Dwellings in national and provincial capitals

With the emergence or growth of capital cities, it was a common practice among aristocrats to buy a house in the city and reside in it for different months of the year. In the Kingdom of Naples, the phenomenon became normal from the sixteenth century onwards and by the second half of the seventeenth century almost all the major nobles of the kingdom had their own residence in Naples, in the main streets, close to places of power. The house in the city became a real status symbol, and a means of competition for the aristocracy so that each dwelling tried to undo the other, based on  wealth and size and by trying to employ the greatest architects of the time. In the eighteenth century the nobles lived stably in the capital in sumptuous Baroque palaces.

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