A jaunt to Naples

"You're going to Italy? What happened, what's wrong?"
"You went to Naples? Wait, people just don't go to Naples [for no reason]."
- Two friends who will remain anonymous

Well, nothing was wrong and nothing went wrong. I was visiting my college friend Cassie who lives and works in Italy's second city, and this visit presented the perfect opportunity to get out of Poland for at least a little bit.

Naples is a messy, disorganized, crowded and absolutely fascinating city. In general I would say that it is a jumble that teeters on the brink of constant chaos but somehow manages. In general, I appreciated the very palpable energy in the air that was by and large not accompanied by thoroughly crabby people as it is in certain places like New York. The fact that it was 55 degrees F (+12 C) and sunny also did wonders for my mood.

As my host was extremely busy with work and other commitments I had the opportunity to wander around the city on my own and see what there was to see without any particular plan but with the aid of a good map. While I did see the archaeological museum, a few underground excavations, a museum in an old monastery, Pompeii and Herculaneum (which I will discuss separately) and the soccer team manage a very disappointing 0-0 draw, the vast majority of my time was spent just collecting impressions of the place, which I would argue is in some ways a much more edifying way of conducting tourism than taking a high-speed tour of a bunch of museums in a gaggle of other tourists.

The historic city center is pretty darn historic: it's built on medieval ruins which are built on Roman ruins which are, in some cases, built on Greek ruins. There are actually underground tours of Naples where it is possible to see old Roman reservoirs and the remains of a theater. Some of those remains have actually been incorporated as structural elements in present houses, i.e. the Roman ruins are still actively holding the city up. Our tour-guide added that the modern city is also actively holding the ruins together. Bulldoze the modern city and the ruins underneath will collapse. What makes this even more interesting is the fact that all of this is taking place in a seismically-active zone next to Mt. Vesuvius, which is one of the 16 most dangerous volcanoes on Earth. This thought rather uncomfortably entered my head as our tour was squeezing through a passageway that was about 150 m long by 6 m tall by 60 cm wide (that's about 500 feet by 20 feet by 2 feet).

The soccer game was an interesting experience. We sat, or rather stood, in the cheap seats in "Curva A", which I think will provoke amusement here in Poland. Most remarkable was how quiet the game could be. Now, I don't mean quiet in the sense that there wasn't any noise, because the fans in Curva A and B could be very raucous and noisy. However, all of the cheering was very organized: the same cheer would go up from thousands of throats at the same time, led by a few designated cheerleaders. In between these cheers, there was this awkward silence. A typical American stadium has a constant din to it, a kind of low-level hum, at more or less all times with particular events such as a home run or touchdown sparking louder cheering which settles back into that humming. Here, the loud cheering after some event would settle down into silence. It was kind of unnerving and vaguely reminiscent of Fascism: massive, organized chants led by a few, that start and stop on command, extremely dedicated partisans who simply must go to these kinds of events even if not coerced, only that instead of chants pledging undying allegiance to a leader (Mussolini, to pick one entirely at random), you hear chants pledging undying allegiance to a soccer team.

Speaking of Il Duce, I actually saw his portrait in a couple of prominent locations, including at one point on a calendar hanging over a cash register in a cafe. Now in the States at least, if people think of Mussolini at all, it is as a half-comical figure: if there's a joke you'd love to crack about Nazis but can't because it's a little too dark or politically-incorrect, such a joke can usually be made at the expense of the Italian Fascists instead. For example, Woody Allen, in a film-within-a-film segment of Crimes and Misdemeanors, has the Alan Alda character rave out with a jump-cut to Mussolini raving out. Had the cut been to Hitler, I think most Americans would not have found the scene as funny. One of the coffee stands at Pitt has what is very obviously a pastiche of an Italian propaganda poster that encourages people to drink espresso. In Italy the feelings towards Mussolini appear more complicated. I once heard an Italian talk about how he killed "millions" of people, and while that's probably an exaggeration, Il Duce was not a nice guy, and he also chose some rather unfortunate allies in 1940. However, the fact that people can publicly display Mussolini memorabilia in Naples, in a country where everybody knows who that guy is, suggests that a number of people probably still regard him fondly. If I had to hazard a guess, that kind of affection could be analogous to the feelings that some Yugoslavs have for Tito, for instance: he may have been mean and nasty, but at least the country worked for a change when he was in charge.

Italian driving is all that it is cracked up to be, namely, absolutely insane. I saw a couple motorcycles use a pedestrian crosswalk. Another motorcycle featured a guy with a rather large golden retriever lying on his lap. At one point I stood under a "senso unico" sign, and apparently the Italians don't know what that means either. Three or four motorcycles came roaring the wrong way down this narrow one-way street with nobody batting an eye. There is a large, divided boulevard near the U.S. consulate by the sea, and there are breaks in the divider between the directions of traffic to allow people to turn left by first turning right and pulling a U-turn down the street somewhere. Well, one guy wasn't willing to go through all that trouble, so he just turned left into the left lane of oncoming traffic, rolled about 50 meters to the next gap and went on his merry way. Considering that nobody so much as honked a horn, this was a normal-enough maneuver. In general I found that as long as a driver (or a pedestrian, for that matter) was clear in his intention, aggressive enough to carry it out, and correctly judged that it wouldn't disrupt the flow of traffic too much, even if such a maneuver was completely crazy the other drivers would adjust. To cross a street, for example, it sometimes paid to not wait for a particular "break" but just to walk into traffic and hope for the best. I don't think I want to see the kind of driving that would actually result in the Italian police giving somebody a ticket. In an amazing coincidence, car insurance premiums in Italy are the highest of any EU country. 

Surprisingly, English was largely between very bad and nonexistent, even in the tourist areas. I got the impression that this wasn't out of a desire to seem "authentic", out of the pride in linguistic ignorance sometimes displayed by some Frenchmen and some Americans, or out of a desire to screw tourists by erecting an artificial language barrier. In general I found that people genuinely tried to understand me when I spoke, would throw in what words of English they knew, and between my very bad to nonexistent Italian, their very bad to nonexistent English, and the hand-waving that accompanies fluent conversation in Italian we were able to communicate simple things like the fact that I wanted one canolo and that I owed 1.50 Euro for it.  Also that we all liked the Napoli soccer team.

Strangely enough, on a number of occasions I met people in the street who steadfastly refused to believe that I did not speak Italian. At least twice, someone asked me something in Italian on a bus or train, to which I replied "non parlo Italiano" with a look of what I hope was pleasant confusion. They just kept right on talking. Once I decided to respond in Polish, and that quieted the fellow right down. He must have assumed I was some kind of crazy person making a bunch of odd noises! 

The first time I was in Italy 3 years ago I was able to communicate by speaking Spanish but throwing in what Italian I was able to pick up. Unfortunately this plan didn't work as well this time for two reasons: 1) I haven't spoken or studied Spanish in years and 2) I kept thinking in and speaking in Polish by mistake. My Polish was never so good as when it did me absolutely no good. 

In general I found the people to be very gracious and friendly. I may have been overcharged or cheated a couple of times, but the amount was so small and other party so pleasant I didn't really mind too much (and lest I be accused of perpetuating stereotypes I should stress that the overwhelming majority of the people I dealt with were perfectly honest and/or transparent about trying to get me to buy more stuff, e.g. "are you sure you don't want fries with that?") However, there is a slightly darker side to all this: people just seemed a little too friendly. And in fact I understand that one downside of living there is that you're never quite sure who your friends really are. Someone could pat your back one day only to drive a knife through it the next.

Naples definitely has a dark undercurrent to it, and has had that undercurrent for some time. Indeed, Al Capone's family originally came from the outskirts of town. My grandfather went through the city during World War II, and said that Naples was the only place on earth he knew of where entire trucks could disappear as if into thin air, with nobody seeing anything or saying anything. More alarmingly, I understand that today from time to time people disappear into thin air with nobody seeing or saying anything. When we went out for dinner one night we went into the Spanish Quarter, which I understand is a Mafia stronghold. When we got to the restaurant it was interesting to note a guy standing about 100 meters from the door, kind of half-blocking the street. We bade him good evening and walked on, but this guy was either watching the cars that had been parked in the street or otherwise functioning as some kind of picket. After dinner, once we had gotten to a main shopping street that borders the Spanish Quarter, it was interesting to note police patrols roaring up and down the deserted street. On this Monday night around midnight we were approached by a group of street toughs who could not have been more than about 15, with one guy who wasn't old enough to shave strutting like a bantam rooster and trying to bum cigarettes off of us. I saw one of the kids light up. He could not have been more than 11 or 12. Further along, I was surprised by a great deal of commotion and shouting behind me and to my right. Before I got a chance to look around, two punks around 18 circled our group like a shark would. Apparently one of our number had looked at those guys the wrong way. Just looked, not said anything or gestured, just looked the wrong way. They buzzed off, content to just intimidate as ultimately there were 5 of us and only 2 of them.

On the train to Pompeii and Herculaneum the half-hour train ride featured about 8 beggars making the rounds up and down entire train cars, some while playing accordions. At least 4 of them were kids one of whom was probably about 6. I've never seen anything like it in Poland. This is not to say there aren't panhandlers in Krakow, only that all of them are at least 18. Across from the National Museum under the arcades of what is by day a shopping mall and gallery about 20-30 homeless settle down for the night. I saw another one or two sleeping in one of the side-chapels of the Cathedral.

Cassie also let me in on one of the great contradictions of Italy: despite the fact that when it comes to driving and pretty much everything else anything goes, the society is very rigid. Not only is upward mobility difficult, but things like what grades you get in school are based largely on what kind of reputation you have. She said she had had trouble with a school administrator when she gave higher grades to certain people than that administrator believed they deserved. This was not a case of the administrator actually looking at any of the work and disagreeing with how it was graded. It was more along the lines of "Giorgio is a C student. Why did you give him an A?" Furthermore, young Italians are usually expected to be only one thing when they grow up: Giuseppe is one of our prize first-graders, an A student, he's going to be a doctor. Giorgio is a C student and will grow up to be a no-account. Furthermore, the opportunities to become rich in Italy are generally limited to those with the necessary connections and experience, i.e. those who are rich already.

These are only some of the impressions I carried away from only 5 days in this city. As I said, it is rich, complicated, and absolutely fascinating.