Naples: Hot Mess

Spaccanapoli at dawn

Italy is one of the most visited nations on earth. But when it comes to Naples, the country’s third largest city by population, even seasoned travelers go wobbly. “It’s noisy. It’s dirty. And it’s full of crime,” declare the Neapolitanophobes. Even my dear departed grandmother, who sailed to Europe solo before women did such things, who regularly faced the challenges of Palermo, and who joked about rubbing shoulders with capos in Corleone, drew the line at Naples. 

The city’s heritage of endemic corruption is one reason for the bad taste. Another, undoubtedly, is its position as Italy’s major seaport. Many migrants from other parts of the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries either embarked from or transferred to trans-Atlantic vessels at Naples. To men and women from rural areas, the place must have typified all the dangers associated with waterfronts: sin, crime (organized and otherwise), godlessness, tumult. Many of these transient rubes may well have been preyed upon, cementing the city’s legacy in oral tradition. “By all means,” they advised later, “see Rome, Florence, Venice. But stay the hell out of Naples.” And their children and grandchildren passed on the wisdom.

Part of my motivation to finally spend a chunk of time there was borne out of sheer contrariness. No place with such a sun-kissed setting, with close to three millennia of history and a deep patrimony of culture and art, could be entirely without interest. Anyplace so strenuously avoided simply had to be investigated. 

In fact, my interest was piqued first during a one-day glimpse I had of the city in 1994. There, walking down a street whose name I can’t recall, I saw a woman use a rope to lower a basket from her window to the street. There, a peddler took her money and filled the basket with groceries. Then she hauled her purchases back up to the fourth floor. The transaction was quick, silent, and routine as we use an ATM. This was exactly what my grandmother had described as once common on the streets of New York’s Lower East Side. In other words, things you’d need a time machine to see in New York now, they still do in Naples. To someone who has made a career of portraying the past, this was irresistible stuff —I need to go to there stuff.

I went there, dragooning an old friend for company. He’s a classical historian who knows Italy well but has always skirted Naples in favor of Pompeii and Herculaneum. (“A dangerous shithole,” he called it). His preconceptions were not dispelled by the neighborhood I picked for our stay: right in the center of the Centro Storico, the bustling core of the old Greek city of Neapolis. The buildings there seem to hunker together, rubbing grimy shoulders. The streets are like paved corridors, crowded with a mix of merchants, tourists, and university students. The cobbled strip of Naples’ most infamous byway, the Spaccanapoli (“Naples splitter”) runs through it. Nothing seems to be given its proper space here, neither the churches (of which there are many lovely examples) nor the vehicles, nor the businesses. Everything is thrown together and expected to find a way. Indeed, in this old, unpicked knot of humanity I felt what it must have been like to walk an ancient city, far more than in the relatively broad esplanades of modern Rome, or the preserved carcass of Pompeii.

There is a much-debated word that describes this Naples: authentic. I use it not in the sense that everything there has been passed down intact from the past, or untouched by tourism. It is authentic in the sense of not pretending to be anything it is not. Is it dirty, graffitied, and a touch overwhelming? Maybe so. But it is also full of casual beauty, of baroque edifices that bestride the streets like misplaced pieces of bedroom furniture. Of sweet and savory smells wafting from overwhelmingly Mom & Pop businesses (no Starbuck’s here, and the closest McDonald’s is miles away). Of faces that you’ve seen before, in some Dino Risi or Antonioni movie from your college days. And reclining in the center is a marble personification of the Nile, now fashionably bearded, seeing it all unfold since the 2nd century AD…with a sphinx for a pillow.

There’s a proximity here between the elegant and the ghastly that is reminiscent of Mexico City. This is apparent in places like Cappella Sansevero, an architectural gem that was founded in the late 16th century, but reached its final form in the late 18th under the direction of Prince Raimondo di Sangro, polymath and mystic. The baroque sculptures in his chapel, including a veiled Christ rendered in marble, are magisterial, exquisite—the kind of masterpieces that generate lines in Rome or Florence. On this level, di Sangro belongs to that particular intellectual species, the Enlightenment gentleman-scientist, typified by Jefferson or Franklin.  

But in a chamber below the art is displayed something else entirely: di Sangro’s so-called “anatomical machines”. These are life-size figures of a man and a woman with every detail of internal anatomy laid bare, down to the capillaries. For centuries it was suspected these were actual preserved bodies, “plastinated” by some secret process of di Sangro’s invention—perhaps not entirely with the subjects’ informed consent. There was once even an infant “machine”, since disappeared. 

Recent microscopic examination has proven that the figures are not preserved tissue at all, but made of fabric and wire. Still, the Chapel’s combination of beauty and creepiness, and the esoteric symbolism that run through the place, makes it feel uniquely Naples. These eerie, skinless “machines” are just a few yards off the Spaccanapoli, where you get your gelato and tea-towels. 

Plastinated capital

The other Naples—the plastinated remainders of its time as capital of “The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies”— isn’t hard to find. On the the heights of Capodimonte, for instance, with its splendid palazzo, now art museum. From the royal gardens, views extend to the double hump of Vesuvius, the apron of development spread to the Bay, and the distinctive profile of Capri beyond. Or in the monumentality of the Piazza del Plebiscito, embraced by the grandiloquently named Basilica Reale Pontificia San Francesco da Paola, otherwise discernible as Naples’ answer to the Pantheon in Rome, with maybe a little Vatican too. Posh, “official” Naples is there, yet it still has the feel of overripe grandeur, of a dusty library of books long since digitized, but with the finger-smudges and pressed blossoms of books that were used and cherished by human beings.

For the descendants of those who shipped out of here, the legacy is more bittersweet. These green hills, this mountain that disgorged such fertility, once seemed to reject whole generations. To them, the bay was not a simmering picturesque, but a way to sluice away the trash. The view I climbed the Capodimonte to see was the same one my ancestors turned their backs on. And as they slid by the yachts and villas and playgrounds of emperors on Capri, they wondered if they would survive the voyage ahead. For some, that anxiety went on clear over an ocean and a half, until perhaps they saw the low hills of Staten Island, where no emperors ever played. 

Now the trash washes back. Not with any sense of vindication, but with trepidation. After five days in Naples my friend and I went to the Piazza Bellini. A relatively calm, leafy space, prowled by cats who eye the pigeons who eye our crumbs, the piazza is a good place to nurse a prosecco in view of Naples' full profile, from the exposed walls of the Greek polis to the tarted-up townhouses around it. After we’d drunk a little, I asked if our visit had changed his opinion of the city. He thought for a moment, taking in the swath of time around us, the contained physical chaos, and said, “A beguiling shithole.”

© 2019 Nicholas Nicastro