Alexandre dumas père.

Lot 8
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Estimation :
500 - 800 EUR
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Result : 766EUR
Alexandre dumas père.
Signed autograph manuscript, La Rue de Tolède [July 1862], 5 pages in-4° on blue paper. Chronicle published in Italian, La Via di Toledo, "à la une" du journal napolitain de Dumas, L'Indipendente, July 22, 1862. "It is something like seven or eight years ago that the Via di Toledo - the only street in Naples that can be driven down, and which was not built by the Neapolitans but by a Spanish viceroy, was interrupted from the Mercatelllo by half-fallen ruins [...] It is simply hideous. The only walk through the city leads to rubble - to mounds of collapsed earth - and the museum, with its mediocre buildings but precious for the things it contains, can only be reached by making a detour through the Porta Alba, and through the famous Convent of Santa Maria di Costantinopoli, whose greatest miracle was to give cholera to Naples. Finally, today the municipality has decided to put up for sale the lands that are more crowded with rubble and more bumpy with stones than the ruins of Babylon and Palmira. From this sandy Sahara it is going to make a new district"... He criticizes the shortcomings of the municipality's project, which did not think about the greenness of the urban landscape, hygiene or aesthetics, but only to make "a pretty chessboard cut by square compartments, whose king is cholera and whose queen is fever" ... And to compare Naples unfavourably to Paris, for water, which cannot even be replaced by local wine, which is adulterated... "What is the municipality doing"... The end of the article announces "the continuation to tomorrow." (Dumas will devote two more articles to La Via di Toledo, July 24th and 25th.)
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