If we talk about Achille Lauro, in the collective imagination of today’s young people, we immediately think of the hip-hop singer-songwriter and his controversial participation in Sanremo. But his stage name derives from the owner from Naples who, between the 50s and 70s, was among the most important Italian entrepreneurs, as well as Mayor of Naples, Member of Parliament, and President of the Naples Football team.
An almost mythological figure for the Neapolitan city and for the whole of Southern Italy, Lauro had an extraordinary art collection. A beautiful Mattia Preti, some works of the ‘900, the ancient billiards on which Horace Nelson had played but, above all, six amazing tapestries dated 1692 of the royal manufactory of Beauvais, belonged to Louis XIV, the Sun King who speaks of his conquests.
Forty years ago, this collection of furniture, consisting of 962 lots, was enchanted to cope with a financial crack definitely avoidable. The many ships of the Commander, apparently, were put on sale as old iron, drastically reducing the value and the auction of the Lauro goods appeared to many a posthumous slap, two years after the death of the entrepreneur from Sorrento.
It was probably the most important enchantment held in Naples in the ‘900. Four rounds, two days of sale, the itchy wait of a lost city. The sale, curated by Semenzato, took place in Villa Lauro, in the most chic heart of the city. And people flocked in droves. They swarmed inside the owner’s most prestigious residence to see with their eyes what he owned, what he kept, what those mysterious spaces contained.
But it wasn’t just the taste of discovery. There was also that compulsive curiosity that accompanies certain collective rituals, the morbid excitement of that very special moment. The days of the exhibition flew fast and, without offers via the web, hundreds of people came to the call of that hammer.
Nothing had been left to chance. A careful and punctual catalog with a strict list of lots, that origin flaunted as a small trophy, the fishhook launched even for the smallest and personal things, convinced that all, at the right time, they would try to take away any memory of that extraordinary story.
Meanwhile, prestigious professionals, protagonists of the Neapolitan aristocracy, and some Roman antiquarians seemed to compete for the most prestigious goods. A tsunami of purchases hit those 962 lots, dispersing everything in a thousand rivulets. But the collection of over 2 billion Lire was only a modest contribution to the coverage of that financial crack.
As in many auctions of the past, it was only important, in those evenings, to paradoxically throw off that myth that for decades had dominated and fascinated Naples. In 1984, the auction base was four hundred million Lire.
