carlos needed above all decisive
project managers. Fuga was given power of executive decision on the
means of production, which did not put him in an easy relationship
to the local workmen.They took every opportunity to make the
Florentine architect’s work more difficult. Fuga often fled to Rome,
leaving the Albergo to young assistants. Although Fuga forged no school or theory of architecture, he left behind in Naples a modus
operandi of a high level of professionalism. Already in 1748, Fuga’s
project was ready to go. An enormous square, 276 by 268 meters, was
to be divided four-square by cross branches within, much like
Caserta, but larger. A church space was placed so that its dome might
rise from the facade plane for greater visibility. Not one but three
nave spaces were to be fit within the body of the wings—left, right,
and down the center. Fuga could have drawn from a plethora of
sources for his plan, but we should not underestimate the influence
that Carlos had upon this project “with compass in hand.” As the
royal vision of things directed Vanvitelli’s work, so too Fuga
considered Carlos’s basic archetype for magnificence.The four-square
configuration with dome and towers of Fuga’s first design proposal
recalls the same rigorous geometry and elemental components that
Carlos gave to the architects of all his projects, confirming the related
nature of his architectural endeavors.The original site designated to
accommodate such a mammoth construction was, however, too low
and swampy and was rejected for hygienic reasons.That it was close
to the military installations of the port was also a problem for reasons
of security, though it is unclear whether it would be the poor or the
port in danger.With the designation in 1751 of a new site along the
Via Foria, Fuga had to rework the plans.
Complications such as this frustrated Fuga, but nothing could
have been more of an aggravation to him than to have seen
Vanvitelli at this time invited to the more seductive and flattering
Caserta project. It was clear that Carlos was more interested in
Caserta after Vanvitelli’s private audiences at Portici, and Fuga
reacted bitterly.

Vanvitelli criticized the Albergo plans and perhaps,
by his authority, triggered further changes shouldered by Fuga. In
turn, Fuga tried to wrench the Caserta commission from Vanvitelli
by criticizing the impractical nature and lack of economy of the
designs.The rivals bragged to one another about their buildings,
exaggerating their comparative sizes.
In May 1751, plans for both the Reggia and the Albergo dei
Poveri were presented to the monarch,Vanvitelli in his first
encounter, Fuga already having re-adapted the building to the new
site on the slope beneath the Capodimonte lodge.

The higher site afforded the desired light, air, and requisite salubrity encouraged by
medical consultants.Water slews and aqueducts from the hill behind,
perhaps to have been linked to the Acquedotto Carolino, would
supply the site.The cornerstone was laid on 7 December 1751,
coinciding again with one of Vanvitelli’s preliminary design deadlines
for the Reggia at Caserta.
The new site for the Albergo, however, required a horizontal
reconfiguration of the plan on the slope along five aligned
courtyards.The longitudinal development of Fuga’s second plan more
closely resembles the Roman hospice at San Michele a Ripa on
which Fuga had worked.The resemblance moreover to Soufflot’s
recently completed Hôtel Dieu in Lyons is a particularly compelling
connection, even more since the great French architect was actually
in Naples during the gestation of the Albergo project and may have
been consulted for his expertise. Fuga’s new building, however, was
to be three times the size: 634 meters long, eight stories high, and
containing over 750,000 cubic meters of interior space. A single
central entrance on the Via Foria facade brings all beneath the
Regium totius inscription into a vestibule where, according to more
Latin inscriptions, men and boys are directed to the left, women and
girls to the right.This immediate and irrevocable division by gender,
akin to the front and back apartments for the king and queen at
Caserta, is emphatically, graciously, and more obviously indicated to
the illiterate by the statuesque gestures of the images of King Carlos
and Queen Amalia to show the way. Routes through the building
maintain strict segregation of sexes and ages with special skip-floor
stair columns and interrupted corridors that carefully restrict
movement within. Fuga conceived the systematic circulation spaces
to eliminate all promiscuity in every sense. Paths of movement are
regulated in invariable schedules of eating and sleeping, working and
praying.There is within the Albergo dei Poveri a rigorous geometric
control of movement through space dissimilar only in quality to the
ritualized movement of the royal court through Vanvitelli’s equally
considered Caserta plan.
Segregation was only the first part of the Albergo’s program of
controlled movement. Once divided, the users were brought together
in the central symbolic space of a church. Experts on religious reform, such as the Neapolitan philosopher Ludovico Antonio
Muratori, expounded upon the efficacy of evangelical instruction in
combating indigence. Hence, at the heart of Fuga’s Albergo, the
central of the five courtyards was to be filled with a church with five
radiating naves, four on the diagonals with their separate entrances
on the corners of the courtyard for the four categories of inmate,
men, women, boys, and girls, the central nave for the public entering
from the front vestibule. Each space was focused upon the central
domed tribune area without affording views from the fenced-in
individual naves to the whole complex.The controlled visibility and
focus on the altar was a feature Fuga had also employed at his prison
in Rome. Here the fully radiating plan, a multiplication of his first
three-naved version, recalls models the architect could have brought
in, such as Michelangelo’s unexecuted although well-studied plan for
San Giovanni dei Fiorentini in Rome, and others that Carlos III and
Soufflot could have suggested.The structures of the naves closely
resemble the heavily buttressed Gothic vessel of the Church of Santa
Chiara in Naples, which Carlos was then having Fuga restore as a
royal funerary chapel.
From the Albergo’s sparse nave spaces, the inmates would be
encouraged to participate by visiting one of the confessionals built
between the wall’s buttresses. Special passageways through the walls
allowed the priests to access these confessionals, themselves not
mingling among the inconstant of soul. Bathrooms were
conveniently located nearby for the inconstant of body. As by then a
century of French development in the building types of confinement
had taught, the centralizing gaze assured patients of the presence of
providence, but the conscious surveillance of their peripheral
positions from the center would, according to Enlightenment
philosophy of mind and body, invest the individuals therein with a
responsible consciousness.They would become through prayer and
work agents of their own reform and reintegration to society.The
architectural design would guarantee it.
If the building’s plan fulfills the functional necessities of its social
goals, the facade addresses, within the limits of economy, the
aesthetics of civic architecture and magnificence.The facade was
originally to have been 101 bays long, longer than the Manica  Lunga, each of its five segments larger than the Palazzo Farnese in
Rome, and so sparse in its ornamentation as to bring to mind the
unadorned mass of the Palazzo Farnese in Parma, once young
Carlos’s ducal seat. Fuga employed the lowest, most economical
pilaster strips and trabeation lines to delineate wall cells and rhythm
for suggestions of central and terminal pavilions.The wall is stripped
down to its barest essentials.The triangular pediment that only
meekly ornaments the mighty face was added by later architects
who shied from Fuga’s severity.
The Albergo dei Poveri, even in the small fraction of the
building eventually completed, exercises an immense visual power
at its scale—larger than the eye can take in.The Albergo impresses
itself upon the city and the region not by any alignments that were
sacrificed at this site but merely by the scale of its conception.
Fuga’s achievement of sober grandiosity and equilibrated
articulations has made the most monumental effect from the most
parsimonious means.The true monumentality of the Albergo dei
Poveri is expressed in a perfect match of his form and its program.
Although largely incomplete, it is the most ambitious utopian
attempt of the Enlightenment.
After thirty years of fitful construction, it was clear that the
economic support of Ferdinando’s regency would not see the
building completed. “At less expense and in shorter time, one could
have eliminated all poverty in the abundant Realm of Naples. It’s a
continual refrain,” Milizia complained, “that with these Hospices one
does not eliminate the poor. But this is not the business of the
Architect but of good Government.” In 1764, a famine pressed the
building into partial service, and the central church space was never
built, nor were the workshops for the education of the inmates.The
program never rehabilitated or reintegrated anyone, and the Albergo
became known crudely as a reclusorio, jokingly as a seraglio, and
effectively as a prison for the poor. Fuga’s Albergo passed
immediately from a utopian vision to a grandiose ruin, inhabited by a
variegated society of squatters.The palace for the proletariat did not
ameliorate the situation in Naples as Milizia predicted but defined
with greater clarity the distance between it and the palace of the
privileged at Caserta. Architecture in both Carlos’s great building projects was employed judiciously as an instrument to stabilize and regulate
society. If Caserta is the last in the line of symbols of absolute rule,
the Albergo dei Poveri is the progenitor of architectural instruments
of social control in the centuries to follow.

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