Abstract

This article deals with national communities in Naples and their churches during the early modern period. Florentine, Lombard, and Genoese merchants had all received special privileges that exempted them from taxes on their trading and from local jurisdiction. These three nationes had different forms of government and the foundations and following stories of their churches differed dramatically. In fact, each of them fostered its own identity in several ways, hiring artists or employing iconographies from the motherland, allowing the coexistence of a ‘pantheon’ of patron saints or decorating their churches with techniques that were more common abroad. The Genoese nation is probably the most difficult to outline, as often its members decided to spread their patronage into the most important Neapolitan churches rather than gather in San Giorgio dei Genovesi.

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