สถานที่ถนนซานเกรโกริโออาร์เมโนVia San Gregorio ArmenoVia San Gregorio Armeno

The street is a stenoporos, one of the narrow cross-lanes of the Greek grid Neapolis was laid out on, running between the two main streets of the ancient city — today's Via dei Tribunali and Spaccanapoli — and crossing at the old agora.

The figures have a long root in the same ground. A temple of Ceres stood on this street in classical times, and citizens offered her small terracotta figurines made in the workshops nearby. The church of San Gregorio Armeno was founded around 930 on that temple's foundations. The Neapolitan nativity scene itself is much later, from the end of the 18th century. The workshops now run all year, with the main displays from early November to 6 January.

Naples is also a capital of the horn. The cornicello — curniciello in Neapolitan — is a twisted horn charm in gold, silver, bone, terracotta, plastic or red coral, worn against the malocchio and hung from rear-view mirrors, a custom the article traces back to protecting draught horses. Coral is the material that carries it, and coral is sacred to Venus.

Edward Lovett, the London folklorist, published a paper in 1909 called Amulets from Costers' Barrows in London, Rome, and Naples. He was reading three street trades as one subject, and this street is the one still working.

Inference — a lane whose craftsmen have modelled votive figures on the same ground for two thousand years is the clearest case in this atlas of a workshop outliving the religion it started in. Both halves of that sentence are cited; the joining of them is this project's.

Workshops produce figures year-round, traditional and topical. The heavy display season runs from early November to 6 January. No weekday is marked open or closed below: the shops set their own hours and no timetable is published for the street.