Naples: The City That Never Wakes Up
The glory of a night by full moon when we strolled through the streets and squares…I felt overwhelmed by a feeling of infinite space. To be able to dream like this is certainly worth the trouble it took to get here.
— Goethe in Naples, March 1787 (all quotes from his Italian Journey)
For centuries Naples was the third city of Europe after London and Paris. Today it inspires the most extreme opinions. On Reddit, for example, there is the shithole camp: “Avoid Naples, it’s trashy, vulgar, disorganised, and chaotic. Pick up the litter and the poop people, clean the graffiti,” with jokes about pickpockets. On the other side is the “Beating Heart of Italy” camp, into which I’m falling. Goethe called Naples the last ancient city in the world, 240 years ago.
You are particularly warned about the area around Garibaldi Station, and the beautifully tiled station escalators give no warning of the racket they spit you up to. Wheeling our bags up the crowded Via Forcella, through the traffic came ragged banging music and a small parade, boys in white smocks and golden banners running onto the sidewalk to collect coins for some neighborhood saint. It was immediately exotic, and also somehow familiar from the years I lived on Mott Street in Little Italy. I realize now it was really Little Naples and Little Sicily: the cliche Italian, from my old neighborhood and the movies shot there, is a southern Italian. And this is my first trip to southern Italy: Rome doesn’t count.
The last time I was in Rome, it struck me how much it felt like a real City, like New York or Hong Kong or Mexico City, more alike than different. The Rome we just left was a parched museum and construction zone, the infrastructure to collect royalties on its art and institutions. Sites are fabulous and pressed with iPhones. We did love the artichokes.
In Naples, they don’t care about you. In a good way. They are busy. They are used to visitors. This difference was something I could feel on my skin. The sensation of liberation, the thing I travel for, that I felt in Hanoi and Istanbul, I was not expecting to find an hour by rail from Rome.
It’s chaotic but dad is happy. I perk up and pull out my camera, stopping in the street at our moment of Peak Tourist, slapping up the cobblestones to our Airbnb in the old city. (To Reddit’s credit, I did know the smoothest route.)We’ve turned onto Spaccanapoli, the ancient stone path the city grew around. It runs through the centro storico and means literally “Naples splitter.” It looks like a cut through the city…not that it’s too narrow to run a Vespa down at 40mph, girls on the front and back.
One can be quiet and at peace here in the midst of the greatest noise and confusion; indeed, I feel calmest of all in the crowd.
The locals guys, the goombas, were leaning on the door in the sun when we finally found the address. Having Molly’s partner Catty — Caterina — made the difference in these situations: I, the man, the planner, had the right to send her in first because she speaks the tongue. They were helpful and friendly, and their particular slouch reminded me of the men on Mott Street: a few right words and we’re your best friend, everything’s good. They showed us the buzzer to press and made space.
Our entrance was a small tightly sprung trap we could barely squeeze through with luggage and force. The small door was part of a huge metal gate to a cavernous dripping stone garage / cave with random cars. Every home a small fortress built of lava rock. We never saw the big doors open.
The rental karma is good: our place is the hub of the hubbub, on Piazza San Gaetano, the ancient center, where nobles greeted emperors. From the little balcony we had a great view of the back of the saint’s head.
The closest touristy street food is fresh good big cheap and not a rip off, the fried pizza and the limoncello. The restaurant we randomed into that night seemed like a movie set. The name translates to The Idiot, and we were swept up in the lively atmosphere, when the music turned up and they all knew the songs. People clapping and singing and waving their black handkerchiefs. All done for our sake, to serve the cliche? The food wasn’t great, perhaps that’s the Idiot part. We all had our cameras out.
Naples is a paradise; everyone lives in a state of intoxicated self-forgetfulness, myself included. I seem to be a completely different person whom I hardly recognise. Yesterday I thought to myself: Either you were mad before, or you are mad now.
In Little Italy, San Gennaro was the name of the feast that overwhelmed the neighborhood every September. Gennaro, I should have known, is the patron saint of Naples. Except he isn’t.
That would be Maradona. Diego Armando Maradona, the scrappy, corruptible, 5' 5" Argentine footballer who vanquished the rich and racist north. A saintly sort of name, unless you happen to know the guy. The murals of San Gennaro and Maradona are painted by the same artists, so there’s a resemblance and it’s more than skin deep. Maradona was the savior of the south, of the poor and working class when he won Napoli’s championships in the late ’80s. Equal time, and extra mural space, is given to the one true God.
Three times a year vials of San Gennaro’s clotted blood are brought from the church and miraculously liquify; Napoli’s football championships are rarer — and more miraculous.
By career’s end Maradona was a coke addict connected with the Mob…but all is forgiven. A week after his death they renamed the stadium after him. Previously it was St. Paul. His image and his number 10, often expressed as D10S — Dios, God — is everywhere. You can walk miles in the old city and Spanish Quarter and never have his face or his jersey out of your sight.
Sport, particularly football, is strongest in people who have known war. The glory that Maradona brought Naples was absolute. There were fireworks and street parties for more than a week. He is deified because he brought paradise to Napoli by every definition; not in heaven, but here and now. In Naples, this is what the exchange for life on an active volcano.
This peak of hell which towers up in the middle of paradise. The Terrible beside the Beautiful. The Neapolitan would certainly be a different creature if he didn’t feel himself wedged between God and the Devil.
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They are equally proud of their Vesuvius. Its history of destruction goes back to Pompeii, the tourist site people stream past Naples to get to. A powerful possibility they live with, that never escapes their minds.
Eruptions figure prominently in the literature of Naples. Books recommended by my Italian friend Jack — The Volcano Lover by Sontag, Italian Journey by old Goethe — added depth to the scene. Goethe, Sir William Hamilton, and his astonishing actress dancer muse, Lady Emma, mistress of Admiral Nelson, all intersected in Naples and were characters in each other’s stories. More recently, Naples ’44 by Norman Lewis, paints the poverty of the post-war occupation. These characters are gone, but you can still recognize their city, the same moon, the same volcano. Scratch the surface of any Naples story, and you find tragedy and ecstasy, blood and intrigue.
Every journey in space is also a journey in time, or maybe that’s just Italy. This trip took me back to Little Italy, reconnected me to M. C. Escher on the Amalfi Coast, and sent me back to college with Giambattista Vico. He’s a pretty obscure dude, but here it is, the Vico Institute of High Culture, unmissable on the main drag.
Filangieri introduced me to the work of an older writer, whose profound wisdom is so refreshing to all Italians of this generation. His name is Giambattista Vico, and they rank him above Montesquieu. The book, which was presented to me as if it were sacred writ, seems to have sublime prophecies of the good and just. It is wonderful for a people to have such a spiritual patriarch.
Vico published The New Science in 1744. That book (or the professor who taught it) opened an idea in me that never closed. Language began as poetry is the gist of it. I knew James Joyce liked him. A “commodius vicus of recirculation,” in the first line of Finnegans Wake, refers to him. I keep the book (Cornell University Press) around and though I don’t understand it, I consider him one of my main men. (Yes, they are all men.)
No idea he was from Naples, no idea he was celebrated with his own Institute, adorned with the colorful graffiti of Neapolitan approval. The engraved stone plaque calls him “the glory of Naples.” There’s a waterfront statue. The kind of madman oddity that fits the place.
Another beautiful subway station to scout the port where we’ll take a ferry to Sorrento next day. Pizza on a side street with typical Maradona coverage, walking up to the Toledo looking for place to sit.
When you order pizza here it’s always a whole pizza so we’re each carrying our boxes and splat! — birdshit directly in the middle of the box before my face. An ancient bird sign?…if the box had been open. Now I just had to throw it away, in Napoli not as easy as it sounds.
We found a small wall at the edge of an outdoor restaurant: Is it OK to sit here? “This is Naples, no one cares!” I was confident to say aloud. I just got here, but I knew the place. Eating pizza outside on stone steps, that was life in NYC back when no one cared.
Two guys sat next to us jabbering and also eating pizza. They finish fast and leave. We’d been commenting on the fashion, and this guy was a highlight: red sneakers, shiny golden Dolce & Gabbana shorts. A second later I notice a phone that must have been theirs.
I jog out to the crowded Toledo — the Fifth Ave, the Champs — not knowing which way but knowing he’d be spottable. I chose left and a second later I see the two of them, and run to catch up. Did you lose this? It’s the big guy not golden shorts. He checks his pockets and pulls out a phone. Then immediately, guiltily, says I have two phones, and opens the second phone to prove it. Can we do something for you, you want a coffee? they ask.
One could go on describing similar scenes, each crazier than the last, not to mention the infinite variety of costumes or the hordes of people you meet on the Toledo alone.
Metros and funiculars and walking up to the Castel Sant’Elmo which overlooks the city. The views keep getting better as you wind up through the castle, of the sea and Capri, of the rambling random spreading city, of Vesuvio. This is one of the great urban views, but had I heard of it? Barely. The inevitable questions about castles, monasteries, money, slavery and how the hell they built these things and why that I’ve been asking since Portugal. The long ramped hallways through the castle are easy to walk up as they were built for horse and cart.
This people displays the most ingenious resource, not in getting rich, but in living free from care.
There is still a line in the sand where the “Papal States” end and something darker begins: the peoples of the Mediterranean — Arabs, Africans, Greeks, Sicilians, Maltese, Egyptians, the lands of another western myth, the Odyssey. Its Italian port is Neopolis, literally the Greeks’ new city in the west, founded 3000 years ago.
There is a prejudice against Naples that is a subset of racism against Blacks. The stereotypical Italian — the Chico Marx — is a Southern Italian trope that we are still pretty comfortable with, racism-wise. Of all our European stereotypes, the Italian is the only one who’s either a criminal or a dope.
We didn’t do any of the underground or even indoor things, as the weather was good and walking the streets endlessly fun. The Archeological Museum is the only regret — once we realized, walking Pompeii in the rain the next day, that the all best stuff from Pompeii is stashed back in Naples. And if you think I mean the pornography, you’re right. (Read about it in my latest clickbait: Porn in Pompeii — 5 Things They Don’t Want You To Know!)
In this city of supposed thieves — that I’m supposed to be afraid of — the quaint subway entrances make NYC’s new rat-traps seem barbaric. Restaurant chairs are left overnight stacked but unchained. Kiddie parks downtown are unmarked. There is graffiti everywhere…but not everywhere. Boundaries are apparently respected. Graffiti is an art form in Naples, art and publicity. Public service mixed into its essential rebelliousness and illegality. You would be hard put to tease out this boundary line, but it is where Naples lives.
It is a strange experience for me to be in a society where everyone does nothing but enjoy himself.
In Naples you are in a novel and exotic place that is neither afraid of you nor trying to plunder you. As a traveller you are free. That’s been Napoli for a thousand years.
[Naples unchanging through time accessible via Goethe’s Italian Journey, Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover, and Norman Lewis’s Naples ‘44.]
