I wrote my FOREWORD for Dove Non Si Muore Mai at my father’s desk, on the night between November 1st and November 2nd, 2025.
Dove Non Si Muore Mai is a multidisciplinary book project developed by
@southmanifesto and
@ipogeodeicristallini , and designed by
@axelagerborg and
@1plus1plus1plus1plus1plus1plus . It uses the ancient Ipogeo dei Cristallini in Napoli’s Rione Sanità as a starting point to explore private grief, memory, and their collective consequences.
The book brings together
@brett_lloyd ’s photographic reading of the Ipogeo and four long-form interviews I curated with specific Napoli-related identities: Don Antonio Loffredo, former parish priest of the Rione Sanità; film director Antonio Capuano; photographer and fashion mastermind Francesca Vitucci Sorrenti; and Falconero, a world-weary witness to Napoli’s street economy. Added to this are an excerpt from a 2001 conversation between Gianni Minà
@fondazionegiannimina and Diego Armando Maradona, and a series of interviews with the youth of the Rione Sanità.
My premise for these interviews was simple: to speak today of private mourning, knowing that for entire populations the private no longer exists—because houses are gone, because cemeteries are rubble, because borders are sealed and IDs no longer match bodies—is perhaps the greatest luxury of the West, which is at once the beneficiary of these conditions and jointly responsible for them.
The fact that beneath the Rione Sanità still stand four tombs of a Hellenistic necropolis from the fourth century B.C. is a material reminder, carved into tuff, of what is needed for grief to come to completion: a place, an inscription, a walkable route. And at the same time, it is a lesson against the naivety with which we often look at “the classical,” as if archaeology were a neutral past and not, on the contrary, proof that when the infrastructures of mourning remain standing, a human community, with all its contradictions, can remain standing as well.
Forever grateful
@feberico e
@iamyellowboy .
