Recently, only a few years before Masaniello would trade in the apron of the fishmonger for the cap of the revolutionary, the lurid red tomato, fixture of Italian gastronomy, had begun to appear in Market Square. At the time, tomatoes would have been smaller and yellow, but their presence attests to how the city—a metropolis of a quarter-million people—was already embedded in a vast network of colonialism and globalization, as well as resistance to those forces. Tomatoes were introduced by the Spanish, colonial overseers of the once-independent Italian kingdom. Ruled over by the Hapsburgs, the Spanish colonial empire had grown incomprehensibly wealthy and powerful through Mexican gold and Peruvian silver. Naturally, such wealth was purchased in blood; in Peru, indigenous workers were dying in droves after just a few months of labor in the mines, poisoned by the mercury used to amalgamate the ore. Five million square miles, the Spanish empire encompassed the Low Countries and the Holy Roman Empire, the Philippines and Guam, almost all of South America and most of the North, as well as this bustling, crowded, fetid, and beautiful Italian city of Naples, something described by its own denizens as a paradise inhabited by devils. It was here that the most unlikely of revolutions—started by an illiterate and working-class fishmonger—would become the first proletariat anti-colonial resistance movement of the modern world; its failed leader’s thought expressed not in treatises but in practice. A fisherman’s politics, of which Victor Hugo would say more than two centuries later in Les Misérables that “revolt is Masaniello . . . revolt is a thing of the stomach.”
Ed Simon, 'Fisher of Men' (The Baffler, June 2025)
