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Oysters
Ostriche
Oysters opened to order.
Contains
In the nineteenth century the oyster sellers’ stalls in Santa Lucia sold oysters from Lake Fusaro, where the Bourbons farmed them.
The story of Oysters
In Naples, the history of oysters begins with the Romans. Pliny the Elder writes that Gaius Sergius Orata was the first to create artificial oyster beds at Baiae, in the time of the orator Lucius Crassus, and the first to judge those of Lake Lucrino the best. He did it, Pliny points out, for profit rather than greed.
In 1752 Charles of Bourbon bought Lake Fusaro as a royal hunting and fishing reserve. Ferdinand IV developed oyster farming there, keeping the oysters on bundles of brushwood above the stones to keep them out of the mud, and he liked to sell them in person. On the shore stands the Ostrichina, a villa opened in 1825.
In the nineteenth century the oysters of the Fusaro were sold at the stalls of the oyster sellers of Santa Lucia. A guidebook of 1845 describes them with the oysters in buckets of seawater and a lantern hanging from each stall, “almost the look of a permanent illumination”. Matilde Serao, in 1884, still remembers “the oyster sellers” of Santa Lucia. That world came to an end with the building of the new seafront and with the Risanamento, the urban clearance that moved the people of Santa Lucia away from the sea.
Did people eat oysters in Naples?
Yes: from the Roman oyster beds of Lake Lucrino, mentioned by Pliny, to the Bourbon oyster farm on the Fusaro, down to the stalls of the oyster sellers of Santa Lucia in the nineteenth century.
Who was the ostricaro fisico?
An oyster seller of Santa Lucia who, according to tradition, wrote on his stall, as if it were a noble title, the quip of a king who had told him he had “the physique of an oyster seller”. It is a popular tale: the versions agree neither on the oyster seller’s name nor on the king’s.
What is the Ostrichina on Lake Fusaro?
A Bourbon villa on the shore of Lake Fusaro, opened in 1825 and linked to the royal oyster farm.