Virgil the magician and the egg that holds up Castel dell'Ovo

Publius Vergilius Maro, the poet of the Aeneid, loved Naples more than any other city. He studied philosophy there at the Epicurean school of Siro, composed the Georgics there and wished to be buried there. His epitaph, handed down by ancient biographers, remembers him in a few words: «Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenent nunc Parthenope». In the following centuries, however, the poet underwent a remarkable metamorphosis. For the Neapolitans of the Middle Ages Virgil was no longer merely a classical author, but a powerful magician who had protected the city with talismans and spells.

From poet to magician

The transformation can already be seen in the twelfth century. John of Salisbury, in his «Policraticus», reports a golden fly with which Virgil supposedly rid Naples of flies. In 1194 Conrad of Querfurt, chancellor of Emperor Henry VI, described in a letter the Virgilian wonders of the city, including a palladium enclosed in a phial. A few years later Gervase of Tilbury, in the «Otia imperialia», gathered further legends: a bronze horse that cured horses, meat that never spoiled, a serpent that kept reptiles away.

These stories arose from the tangible presence of ancient statues, inscriptions and monuments that medieval people could no longer interpret. The most revered author of Latin literature, regarded by many as almost a prophet of Christianity because of his fourth Eclogue, naturally became the supernatural guardian of the place where he had lived and where his body rested.

The egg in the castle

The most famous legend concerns the castle on the islet of Megaride. According to tradition, Virgil hid an egg in its foundations, sealed in a glass carafe, itself enclosed in an iron cage hanging from a beam. As long as the egg remained whole, the castle and the city would be safe. The «Cronaca di Partenope», a fourteenth-century text, records this belief, and the name Castel dell'Ovo, the Castle of the Egg, is said to derive from it.

The story adds that when, in the Angevin period, part of the castle collapsed, panic spread over the fate of the egg. Queen Joanna I is then said to have announced that the egg had been replaced, in order to calm the population. The episode is not securely documented, but it shows how deeply rooted the belief was. The egg, after all, has always been a powerful symbol: in ancient cosmogonies it contains the world in embryo, and in Christian tradition it alludes to the resurrection. Tying the survival of a city to so fragile an object meant entrusting it to a delicate balance that had to be carefully guarded.

A place of layered stories

Megaride has a real history that is just as evocative. Part of the villa of Lucius Licinius Lucullus stood here, and in 476 Romulus Augustulus, the last Western emperor, was confined in the castrum Lucullanum. Later, monastic communities settled there, and then the Normans, the Swabians and the Angevins fortified the islet. The present castle, reworked several times by the Aragonese and the Spanish viceroys, preserves traces of all these phases in its halls and walkways. Every age has left a stone and a story.

The figure of Virgil the magician survived for a long time, inspiring chivalric romances, novellas and folk tales across Europe, from France to England, where collections of stories devoted to his deeds circulated. Even today, looking at the outline of the castle against the sea, it is hard not to think of that invisible egg on which, according to legend, the destiny of Naples depends.