The Cerimoniali Project was born in the 2008 with the purpose of bringing to light the ceremonials books (Libri di cerimonie): unpublished manuscript sources written by the masters of ceremonies of the Royal Palace of Naples. These manuscripts describe in detail the court ceremonials, the daily life in Naples and the relations of the Kingdom of Naples with the other European courts.

 

All the documents, preserved in Italian and Spanish libraries andarchives,dating back to the Spanish and Austrian Viceroyalties and to the Kingdom of Naples (XVI-XVIII centuries), have proven to be invaluable sources for the study and the deepening of the culture, art, architecture and the political dynamics of the Kingdom of Naples on the European chessboard.

 

The rediscovered, and now published, corpus caeremoniale enriches the sources about the Neapolitan history, fuelling the studies on the Royal Palace of Naples and on his court and expand the knowledge of Kingdom and his capital with new contribution on the artistic, historical, musical, social and economic context.

 

The purpose of the project is to reach the widestpossible diffusion as well as the widest possible accessibility for a non-specialist public, through the printing of picture books and, subsequently, putting them on the network, becoming in such way vehicle of interest and revaluation of the history of the territories belonged to the old Kingdom in Naples: the South of Italy.

 

While we publish the fourth volume and we work on the fifth one, we open our research to other fields of studies about the Italian Mediterranean Capital (Palermo, Genova, etc.) that allow us to make very rich comparative analyses between the courts, the ceremonial study and the lives of the most important personalities of this period.