"Timely and comprehensive, this book offers compelling new perspectives on Naples' cultural, historical, and social traditions. La Trecchia's study provides the scholarly community with broad-ranging insights that reassess and reimagine the city's urban space in the context of global transformations." (Gaetana Marrone, Professor of Italian, Princeton University, USA) "A truly intriguing multipronged reading of the evolving fortunes of Naples, a cultural capital reduced to a negative stereotype, especially following WWII. But this perception started changing from the 1990s on. La Trecchia's engaging and passionate book analyzes writers, filmmakers, architects, performers and artists who with their work opened up new horizons, established Public Arts projects, and in ten years straddling the millennium the city, like a "sponge," absorbed the voices and the faces of newcomers, including new immigrants, blending their music into its inexhaustible traditions, setting up a rich tapestry of post-modern installations, performances, murals, repurposed buildings, subway stations paintings and exhibits among other phenomena. Naples is like an expanded border, she says, as a person can feel being both inside and outside the culture, treading a constantly shifting and yielding boundary. A positive energy was thus generated that capitalized on art having rediscovered its social-political, indeed ethical, role in the polis, making Naples into a model for other cities, and a key hub between Europe and the Mediterranean. La Trecchia argues also for a reconceptualized notion of identity based on "chosen kinships" which valorize "flows rather than roots," and celebrate its visual "polyphony" in the "new Global South".

" (Peter Carravetta, Professor of Phylosophy, Stony Brook University) "A synthesis of professional and personal life, Reframing Naples reaches beyond the academic classroom and into the streets of all our lives to render a very different Naples from what you will find in the news, tourist guides and social media. La Trecchia's take on this wonderful city of the world is fresh and multi-faceted, moving us beyond traditional stereotypes and myths of the past into a new way of seeing Naples as a city of the future. La Trecchia shows us how, over time, this city has shifted from serving as a cultural colony of Europe's mainstream artists and intellectuals into a decolonizing force of new immigrant artists and 21stcentury thinkers. This narrative's strength of La Trecchia's work comes from a unique exploration of the dynamics of Southern culture that defy the hegemonic and outdated ways of depicting Naples' place in the history of the world." (Fred L. Gardaphe, Distinguished Professor of Italian American Studies, Queens College, CUNY) "With La Trecchia's beautiful Reframing Naples: The South in Global Perspective, the volcanic city sparkles and breathes, its searing complexities brought into relief by a scholar who has scrutinized its lifeblood from within and from afar, from lived experience and extended study. La Trecchia slices through Naples' past lives and lists of labels, peering into the heart of what has always made this metropolis what it is: a vital nexus of cultural hybridity and innovation, a hub--and a model for--Southern Italian, European, Mediterranean, and global cosmopolitanism. Through an analysis of the explosion of film, literature, public art, and popular music in 1990s Naples, La Trecchia introduces us to creative production that draws from the margins of society--the urban poor, youth subcultures, the radicalized, the immigrant.

Reframing Naples shows us how modern Naples' porosity and inclusivity, its struggles and its resistance, not only generates its virtuosity, but lays down tracks for future cities to follow." (Arielle Saiber, Charles S. Singleton Professor of Italian Studies, Johns Hopkins University, USA).