Cosenza is honored nonetheless, since he was involved with three of the featured buildings: the Fish Market (1935), the Villa Oro (with Bernard Rudofsky, 1937), and the Cesare Battisti housing project (1947). A graduate of the engineering school in Naples and a lifelong anti-fascist, he is generally credited with introducing Modernism to the city with his vast, barrel-vaulted fish-market building. Another architect featured thrice is Marcello Canino, a graduate of Naples’s Royal Polytechnic, who became “a central figure in the fascist power system” and would organize the city’s 1939 Mostra d’Oltremare (colonial exhibition). The political difference can be felt in their buildings: where Canino is all Roman bricks, travertine, Classicism, and other obvious symbols of italianità, Cosenza is international to the point of universalism. A later important figure was Stefania Filo Speziale, a pupil of Canino’s, who was one of Naples’s first female architects and part of the trio that designed the Palazzo Della Morte condominium (1960), which makes brilliant use of a difficult hillside site. Faced with such a disparate selection of projects, Napolitano pleads an unconvincing case for Neapolitan specificity, while Manuel Orazi (one of several essayists), entertainingly sets the city’s modern architecture in a wider national and international context.

Frustrations abound, though. The omissions. The competent but not-quite-good-enough English translation (an Italian edition is available from Quodlibet). The images—Cyrille Wiener’s photos are fine as far as they go, but so much isn’t shown of these buildings, and the drawings (beautifully done) and photographs are scattered in such a way that you’re forced to flip back in search of the relevant plates when reading the project descriptions at the back of the book (by Andrea Maglio). But most of all, the hybrid concept hovers annoyingly between the serious in-depth study—which would have implied a volume of greater length and ambition—and the introductory survey, which would have required a more comprehensive approach. But, despite all that, Napoli Super Modern succeeds in making this reader yearn to hop on a plane and rediscover, among the city’s older treasures, its 20th-century architecture, and appreciate it anew.