Rione Sanità

This guide to Rione Sanità in Naples opens with a question: why build a bridge that connects everything above a neighborhood while abandoning everything below it? In 1806, French rulers of Naples ordered a shortcut slung on seven stone arches across the Sanità valley to reach the royal palace at Capodimonte, tearing through a church's cloisters to plant the pillars. The new road worked perfectly, and that was the problem: cut off from the traffic that had fed it for centuries, the neighborhood turned inward into poverty and crime. In September 1943, retreating German forces packed the bridge with explosives to sever the road north. Listen for whose name the arches carry today.