On June 4, 2023, the city of Naples officially celebrated the S.C.C. Naples’ victory in the Italian football championship 2023, an extraordinary event that last occurred with the ‘miracle’ of Diego Armando Maradona 33 years ago. On the very same day, June 4, Luca Santese & Marco P. Valli released Malatì, a photographic volume shot in Naples between April 29 and May 4, the week that marked the championship’ certain victory.
Neapolitans’ mad eternal love for their city and football team has not spared the two authors, who, possessed by the same holy Malatì (literal for ‘madness’, and title of a Naples’ TikTok hit song which now became the team’s anthem), try to give it back in this photographic volume rich in icons of the city, its history, and inhabitants. The latter are reinterpreted in a chaotic, extreme, reckless, and fleeing visual play—as a scooter speeding in the night through the neighborhoods’ alleys of Naples.
The cover’s photograph portrays a personalized cake realized for the two authors by a Neapolitan pastry chef; on the back side, the photographic volume ends with the cake’s left-overs surrounding the fragment of a Napaepolitan poem: