Still, on the off chance it’s ever confirmed that Vlad III the Impaler truly is buried in Naples, let’s just hope no one gets the bright idea to open the tomb. You never know 🧛‍♀️

while this is more fascinating than historically reliable, genuine research has been done across Italy, Romania, and Estonia. Ironically, it’s the fiction of Dracula that seems to have encouraged cross-border and multidisciplinary scholarship about the historical figure of Vlad III Tepes.

The latest claim of deciphering the slab has appeared in "Vlad, Where Are You? Clues from the La Nova Codex of Naples (2025)", a volume edited by Giovanni Reale, director of the Santa Maria la Nova complex, and published by the local press La Valle del Tempo www.librerianeapolis.it/libri/saggi/...

Plenty of issues here. Vlad III isn’t known to have had a daughter. More problematically, none of this has appeared in peer-reviewed journals. The slab is real enough. But its first alleged “reinterpretation” appeared in a 2014 newspaper article for Il Mattino. www.ilmattino.it/napoli/cultu...

According to their translation, one passage reads: “To him who was twice slain by his enemies and honoured as a martyr. The ruler of the Wallachs, Vlad the Pious, went in peace, ever praising God in the place where he is buried”.

A reported breakthrough came in 2025, when Romanian historian Mircea Cosma and linguist Christian Tufan announced to have cracked the code. According to them, the inscription features a multilayered code with three linguistic levels. The one in Byzantine Greek apparently conveys a coherent message.

Attempts at deciphering the slab have been made since the 1920s. The most recent (serious) study (Palma, 2023) found that the glyphs drew from Old Slavonic, Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Carian scripts. His results produced some coherent snippets in Latin and Hungarian but no full translation.

And yet, the iconography of the Ferrillo monument is unusual for southern Italy. Even more unusual is a curious marble slab in the sixteenth-century Turbolo Chapel of the same church, which on the right-hand side bears an inscription that has yet to be deciphered.

This interpretation is essentially linked to the undocumented claim that Vlad III had a daughter or niece, Maria Balšić, who was secretly sent to Naples as a child by her father to escape persecution. She was later adopted by Italian nobility and married to Matteo Ferrillo.

Such a reading of the relief on the sepulchre has sparked the theory that the funerary monument may not hold Count Ferrillo’s mortal remains at all, but those of Vlad III himself, potentially hiding his final resting place in plain sight.

Inside, the funerary monument of Count Matteo Ferrillo (15 c.) features unusual symbolism. It includes a dragon helm reminiscent of the Order of the Dragon (associated with Vlad’s father) and two sphinxes, the symbol of Thebes, which should intriguingly resonate with the Romanian Țepeș, Impaler.

Existing since the mid 13 c., originally as a Franciscan convent, the Church of Santa Maria La Nova in Naples is now an outstanding example of Neapolitan late Renaissance sacred architecture.

This breaks my heart.

oh, of course, cheers to all the Francises and Franceses! #history #medievalsky #Manuscripts

To conclude, albeit not with a MS, no one captured Francis’ life more vividly than Giotto. His fresco cycle in the Basilica of Assisi doesn’t just illustrate the life of the saint, it helped shape how generations imagined the "God's jester". A life and and legacy now set in colour and stone.