Published by 5 Continents Editions in 2024, Il complesso di Santa Maria delle Anime del Purgatorio ad Arco a Napoli examines one of Naples’s most layered religious and cultural sites. The complex comprises a small seventeenth-century church, a museum, a historical archive, and a large hypogeum associated with the longstanding cult of the “anime pezzentelle,” the neglected or abandoned souls believed to remain in Purgatory. Rather than isolating the church as a monument, the book presents it as a living constellation of art, devotion, memory, and social practice.
Luigi Spina’s photographs move across the site’s architecture, objects, and devotional traces. Details of paintings, sculpture, silverware, sacred vestments, manuscripts, and ex-votos are placed in relation to interiors and subterranean spaces, allowing the images to register both material density and the intimate scale of belief. Spina’s camera functions less as an inventory than as a guide through a place whose meaning resides in the exchange between what is preserved, what is venerated, and what is remembered.
The photographic sequence is accompanied by an extensive text edited by art historian Francesca Amirante, with contributions addressing the complex’s history, art, worship, and sociocultural practices. Further essays consider the “anime pezzentelle” cult, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century musical production, and the historical archive. This dialogue between image and scholarship gives the volume unusual breadth: it can be read as a photographic study, a cultural history, and a close account of a particular Neapolitan institution.
An Italian-language hardcover of 168 pages, with English abstracts and 85 colour illustrations, the book will interest collectors concerned with photography’s encounter with sacred space and material heritage. Its distinctive strength lies in the way Spina’s attentive, embodied looking is held within a broader collaborative structure, preserving the complexity of Santa Maria delle Anime del Purgatorio ad Arco without reducing it to either spectacle or documentation.
