Naples as Topography of Spaces In-between: Walter Benjamin and the Threshold between Old and New

The urban space is the privileged place to get to know the modern age with its euphoric constuctivism also with its destructive character. It is known that the city model used by Walter Benjamin is Paris; less known is the fact that at the base of his studies of the metropolis as “space” of the modernity has been another model of great city, in which the threshold between the Old and the New draw more complex implications. Benjamin perceives the topographical disposition of the modernity’s spaces: metropolis as Paris and Berlin have different characteristics compared to great cities as Naples, Marseille or Moscow. Naples is a “threshold”, a “space in between”, it is “archaic” and post-modern at the same time; the threshold between old and new takes the form of an access to the underworld (Pozzuoli) and mythical-magical world, an intermediate space where modernity, technology and the archetypal world might be confused. We can find in the modern metropolis not only the traces of the ancient city, its ruins, not only in the psyche of modern man are layered traces of archetypes, dreams and traumas of ancient and even primitive man, but Benjamin also refers to what happens in the "underground" of Paris, in sewers, subways, basements, in the underground topography of the metropolis. This Mediterranean, ancient, primitive threshold leads directly to the origin of Western civilization in Crete, to the primordial rites, to the myth of the labyrinth. Paradoxically, just as Benjamin descends “down”, in the “underground”, in the places of the Mythical, the Magical, the “Sacred”, he takes a “political” action: his raids in these areas take for him the value of a political-cultural battle against those who wanted to interpret as “inevitable” and in a certain way “unexplained” the phenomena of modernity.