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Sasi Visone, 47, was working as a simple hairdresser, a parrucchiere in Italian, when tourists began to appear along the narrow, straight lanes of the "Quartieri Spagnoli" — the Spanish Quarters — where he grew up and which foreign visitors had carefully avoided just a few years earlier. At the same time as other shopkeepers converted their business to street food, the grid layout of this popular enclave in central Naples, developed in the 16 th century, began to be covered with pink pinheads on Google Maps, indicating rooms and rental apartments offered for booking on AirBnb.
These rapid transformations, which began several years ago but accelerated after the pandemic, are part of a "golden era" for the 15, inhabitants of the Spanish Quarter, according to Visone. He remembers believing things were starting to change when fashion designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana came to his neighborhood to celebrate 30 years of their fashion house in Naples, with the support of the then mayor, Luigi De Magistris. The three days of celebrations in the city heralded a radical change in the image of Naples and its still-popular city center, both in Italy and abroad.
On the flaking, pastel palimpsest walls, which locals still remember resounding with gunshots fired during occasional settlements of scores, hairdresser Visone has seen his neighbors stick up a string of pictures of Sophia Lauren as a pizza maker, as in Vittorio De Sica's film The Gold of Naples , and of Diego Maradona in all his glory, for the attention of an ever-growing number of foreign visitors.
