This book is addressed to “lovers of paradoxes” and we have done our utmost to assemble a stellar cast of Neapolitan and American scholars, intellectuals, and artists/writers who are strong and open-minded enough to wrestle with and illuminate the paradoxes through which Naples presents itself. Naples is a mysterious metropolis. Difficult to understand, it is an enigma to outsiders, and also to the Neapolitans themselves. Its very impenetrableness is what makes it so deliriously and irresistibly attractive. The essays attempt to give some hints to the answer of the enigma, without parsing it into neat scholastic formulas. In doing this, the book will be an important means of opening Naples to students, scholars and members of the community at large who are engaged in “identity-work.” A primary goal has been to establish a dialogue with leading Neapolitan intellectuals and artists, and, ultimately, ensure that the “deliriously Neapolitan” dance continues. Delirious Naples: A Cultural History of the City of the Sun is an interdisciplinary and highly diverse collection of twenty-two (im)personal essays dedicated to writing Naples by thinking/feeling it in ways that respectIts complexity as a sublime problem―a city that at once demands to be written and resists being written; a city of difference, of Otherness, that at once demands and resists interpretation. . . Writing Naples is as difficult as writing the sea and the sun. ---Pellegrino D’Acierno, from the Introduction Delirious Naples: A Cultural History of the City of the Sun is an interdisciplinary and highly diverse collection of twenty-two (im)personal essays dedicated to writing Naples by thinking/feeling it in ways that respectIts complexity as a sublime problem―a city that at once demands to be written and resists being written; a city of difference, of Otherness, that at once demands and resists interpretation. . . Writing Naples is as difficult as writing the sea and the sun. ---Pellegrino D’Acierno, from the Introduction, Pellegrino D'Acierno is Professor of Comparative Literature and Languages at Hofstra University. Stanislao G. Pugliese is Professor of Modern European History and the Queensboro Unico Distinguished Professor of Italian and Italian American Studies at Hofstra University. His most recent book is Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone , winner of the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography. He is the author of Answering Auschwitz: Primo Levi's Science and Humanism after the Fall (Fordham). Theresa Aiello is Associate Professor at the New York University Silver School of Social Work. She is Director of the Advanced Practice Certificate Program and codirects the Advanced Certificate in Child and Family Treatment. Dr. Aiello is also a psychoanalyst and has written extensively on psychoanalysis, oral history, and narrativist approaches. She won the New York University Distinguished Teacher Award and was elected to the National Academy of Social Work as Distinguished Scholar and Practitioner. She is in private practice in New York City. B. Amore is an artist, educator, and writer. She studied at Boston University, University of Rome, Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara, and is the recipient of Massachusetts Cultural grants, a Fulbright Grant, a Mellon Fellowship, as well as a Citation of Merit Award presented by the Vermont Arts Council. She is founder of the Carving Studio and Sculpture Center in Vermont. Amore taught for many years at the Boston Museum School and has won numerous public art commissions in both the United States and Japan and is represented by SOHO 20 Gallery, New York, and Boston Sculptors Gallery. Life line―filo della vita , her multimedia exhibit, which premiered at the Ellis Island Museum, has recently been published as An Italian American Odyssey, Life line―filo della vita: Through Ellis Island and Beyond . Her art and literary reviews appear in International Sculpture Magazine and Art New England , and her creative writing and art in VIA , Italian Americana , Biancheria , and Speaking Memory , among others. Rondini di Passaggio is on view at the Museo dell’Emigrazione, Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi, Province of Avellino, Italy, and is a re- evocation of her Naples/New York exhibit created for the Delirious Naples Conference at the Hofstra University Museum. Andrea Baldi is Professor of Italian at Rutgers University. He has published articles on sixteenth-century conduct books, a monograph on Alessandro Piccolomini (2001), and is the coeditor of Essays in Honor of Marga Cottino-Jones (2003). He has also devoted his critical attention to contemporary Italian literature, publishing articles on the relationship between literature and cinema (Luigi Pirandello, the Tavianis and Italo Calvino, Monicelli) and on women’s writing (Anna Banti and Elsa Morante). He has worked extensively on Anna Maria Ortese, editing and prefacing