California Italian Studies

This article argues for the foundational role of a fourteenth-century vernacular history of Naples (the Cronaca di Partenope) in the development of Neapolitan historiography through the seventeenth century. Thrice printed, the Cronaca was also frequently mined for source material by later historians; its uses illustrate the blurred boundaries between amateur and erudite printed historiography and between “foreign” and “native” accounts, as well as the evolving concerns and historical methods that informed treatments of the city’s and realm’s past over some two and one- half centuries.