Delirious Naples: A Cultural History of the City of the Sun, edited by Pellegrino D'Acierno and Stanislao G. Pugliese, New York, Fordham University Press, 2018, xiv + 395 pp., $35.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-8232-7999-9

This collection of essays evolved out of a four-day interdisciplinary and multimedia conference on Naples held in New York in 2011 and co-organised by the Hofstra Cultural Center and the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at New York University. As Pellegrino D’Acierno notes in his introduction, the conference had ‘sought to create a counter-requiem’ (p. 1) to the doom-laden images of Naples that were circumnavigating the globe at the time. The present book takes a step further by attempting to systematically grapple with the conceptual and experiential challenges posed by the cultural life of Naples, ‘a city’, according to D’Acierno, ‘that at once demands and resists interpretation’.