Bold Ventures by Charlotte Van den Broeck

Author:Charlotte Van den Broeck [Van den Broeck, Charlotte]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2022-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

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Killing yourself at the age of seventy-eight – is that a rejection of life or of death?

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Lamont Young’s buildings show no obvious design or construction flaws. There is a crack in the Victorian turret in Parco Grifo, yes, but I’ve read it was put there deliberately to create the gothic effect of a ruin, an anachronistic means of giving a new design an interesting past.

Young does not seem to have failed so much as simply been forgotten; the process began during his lifetime. He was never really admitted onto the public stage. That was punishment enough for an architect like him – if there’s one thing I have learned about Lamont Young, it’s how passionately he must have loved his city.

Young was progressive and pro-Naples. After the unification of Italy, his city stagnated into a provincial town; he hoped to reshape it into a metropolis to rival the London or Vienna of his day. He dreamed of less concrete, of botanical gardens, of ponds and fountains, of a smoother flow of traffic…

In all probability he was the utopian he was made out to be, a committed, practicing utopian. Villa Ebe and Castello Aselmeyer are evidence of that. This must have made it all the more agonizing for him not only to remain a lone dreamer, but also to see his dream disfigured, in his own lifetime, into something wretched. The construction of the steelworks could not have been further from his romantic dream of Little Venice. After all the years that Young had tried so hard to obtain permission and funding for his projects, the outcome must have filled him with despair.

“A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger,” Albert Camus says in The Myth of Sisyphus.

Young’s dream did not resonate with his fellow Neapolitans in his day. Whether that was due to misunderstanding, a boycott, the social and economic conditions of the time, or a lack of talent, the repeated rejections must have sorely tested his creative imagination and his personality, which was held together by visionary thinking. The result was total alienation from himself, culminating in suicide.

The historical record is silent. The legends spiral out from his embitterment. On cold winter nights, the spirit of Lamont Young is said to appear on the tower terrace of Villa Ebe. Through the arched windows, he looks out in frustration over his beloved, despised city and wails in grief.

Young was born in Naples and lived and worked there all his life, yet he always felt British. That’s also how other Neapolitans saw him. As the son of a Scottish father and a British Indian mother, he was labeled an outsider – reason enough to exclude him from local debates.

Yet Young made no compromises about his identity. Neapolitan pride went hand in hand with Anglo-Saxon bullheadedness. In his marriage contract with Ebe Cazzani, he demanded a mention of his British origins.

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