Naples
God’s Country
Hear it in the voices, breathe it in the air: Mount Vesuvius lives in Naples’ shadow, never the other way around.
In Naples, magic grows within the contradictions: Baroque grit, strange familiarity, life shimmering in alleys enshrined by the dead and the defied. Smell it, taste it, listen to it – within those tensions exists something other than human.
The Kingdom
The bus swayed into the city under the weight of around 40 passengers, cramped around awkward luggage. Rain drops raced across a cloudy window, behind which the city began to unfurl its wings. Flapping in the coastal wind, streaks of blue and white ribbed every street, complimented by flags, banners and quasi-religious iconography.
For the first time since 1990, Napoli had won the Scudetto, Italy’s premier football league; a victory that shook the city into an eruption that gave Mount Vesuvius fever dreams. Just as Vesuvian ash encrusts Pompeii, so too streaks of blue-and-white had settled on Italy’s third largest city.
In 1861, the Kingdom of Two Sicilies – which included the former Kingdom of Naples – was incorporated into the newly unified Kingdom of Italy. With political power centred in Rome and industrialisation in Milan and Turn, Naples and much of Southern Italy remained largely agricultural with high levels of illiteracy and a strong Catholic influence.
In the decades following, the city reeled from high levels of poverty, crime and public health crises, soon becoming maligned as the villain in the drama of Italian unification: destitute, dangerous and dirty.
Neapolitans, however, came to adopt this tarnished reputation and transform it into a sense of regional pride. To be from Naples is more than a geographic fact. It is the basis of an identity.
The city baptised me on a 20-minute walk from Port’s bus terminal to the Centro Storico, leading across the wide boulevards that characterise the coastal edge of the city before delving into the cobbled veins of the old town. My room was tucked inside a tightly packed courtyard, adorned with washing lines and electricity wires and concealed by an enormous wooden door weathered by graffiti. What other stories does that door conceal, I wondered, before a being interrupted by the deep clang of a broomstick on air conditioning unit.
To be from Naples is more than a geographic fact. It is the basis of an identity.
Dios
Moving upwards and away from the Centro Storico on Montesanto station’s funicular, the city’s tone changed like a transition between theatre sets. Crowded corners become leafier and the choir became a hum. From the busy arteries of the old town, the funicular delivered me onto a quiet, winding road leading to the foot of the impregnable Castel Nuovo, where the city rolled out before me like a carpet of spires, domes and red-roofed apartments encased by a mist that erased the world beyond those walls. And yet there – centre-stage, spotlit by a patch of sunshine – the Quartieri Spagnoli was the whole world.
Open windows and doors became portals: the nonna with the floral blouse, the child with chestnut hair playing at her feet, the boxy television in the corner below a tile-sized vignette of Santa Maria on cracked white wall. Motorbikes shot by unwaveringly, often ridden by wiry children in flip-flops, bouncing on the cobbles as they went.
Does God exist? It’s one of life’s heavier questions, but for Neapolitans, He not only existed but was an Argentinian who wore a light-blue shirt with the number 10 on the back.
In the heart of the Quartieri is a shrine to Diego Maradona, the hero who put Naples on his back, embodied its imperfections and its passions, defied the bourgeois prejudices, fought the chants of ‘NAPOLI COLERA’ and led the city to its first ever Scudetto - an achievement that had less to do with the sport than the character of a city that had been kicked to the curb.
One mural occupies the wall of an apartment block, below which stands a cabinet containing artefacts of Diego’s life in Naples including photographs, memorabilia and – the centrepiece – a portrait of the curly locks and a magnetic glint hanging above a small statue of Jesus dressed in the light-blue and white of Napoli.
The Spaces In-Between
Naples’ charm isn’t Roman or Milanese. It is not about Colosseums and grand piazzas. It is a painfully relatable beauty that is best experienced in the morning, delivered by dogs trailing their owners in blissful ignorance, by empty beer bottles rattling along the cobbles as they are swept into rubbish bags, by pizza boxes towering on street corners as squawking seagulls bicker over discarded crusts.
Bleary eyes are flushed by volcanic espresso and a rum-soaked sponge cake called babá, a Neapolitan favourite. Fresh sunlight promises Mediterranean warmth, while pastel walls cast breezy shadows.
The Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, as well as being an attractive destination for students, historians and artists, is an exhibition of this honest beauty in itself. Its weathered pink exterior is fringed by murky grey limestone. Century-old statues line its corridors, fixed perpetually in poses of vigour and vulnerability; Greek, Roman, Jewish and Catholic histories intertwining in their marble expressions. Its grandiose exit faces the Galleria Principe di Napoli, an arcade lined with graffiti, litter and small tents.
As the curtain falls, crowds old and young gather in the Piazza Bellini. Bereted couples sink Spritz’s, skinny jeaned youth smoke cigarettes and a towering policeman in military boots stands guard with an automatic rifle. A pair of destitute men sit on a bench a few feet away, separate but never entirely removed from the scene. Church bells ring.
Naples speaks to you the same way a God might: in bursts of light cutting through the mist, in the gaps between sentences, in the spaces between the living and the dead.
‘Vedi Napoli e poi muori’ they say. ‘See Naples and die.’
MM
