Palazzo Mannajuolo

This guide to Palazzo Mannajuolo in Naples starts with a nine-night booking on Christmas night 1931, when Eduardo De Filippo brought a new play about a nagging father and a nativity scene to the ground-floor theatre here. It steps back to engineer Giuseppe Mannajuolo and architect Giulio Ulisse Arata, who raised the building between 1909 and 1911 using cheap, fast reinforced concrete instead of carved stone. The savings paid for the ellipsoidal marble and wrought-iron staircase that still coils up from the entrance, past shops stacked two levels deep along the street.