The Secrets of Italy Read online

  The Campanians carried out his instructions with the same slackness and carelessness that they showed in everything else. Hardly more than four hundred country carts were sent and a few draught cattle. Hanno scolded them severely, telling them that even the hunger which rouses the energies of dumb animals failed to stimulate them to exertion. He then fixed another day for them to come for corn provided with much more efficient means of transport.

  So it seems that Naples and its environs had already earned a bad reputation in ancient times. Livy, originally from Padua, way up north, was writing in the first few decades of the Common Era. Years later, the sixteenth-century Calabrian philosopher Tommaso Campanella wrote his own masterpiece, La città del sole (Civitas solis / The City of the Sun), and put these words in the mouth of an imaginary Genoan sea captain, a stand-in for the author himself:

  [T]here are three hundred thousand souls in Naples and not fifty thousand of them work, and these work so hard that they destroy themselves. Meanwhile, the idle ruin themselves in pursuing idleness, avarice, lasciviousness, and usury; and they ruin still others by keeping them in impoverished servitude or by making them parties to their own vices. As a consequence, the public services are not sufficiently attended to. The tasks of the fields, of the camps, and of the crafts are badly performed even with great effort.2

  More time passes, and by the eighteenth century the Age of Enlightenment has dawned. Yet Naples appears to remain the same as ever: according to legend, a German philologist known only by the Italian version of his name, Giovanni Andrea Bühel, claimed that Naples is full of cheats and swindlers, especially when it comes to gambling, and that the Neapolitans’ general temperament is so vile that all other peoples of Italy rightly consider them the worst of the worst.

  Later that same century the Marquis de Sade admits that Via Toledo is one of the most beautiful streets anywhere, but he is quick to add: “[It is also] fetid and filthy … Good Lord, look whose care it is in! Why in the world does Heaven hand such riches to people so incapable of appreciating them?”3

  Matilde Serao—a profoundly Neapolitan writer even though she was born in Patras, Greece—experienced and described Naples from within. Each and every emotion she felt was closely tied to the life of the city and its inhabitants. Here is how she saw it toward the end of the nineteenth century (Il ventre di Napoli, 1884):

  Crumbling houses, dead-end streets, a haven for filth of all sorts: everything remains as it has always been, so dirty it is disgusting, not a street cleaner nor garbage collector in sight, not a soul to peek in and safeguard the city’s sanitation … A writhing maze of alleyways and blackened lanes where even the noonday sun never shines, not a ray of light penetrates. The ground is covered with years of accumulated muck, and rubbish collects in great piles, in every corner—everything is dark and depraved.

  How curious it is, then, that seventy years later the lead character of Anna Maria Ortese’s book Il mare non bagna Napoli4 (1953) describes an almost identical scene: “[The streets are dotted by] arched niches, blackened by time, with brightly lit candles encircling the grieving Virgin Mary; the ground is white with soapy water, strewn with cabbage leaves, bits of paper, litter, and—in the middle of the courtyard—the usual group of wretched souls dressed in rags, their faces pock-marked by poverty and utter resignation.”

  Benedetto Croce, a major philosopher and adoptive Neapolitan, published an essay titled “A Paradise Inhabited by Devils” in the early twentieth century.5 This proverbial saying about Naples dates back as far as the fourteenth century. Croce’s text tries to explain the roots of the phrase, perhaps inspired by “the spectacle of feudal anarchy that the city represented to citizens coming from the peninsula’s central and northern towns and republics … the spectacles of poverty and sloth and their attendant vices, all of which made an impression on the merchants coming to Naples from Florence and Lucca and Pisa and the Veneto and Genoa to conduct trade.” He concludes:

  If we still accept this ancient criticism today … it is solely because we feel it might act as a whip to prod us into shape, a lash to keep us consciously aware of our duty. Viewed from that perspective, we are not so concerned about how true the saying is; it is to our benefit to believe it absolutely true, such that it becomes increasingly untrue.

  This list could go on forever, as it seems most voyagers who embarked on the grand tour generally had a strongly negative reaction to Naples. But there are a few exceptions—illustrious ones, at that. Stendhal, for example, called Naples the most beautiful city in the universe. Goethe wrote that he spent his entire time in Naples contemplating magnificent things. Norman Douglas compared the city to an ancient amphora extracted from the depths of the sea: it is covered in algae and incrustations that make it nearly unrecognizable, but the eye of an expert immediately sees the beauty of its original form.

  Who are we to believe? Who most accurately captured the city’s core features, which—like any complex place—can be viewed from many different perspectives? The Neapolitan writer Raffaele La Capria calls his hometown a città bifronte, literally a two-faced city, much like the ancient Roman god Janus, with one face looking to the past and one peering toward the future. Depending on how you look at it, Naples can be either completely desperate or absolutely happy—sometimes both.

  Perhaps the real dilemma of Naples is the fact that whatever judgment you make about it could be considered correct. Its magnificence and abjection, its beauty and horror, its kindness and cruelty all seem to come from the distant past. But if Naples were only a place of horror and savagery, as news reports often lead us to believe, then it wouldn’t even be worth the slightest consideration; we would not bother to even wonder how what goes on there can go on.

  In a book titled Le strade della violenza (“Streets of Violence”), the Salerno-born writer and politician Isaia Sales uses cold hard numbers to expose the extent of Naples’s ongoing massacre: more than 3,500 people killed by the camorra over twenty-five years, a number that would warrant the label of civil war. The city is in the grip of criminal gangs that are at once both archaic and postmodern, whose rites are modeled on ancient traditions, primitive pagan cults, and Christian practices as well as movies and television shows. They express themselves through pop singers and poets, and live in a realm quite far from any semblance of civil society. Sales describes the culture, the lifestyle, and the world that produced this socially perverted phenomenon. The same things Sales portrays in terms of economic sociology are also addressed by Roberto Saviano in his bestselling book Gomorrah, a voyage into the economic empire and power-hungry aspirations of the camorra.6 The book is even more shocking than one might expect, since its episodes are taken from the lives of men, women, teens, and even children. Saviano himself grew up in the area, where the only valid laws are those set by the camorra, where every teenager dreams of getting his hands on a gun, money, women, fast cars—and of dying like a “real man”: being shot by someone.

  It is true, as the Neapolitan essayist Enzo Golino wrote a few years ago, that in Naples and throughout southern Italy “the camorra’s code of silence and amoral familism, in both politics and among circles of relatives, have been a defining aspect of society for many centuries.”7 This is a point worth keeping in mind, and we will come back to it later. But Naples has never been, nor is it today, shaped solely by that. In the eighteenth century it was one of the main musical and theatrical capitals of Europe. Its musicians’ refined performances were widely renowned, as were the innovative stagings produced in theaters, churches, private institutions, and the homes of the wealthy. The Neapolitan operatic tradition—with its school including Giovanni Paisiello, Alessandro Scarlatti, and Domenico Cimarosa, to name only the most famous—set the tone for the entire century. These composers’ subtle use of the human voice and joyous melody are unrivaled. It took the arrival of Mozart for the Neapolitan school to fall from its first-place ranking.

  During the Enlightenment, shifting attentions—the rediscovery of
antiquity through the ruins of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and the temples at Paestum; the enchantment of the Neapolitan seaside, the Amalfi coast, and the gulf islands; as well as the area’s golden light, lush gardens, and scented breezes—once again gave the city the aura so aptly captured by the ancient Roman name for the region, Campania felix, “fertile countryside.”

  While all that was happening and the area’s natural beauty unveiled itself to the eyes of ecstatic visitors, the flip side of the coin was that, with equal eloquence, Naples’s other face—its darker, more evil side—began to surface as well. It moved the great Victorian writer Charles Dickens to write to his friend John Forster: “What would I give that you should see the lazzaroni as they really are—mere squalid, abject, miserable animals for vermin to batten on; slouching, slinking, ugly, shabby, scavenging scarecrows!”8

  These lazzari or lazzaroni, which I briefly mentioned in the previous chapter, seemed to live on nothing, doing nothing. They were often covered in rags and eked out an existence doing occasional odd jobs, pulling scams, pickpocketing, and thievery. The city’s tempered climate, sunshine, and lavish nature certainly helped them out a lot. Among the upper classes, enlightened citizens attempted to establish a Parthenopean Republic in 1799, and some of the city’s best intellects joined in the effort: Vincenzo Cuoco, Domenico Cirillo, Mario Pagano, Gennaro Serra, Francesco Caracciolo, and courageous women like Luisa Sanfelice and Eleonora Pimentel Fonseca. But it did not last long, and, like the Roman Republic of 1849 a half-century later, was destined to remain a brief yet glorious experiment. The Neapolitan writer Enzo Striano made the Portuguese-born Eleonora Pimentel Fonseca the heroine of his superb novel Il resto di niente (1986). In one of its toughest scenes, some of the aforementioned enlightenment thinkers turn onto a filthy side street in an attempt to convince the riotous populace to rebel in the name of liberty. The noble progressive’s speech is met with ridicule and scorn until the lead lazzarone gives his brutal dismissal, in dialect: “La libertà ve la tenite pe’ vvuie! Sai addo’ l’avit’a mettere? Dinto a lo mazzo de màmmeta!” (“You can keep your freedom to yourself! Know what you can do with it? Shove it up your mother’s ass!”). As Vincenzo Cuoco wrote in his book about the short-lived revolution, Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana del 1799: “The Neapolitan patriots were great idealists but terrible politicians. They held their tottering republic upright by way of outsized illusions and minuscule accomplishments, ardent proposals and insufficient means. Thus it vacillated between comedy and tragedy, until the latter finally prevailed.”

  As we saw in the last chapter, this unrealistic republic was ultimately crushed by the troops of the so-called Army of the Faith led by Cardinal Ruffo, supported by Horatio Nelson’s naval fleet and the many lazzari who almost unanimously lined up in favor of restoring Bourbon rule, which they felt was more fitting for them than that word they found so unsettling: liberty.

  Another sixty years passed before Garibaldi and his legendary army of volunteers finally brought the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to an end.

  It has often been written—even recently—that Garibaldi’s famous expedition and fight for Italian unification was actually an act of oppression, a huge overthrow, a criminal trespass. But even a thousand men, valiant as they may have been, would certainly not have been enough to defeat an entire kingdom were it not already rotting from within; all it took was a little push, and it toppled.

  From September 27 to 30, 1943, Naples starred in yet another major historic event. Groups of civilians—including many teenagers, with assistance from pro-southern militants known as badogliani9—rose up against the Nazi occupation of the city. By the time the Allied troops arrived on October 1, the people of Naples had already kicked the German troops out, becoming the first European city to rise up against the occupying army during World War II. Sporadic revolts against the occupiers had begun with the announcement of the armistice on September 9. The period of confusion that followed was punctuated by acts of great cowardice and unprecedented courage, in almost equal measure. To give just one example: on September 9 on Via Foria, a group of soldiers captured a German tank, taking twenty prisoners. The Italian military command, upon learning of the capture, ordered the Germans’ release. It was total chaos, no one knew who to obey anymore. The Italian soldiers had thought they were undertaking a commendable action, and instead found themselves literally tied up in the Bianchini barracks, a building already partially destroyed by the bombardments, risking an unfortunate end.

  The city and its port were repeatedly bombed by British and American forces. More than twenty-five thousand people were killed, and the city’s buildings and monuments were significantly damaged as well. One of the buildings hit was the eighteenth-century barracks designed by Luigi Vanvitelli for the Bourbon cavalry, later renamed in honor of the Neapolitan military captain Edoardo Bianchini. The uselessly heroic act of those young Neapolitan soldiers ended up with their brief imprisonment amid its crumbling walls.

  The damage already done by Mussolini’s disastrous war and all the bombardments was then aggravated by the Nazis’ harsh reprisals following the declaration of armistice. German colonel Walter Schöll proclaimed a state of siege and ordered that anyone acting against the German troops be executed. For every German killed, one hundred Neapolitans would pay with their lives. The ferocious acts of terrorism that followed included the execution of a young sailor on the steps leading up to the university, with German troops forcing hundreds of people to watch. Neapolitan acts of sabotage against the occupiers were sporadic yet incessant, while the Germans continued their summary executions, round-ups, and sacking. Colonel Schöll stood rigid in his uniform, utterly unaware of basic human psychology, and reacted in the worst way possible. On September 22 he ordered the evacuation of the city’s coast, clearing out a swath of land three hundred meters wide all along the seashore. In just a few hours, thousands of people were forced to abandon their homes, and you can imagine how they felt about that. A few hours later all men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-three were ordered to report immediately to the German prefecture, to then be sent to do forced labor in Germany. Basically, it was a mass deportation. Anyone who failed to report would be executed. Only a few hundred men, out of an estimated thirty thousand, responded.

  On September 27 the Germans forcibly rounded up nearly eight thousand men, whereupon the Neapolitans’ accumulated exasperation finally exploded. A few hundred people who had stolen arms from the Germans’ depositories launched an attack that raged on for the next four days, amid clashes, skirmishes, and improvised tactics of urban guerrilla warfare. People of all socioeconomic levels—doctors, priests, young women, students, and the city’s street urchins (known in dialect as scugnizzi)—took to the streets, driven by sheer misery, hunger, fear, and the desire to end the nightmare by any means necessary. The lower- and middle-class citizens were joined by soldiers from troops that had disbanded on September 8.10 The men who had been imprisoned and slated for deportation were freed. They were under no directives, nor did they have any contact with organized partisan groups—their battle was general, spontaneous, impassioned, and led primarily by self-appointed commanders representing their own apartment buildings, city blocks, and neighborhoods.

  Despite the Germans’ superior weapons capabilities, armored cars, and discipline, Colonel Schöll understood he would eventually have to negotiate a deal. His counterpart was a young lieutenant from the Royal Italian Army, Enzo Stimolo. Schöll was granted a route by which to withdraw from Naples in exchange for releasing his hostages. But the retreat was not painless. He continued his path of destruction right to the very end, complete with ferocious, pointless, and criminal acts, such as torching the priceless documents held in the state archives. The Germans, generally known to be highly respectful toward culture, behaved like barbarians blinded by wrath, but for the first time in their broader European occupation they were forced to deal with insurgent civilians as equals. In recognition of the Four Days
of Naples, as the uprising became known, the city was awarded the gold medal of military valor.

  After Liberation, during the postwar period the city seemed to have lost the impassioned energy of those exceptional days. In his reportage-infused novel La pelle (The Skin, 1949),11 the controversial writer Curzio Malaparte illustrates the Neapolitans’ conditions and state of mind with the vivid, macabre colors of a prose that deftly mixes the blue of the sea with the red of blood—buffoonery and obscenity with tragedy, inventiveness, resignation, hunger, and abuse. In the chapter “The Virgin of Naples,” the author and an American lieutenant enter a tenement where visitors are invited to admire an actual virgin, laid out, legs splayed apart. For a dollar, they are allowed to test her virginity with their own fingers. All the book’s episodes have a similar tenor: Neapolitan women’s pubic wigs are blond because the American “negroes” like blondes; one scene describes a homosexual orgy with a strap-on; another scene portrays a group of monstrous dwarfs as if they were painted by Hieronymus Bosch. The overall impression is that of a city populated by thieves, ruffians, and whores where any- and everyone is ready to sell their body for a song or some basic staple. All traces of dignity are gone, and rather than returning to its usual flow, life in the city slithers along instead, in the most degrading way possible. Malaparte’s stories are based on his actual experiences, expanded by his vivid imagination, his expressionistic and lush prose, and the dreamlike distortions by which his writing reshapes reality. I do not know whether Fellini ever read his work, but many of their characters’ “monstrosities,” deformations, and excesses (at least from La dolce vita onward) reveal that these two men had a similarly attentive, distorted, realistic yet hallucinatory vision.