Summers Alla Napoletana: Summers Neapolitan Style

By Ryszard Linkiewicz

Summers Alla Napoletana is the story of a boy growing up in and around the slums of Naples in the late nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties. Based on personal memories of real events, places, and people, the story follows the disruption of migration and family separation. It tells of a timeless city in a time that has become, in the modern West, some sort of golden halcyon era. This is an atypical account of the sixties. It is not the usual story of baby boomers growing up in middle-class American suburbia but an insiders account of a world few people ever get to see or read about.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Nov 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524517410

Ryszard Linkiewicz

Ryszard Linkiewicz was born in London on August 11, 1953. My father was Polish, and my mother was Italian. They met in Italy during the war, and after he was demobilized, Dad chose to stay in England. My mother joined him in England in 1948, and they were married in a small church in Princes Risborough. When I was born, they were living in a bedsitting room in Goldhawk Road, Shepherd’s Bush. As neither of them spoke English, they found it hard to find work. Dad worked at a Wall’s sausage factory, and Mum worked in a radio factory. We moved around a lot when I was young. Finally, they bought their first house in Neasden when I was about five years old. I went to school there, and in 1963, we immigrated to South Africa. After a year in South Africa, where I completed primary school, my parents decided to return to England as the situation in South Africa was not safe. Upon our return to England, we lived above a butcher’s shop in Muswell Hill, North London. I started secondary school at Priory Vale Secondary Modern. After about eight months, we moved to Teddington, where Dad had gained employment as manager of another butcher’s shop. Again, we lived in a flat above the shop until my parents had enough money to buy a house in a nearby street. I changed school and attended Teddington County Secondary School. Just after my O levels, my father decided to immigrate to Australia, and we arrived in Sydney in March 1970 as “ten pound Poms.”

Book preview

Copyright © 2016 by Ryszard Linkiewicz. 740325

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016915019

ISBN:   Softcover     978-1-5245-1742-7

             Hardcover   978-1-5245-1743-4

             EBook         978-1-5245-1741-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 09/16/2016

Xlibris

1-800-455-039

www.xlibris.com.au

Contents

CHAPTER I - PIAZZA TARSIA.

CHAPTER TWO: PIGNASECCA

CHAPTER THREE: WHEN GROWN-UPS SLEEP.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE TURKEY

CHAPTER FIVE: THE DARTBOARD

CHAPTER SIX: RETURN TO EDEN

CHAPTER SEVEN: SOCCAVO

CHAPTER EIGHT: JOHNNY WALKER.

CHAPTER NINE: I LUPETTI. (Wolf Cubs)

CHAPTER TEN: AMALFI.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE AMERICANS

CHAPTER TWELVE: POMPEI

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: SAINTS, BEGGARS AND SCUGNIZZI.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: ‘A SPIAGGIA

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: CAPRI

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: TRACES

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: ROMA

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: TRASTEVERE.

CHAPTER NINETEEN: NOLA

CHAPTER TWENTY: ROMA (AGAIN)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: ADDIO NAPOLI.

Synopsis:

‘Summers alla napoletana’ is the story of a boy growing up in and around the slums of Naples in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties. Based on personal memories of real events, places and people, the story follows the disruption of migration and family separation. It tells of a timeless city in a time that has become, in the modern West, some sort of halcyon, Golden era. This is an atypical account of the Sixties. It is not the usual story of Baby Boomers growing up in middle-class American suburbia but an insider’s account of a world few people ever get to see or read about.

Biography:

Ryszard Linkiewicz, born in London, 11th. August 1953. My father was Polish and my mother was Italian. They met in Italy during the war and, after he was demobilised, Dad chose to stay in England. My mother joined him in England in 1948 and they were married in a small church in Princes Risborough, When I was born, they were living in a bedsitting room in Goldhawk Road, Shepherds Bush. As neither of them spoke English they found it hard to find work. Dad worked in the ‘Walls’ sausage factory and Mum worked in a radio factory. We moved around a lot when I was young, finally, they bought their first house in Neasden when I was about five years old. I went to school there and in 1963 we emigrated to South Africa. After a year in South Africa where I completed primary school, my parents decided to return to England as the situation in South Africa was not safe. Upon our return to England we lived above a butcher’s shop in Muswell Hill, North London. I started secondary school at Priory Vale Secondary Modern. After about eight months, we moved to Teddington where Dad had gained employment as manager of another butcher’s shop. Again, we lived in a flat above the shop until my parents had enough money to buy a house in a nearby street. I changed school and attended Teddington County Secondary School. Just after my ‘O’ Levels, my father decided to immigrate to Australia and we arrived in Sydney in March 1970 as ‘£10 Poms’. I completed my secondary schooling at Ashfield Boys’ High School, gaining a Commonwealth Scholarship to attend the University of Sydney. After deciding that medicine wasn’t for me I completed a B.A. with honours. Soon after graduation I married a girl I had met in Orientation Week in the Great Hall of Sydney University. I took up a job in teaching because that was all that was available, then I completed a Diploma of Education at the University of New England followed by a Master’s degree. I have four children, one of whom is intellectually disabled. I am still married to the same girl and I’m still a teacher.

30126.png

CHAPTER I - PIAZZA TARSIA.

Sta Napule, riggina d’ ’e ssirene, ca cchiù ‘a guardammo e cchiù ‘a volimmo bbene

Totò

This Naples, queen of the Sirens, that the more we look at her the more we love her.

Antonio De Curtis, alias Totò

You could see Mount Vesuvius from my nonna’s bedroom window. On the top floor of the old palazzo in Piazza Tarsia, my grandparents’ small flat had one of the best views a small boy could want. In the distance was the famous volcano and I used to sit at the window and just gaze at that mysterious mountain, almost willing it to erupt so that I could experience the same kind of awe and excitement that my mother had experienced when she saw the 1944 eruption. On a clear day, I could pick out the small white farmhouse on the volcano’s slope, which had been miraculously spared when the lava flow split into two just a hundred yards above the house. My mother told me of the spectacular sight of the lava flow at night, of the shades of gold and red glowing on the mountainside, lighting up the night sky while fresh explosions illuminated the smoke plume over the crater. I tried to imagine what it must have looked like, superimposing onto the scene before me the descriptions given by my mother, Zia Isa, Nonno, Zio Cesare and Zio Dino. Sometimes I’d wait for a full moon when the outline of Vesuvius was clearly visible against the night sky and, while the grown-ups were sitting around the dinner table, talking loudly about the day’s events and planning for the following day, I’d creep into the bedroom and sit at the window, looking over the moonlit rooves of the city at the volcano. The lowest parts of the slopes were clothed in a fine lacework of lights, tracing the limits of human impudence, and halfway up the slope was a single pinprick of light from the farmhouse. I could almost see the forked lava flowing, slowly moving towards the lights and once, when there was a luna rosa — a salmon-pink full moon — I could have sworn I saw something glowing in the crater.

Summer holidays in Naples were magical times. Leaving my father behind in London, my mother would take me ‘home’ to see her parents (my nonna and nonno), three brothers (Zio Cesare, Zio Dino and Zio Luciano) and two sisters (Zia Isa and Zia Carmela). They lived in a dilapidated palace in Piazza Tarsia, Naples. My grandparents had moved into Palazzo Tarsia shortly after the end of the war. Previously, they were living in Spaccanapoli, in Via San Biagio ai Librai, down towards Via Duomo.

It was a two-day trip by train to cover the more than one thousand miles (about 1600 kilometres) from London to Naples. Starting at Victoria Station’s platform number two, we would board the Golden Arrow train that would take us to Paris via the Dover to Calais Ferry. I remember looking up at the front of the locomotive and admiring the crossed Union flag and French Tricolor forming a ‘V’ under the train’s distinctive emblem: the name ’Golden Arrow’ in gold capital letters superimposed on a golden arrow placed diagonally across the round front of the boiler in a ‘ten-to-four’ position with the arrowhead pointing at the imaginary number four. The first French words I learned were ‘Flèche d’Or’, the French name of the train that was sometimes added to the English. At 11 a.m. the green Britannia 4-6-2 steam engine belched and hissed, the deep foomph, foomph, foomph of the smoke erupting out of the funnel reverberated through the station. A couple of fast spins of the driving wheels, as they struggled to gain some traction on the damp rails, set the train into clanking slow motion, like a reptile awaking after a long hibernation. The rhythmic booming of the steam blasts quickened and increased in volume as the train accelerated towards the open air. After leaving the grimy iron and glass cavern of Victoria Station, the train steamed strongly and steadily across the Thames then on past the Battersea Power Station and the south-western suburbs of London — Clapham, Brixton, Herne Hill, West Dulwich and through the tunnel under Sydenham and Crystal Palace, Beckenham and Bromley — before heading through the Vale of Kent and the lush, green Kentish countryside, from Tonbridge to Ashford, through the Shakespeare Cliff tunnel, with its curious, vertically elongated, bullet-shaped entrances, until it reached Dover. The first 70 miles of our journey were over and now, at Dover, the complicated shunting that placed the train on the ferry would begin and I would eagerly anticipate watching the White Cliffs of Dover disappearing behind us into the salt-spray mist. Sometimes, on a clear day, I’d be able to see both French and English coastlines quite clearly from the ferry as it passed the halfway point of the English Channel. Even though we were always travelling in summer, squalls and storms could blow up in the Channel in a nanosecond.

After disembarkation at Calais, the train then lumbered gently through the French countryside to Paris where we changed trains. We would board the Paris to Rome train, which took us through France to Modane in the Rhone-Alpes region where the French Border guards and Customs officers would come on the train and stamp our passports. After they had performed this ritual, they left the train and it continued its journey under the Alps through the Frejus Tunnel. At Bardonecchia, the Italian Customs officials and Border guards would walk through the corridors and compartments on the train and stamp everybody’s passports. When that happened, I felt the holidays had started in earnest.

Next stop: Torino. The deep green Piemontese countryside flowed past as the train skirted the foothills of the Alps. Even in summer it was possible to see the snow on the tops of the mountains that seemed to hold up the sky. As we travelled down the line towards Torino, we passed small towns like Beaulard, Signols and Oulx, little did I realize at the time that I was looking up the slopes that would host the 2006 Winter Olympic Games. Torino was invisible under its whisky-brown shroud of heat haze and air pollution. The train paused briefly at Stazione Porta Nuova before resuming its journey to Milano, Bologna, Firenze and then finally on to Roma.

At the Termini station in Rome, which at the time was the largest station in Europe, we changed trains again and boarded the inappropriately-named direttissimo for Naples. Usually, we had to sit on our suitcases in the corridor because the train was packed with pendolari, migrant workers heading south, home to their families for the summer holidays from their jobs in the cities of northern Italy, Switzerland and Germany. Sometimes the workers would gallantly offer up their seats in the compartments to my mother and she would accept. I’d often make myself comfortable on the small fold-down seat that was in the bulkhead at the end of each carriage. I didn’t mind, anywhere that offered a place where I could stick my head out of the window and feel the wind on my face and smell the unique aroma of steam and burning coal was alright as far as I was concerned.

Once we arrived in Naples and unpacked our bags in the flat in Piazza Tarsia the, city enveloped us and the universe shifted its focus. It was a different world with different customs: a different language; different people; different perspectives; different philosophies and different expectations.

The view from my bedroom window in Tadworth Road was of a typical street in suburban north-west London: a row of terraced houses. The view from the window of my grandparents’ flat on the top floor of Palazzo Tarsia could not have been more different. Directly in front of me were the rooftops of Decumano Maggiore and Spaccanapoli, and the bay of Naples as it stretched away from the port named after one of Naples’ heroes, Admiral Caracciolo, bordered on the left by the shoreline, which extended into the distance past San Giovanni a Teduccio, Portici, Ercolano and Torre del Greco. A little to the left was the roof of the Foro Carolino in Piazza Dante and its statues and clock tower, past that a bit of the cupola of the Duomo on the Via dei Tribunali. To the right, the slope of Vomero hill, topped by the forbidding mass of the Castel Sant’Elmo and, just below it, the white Certosa di San Martino, inclined gently down to the bay where, hidden from my view by uncontrolled development, stood the castle of Maschio Angioino. My aunt, Zia Isa, once told me that Tommaso Campanella was imprisoned in Castel Sant’Elmo; who he was and why he was incarcerated, she never did say. She did, however, explain that the Vomero got its name from the old word for the blade of a plough because the hill, as well as all the other hills around the back of Piazza Tarsia, was once covered in farms, especially during Roman and medieval times. The farmers, it seems, used to play a game called ‘vomere’ in which the prize went to the farmer who could plough the straightest furrow. In Roman times, the hill was dedicated to the god Janus and it wasn’t until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that any major buildings were erected, in this case the Castle of Saint Elmo and the Charterhouse of San Martino.

‘When they built this palace,’ she told me, ‘there were farms and orchards all the way up the hill, which is why there’s no back wall — the prince wanted to have a view of his lands.’

So, now I knew why the palazzo had no back wall!

It was also at my grandmother’s window that I discovered I had no head for heights. While the panorama of Naples and the volcano across the bay held great fascination for a small boy, even greater fascination was to be found in the piazza below, if only I dared to look. The piazza itself was in the shape of a sort of flattened capital D. The facade of the palazzo was the straight bar facing south-south-east, while the piazza itself was a rectangle with very rounded corners, a row of stables that once housed the prince’s horses and carriages making up the opposite side. The stables themselves now housed a number of families. Each stable had large wooden double doors, some of which had had windows cut into them to let some light into the living areas.

The piazza looked huge even though it wasn’t more than about 300 feet in breadth by about 150 feet in depth. In front of the palazzo was a wide, cobbled carriageway that led, at both ends of the building, through huge arched gateways complete with gatehouses, which used to house sentries, and massive, solid wooden doors encased in iron frames. The area between the carriageway and the stables was unpaved and the pale, dusty ground was littered with half-buried rocks, stones and occasional bits of broken glass. Once upon a time that patch of dust had been one of several magnificent gardens that surrounded the palace, all with immaculate flowerbeds, small shrubs arranged in Baroque patterns, and gravel pathways. All that had disappeared over time and under the wheels and tracks of the British trucks and tanks that had used the piazza and palazzo as a depot during the Second World War. The inhabitants had prayed that the Germans wouldn’t bomb the building once they found out who was using it. For once, their prayers had been answered. The dust enclosed by the palazzo and its stables was now the playground for the children who lived in the stables.

The window sill came up to my chin and I would kneel on a chair, resting my chin on my folded forearms to look out over the piazza. Only once did I look straight down at the carriageway to see what the commotion was between a barrow boy selling fruit from a handcart and one of the tenants on the ground floor. It was then that I found out that I wasn’t much good at heights: a very sobering lesson for a five-year-old. However, I also discovered that as long as I looked across the piazza at the stables I would be all right.

The children playing football in the dust were typically Neapolitan: skinny urchins with tanned olive skin wearing tatty shorts that once may have been brown or black, ragged T-shirts that were either plain or horizontally striped and shoes that were soon discarded in favour of bare feet. Their spindly brown legs were flecked with small white scars around the knees left by cuts suffered from falling over on the ground and miraculously locating the only bit of broken glass for yards around that hadn’t been picked up by the ever-vigilant mothers. A few of the kids wore vests that had been white in a former life. Some kids, the rich ones, had socks as well as shoes. All of them had thick black hair and yelled and screamed as the game progressed. Their mothers sat in the shade of the doorways of their converted stables watching their offspring playing while knitting or chatting. They all looked old to me. They only wore black although I did see one of them, once, in an obvious fit of gay delirium, wear a navy blue dress that had small white polka dots on it. The only reason I remember that is because my grandmother had an identical dress in her wardrobe that she wore on official occasions, such as a visit to her relatives or an appointment with some professional person or petty public servant.

The stables were a uniform grey colour and the plaster on the façade was old, cracked and peeling. The palazzo, now known as Palazzo Principi Tarsia, was a faded remnant of a once glorious past. It had seen better times and, like much of Naples, was in desperate need of renovations. Naples had once been the capital city of a wealthy kingdom — the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies — and the palazzo had been the property of aristocracy. It stands in the quartiere (district) of Naples known as Avvocata, an area of just over one square kilometre containing some forty thousand people. It was built in the mid-seventeenth century when the Baroque style was all the rage. The front of the palazzo was fairly unremarkable: the windows were all tall and surmounted by flat, protruding architraves. They all had small metal balconies and wooden shutters, some of which had been painted while others had been left in their natural timber. Each floor was delineated by a stone ledge that ran the entire length of the building. Entrance to the palazzo was by way of the large central arched gateway. It had two huge wood and iron doors which, like the ones at either end of the piazza, had a smaller door cut into them to allow residents to get in and out late at night after the portinaia had locked it. Through the archway was a largish square courtyard with walled facades punctuated by windows and balconies on both sides of the building. The courtyard was bounded on three sides by the building, the fourth was open — I could stand in the courtyard and look up the hill behind Piazza Tarsia at the other buildings on the hill. Those other blocks of flats were built upon what used to be the magnificent Baroque gardens of Palazzo Tarsia. On the side of the courtyard opposite the portinaia’s office was the building’s only obvious concession to the modern world: a metal lift, clumsily attached to the balustrades up that side of the building. Ignoring that eyesore by standing with my back to it, I could well imagine the courtyard filled with horse-drawn landaus and hansom cabs, taking the aristocrats, dressed in their finest gowns and uniforms, to some do at the Royal Palace a couple of miles away or the premiere of Scarlatti’s latest opera at the Teatro San Carlo, conveniently placed right next door to the palace. I don’t think they would have gone by way of Via Pignasecca, it was far too plebeian and they would have risked being robbed by one of the many thieves and cutthroats who infested the streets of Naples. No: the prince, Principe Spinelli di Tarsia, would turn left out of the courtyard, through the gateway that leads to Salita Pontecorvo, turn right into that street that would take him down to Via Tarsia and then straight on to Via Toledo where another right turn would head him in the direction of the palace about a mile and a half away. After a short trot, his coachman would turn left into the huge interior courtyard of Palazzo Reale opposite Piazza Plebiscito and where the church of San Francesco di Paola now stands.

Looking at the shambolic remains of former glory, it was almost impossible to believe that the building which now housed my Italian connection was once home to works of art by Van Dyck, Veronese, Tiziano, Michelangelo, Raffaello, Giotto, Caravaggio, Tintoretto, Albrecht Durer and Andrea del Sarto, as well as lesser-known Neapolitan masters. A former owner, Don Vincenzo Spinelli, had even wanted to open a public library that had an ornate door surmounted by a few lines of verse by Gian Battista Vico. All that remains of that famous collection is a catalogue by a gentleman called Di Costanzo titled F.V.Spinelli, Tarsiae principis bibliothecae index alphabeticus. Now it’s only claim to fame was as a film set in ‘The Four Days of Naples’.

The dark grey flagstones of the courtyard had worn to such smoothness that they were slippery even when dry. When it rained, they turned black and glistened like polished marble. Sweeping the flagstones was one of the jobs of the portinaia, who lived in a small flat beside the main door, on the left as you entered the archway into the courtyard. She and her intellectually handicapped daughter lived there rent-free and survived on a small pension. The portinaia also tended the flowers and palms planted in pots and set around the edge of the courtyard, watering them with the help of a thick black rubber hose with no nozzle. A huge square grate near the middle of the courtyard covered the only drain and the water would trickle along the grooves between the flagstones and finally fall down the drain. Once, I peered down the drain, following the stream of water, to see how deep it was. All I saw was a thin stream of water disappearing into darkness; I never went near that drain again.

From the courtyard, the stairway on the left led up to the fourth floor. After a climb of one hundred and five steps a small passage led towards the front of the building and my grandparents’ flat. The flat was at the end of the corridor and a rather decrepit brown door with an old lock and finger-latch opened into a long, poorly lit room. The doorway into the next room was in the right-hand wall. Down the left-hand side of this first room was, in order: the toilet, which was nothing more than a toilet bowl enclosed in a makeshift cupboard barely big enough for the user and without toilet seat or toilet paper (but we did have squares of newspaper on a nail); a large scullery sink that looked as though it had been made out of cast iron and was big enough for me to bathe in (and sometimes I did because there was no bathroom); the two-ring gas cook top and oven and the kitchen bench and cupboards. There was no refrigerator because Nonna bought all the food she needed every day. Above the toilet and sink, two small windows allowed feeble daylight into the room.

Through the doorway opposite the ‘kitchen’ was the dining room-cum-bedroom. Standing in the doorway with the kitchen behind me, I looked across a slightly bigger room to the large window in the wall opposite; on my left was the door to my grandparents’ bedroom, which was the same size as the dining room. In the corner of the room to my right was the dining table and chairs, while around the room various cupboards and a dresser, as well as a sofa which converted into a bed, stood against the walls. On the wall was a carved mahogany cuckoo clock that had two metal pine cones hanging underneath from long chains. To wind up the clock, Nonno only had to pull down the higher cone. The small red cuckoo popped out of its hatch on the hour, every hour, and let out one ‘cuckoo’ for every hour of time. My two uncles slept in this room and my aunt had a small bed in my grandparents’ room which my mother and I shared. After my uncles married, my mum and Isa moved into the dining room. The one outstanding feature of the room was the floor: it was concave and warped. Some time in the forgotten past the part of the palazzo beneath the flat had subsided or a wall had collapsed, leaving my grandparents with a funny floor. The floor in my grandparents’ room was fine, but the floor in the dining room sloped gently, down with slight undulations, like a very shallow saucer, to its lowest point beneath the dining table. Washing the floor was one of my aunt’s least favourite chores because she constantly had to mop the water up against the slope of the floor. If she was careless and used too much water, she’d end up with a pond in the middle of the dining room. The floor’s slope, combined with the uneven tiles, made playing marbles a somewhat unique experience.

Because of the high ceilings and thick stone walls, the flat stayed very cool in the summer. Neapolitan summers are very hot. July and August are the two hottest and driest months of the year and, for someone born and raised in the cooler and damper climate of London, the heat could sometimes be unbearable. The temperature can hover around 30° Celsius for days on end and, with little rain, the city becomes parched and dusty. Luckily, Piazza Tarsia is on a hill and quite high enough to get the breezes coming off the bay. By having the persiane (shutters) on the outside of the window and the windows opening inwards, you could close the persiane and leave the windows open, stopping the sun hitting the glass and creating more heat. Usually, the slats of the persiane were left open to let the air circulate through the windows. Once the sun went down, the persiane would be opened completely to let the breeze in. It was a welcome relief to return to the palazzo after a morning’s outing with Mum, Nonna and Zia Isa.

These outings were shopping expeditions combined with social visits. They usually started at about nine thirty, after a breakfast of caffélatte, which I’d devour with lumps of crusty bread dunked into the sweet mixture of warm milk with just a dash of espresso coffee. The grown-ups would have a small cup of black coffee made the Neapolitan way. Nonna would usually have hers with a glass of water as a chaser. After this, with everyone dressed neatly and properly, we’d begin our descent of the one hundred and five steps to the courtyard below. Me in front, in shorts, T-shirt with the inevitable blue and white horizontal stripes, short white socks and brown sandals; Mum and Zia Isa in cotton summer frocks and Nonna bringing up the rear, looking suitably matronly in all black. I usually had to wait for a while in the courtyard for the grown-ups to catch up with me. At that time of the morning, the courtyard would still be in shade but the heat and light of the sun were already creeping around the arched entrance. The portinaia was watering the pot plants around the courtyard, splashing as much water on the cobblestones as she did on the plants.

‘Buongiorno, signora.’ I’d call out as I descended the last of the steps.

‘’Ngiorno, signorino,’ she’d reply, with an acknowledging nod of the head and wave of her free hand. The water and cool air combined to create a waterlogged smell like grass after a thunderstorm.

When the grown-ups finally reached the courtyard, the echo of their footsteps mingled with the reverberations of their matutinal salutations.

‘Buongiorno, signora.’

‘’Ngiorno, signora. Buongiorno, signorina. Buongiorno, Signora Vogna. E ‘na bella jurnà’.’

‘Speriamo che nun faccia troppo caldo,’ Nonna would answer.

Even though she insisted that no-one should speak dialect to me or around me because she wanted me to learn standard Italian, she couldn’t stop her own inflections entirely and she certainly couldn’t protect me from the utterances of everyone else around. Besides, I always preferred ‘napuletano’ to ‘Italiano Standard’. It was the music of the streets. Songs were sung in it, songs famous the world over, like ‘Torna a Surriento’, ‘O Sole Mio’, and ‘Perchè Lasciasti Napoli?’ ‘Marechiaro’ and the old chestnut ‘Funiculì, Funiculà’. Beautiful poetry was written in it. This city was so ancient its history entwined with mythology. This was the home of the sirens, where the siren Parthenope had been washed ashore after being rejected by Odysseus. Hence our nickname: partenopei. The great Roman poet, Virgil, was buried near Mergellina where Zio Errico and Zia Carmela, Mum’s younger sister, lived. The greatest of all Italian poets (apart from Dante) was, according to my grandfather, Giacomo Leopardi, and he had decided to be buried in Naples rather than in his home town of Recanati — which, if you have seen Recanati, seems an obvious choice. So, if Napuletano was good enough for those people, it was good enough for me: too bad if my grandparents and teacher-trained aunt didn’t want the taint of dialect on my lips. Out of their earshot, I spoke nothing but dialect. My uncle, Luciano, the youngest of the family and Nonna’s beniamino, encouraged my efforts and made sure that I was completely at home with all the best swear-words and curses.

The obligatory obeisances completed, we would head out of the archway, turn right and walk along the carriageway to the western gateway that led onto Salita Tarsia. Once out of the piazza and into the street, the pullulating city became palpable. At the time, London was the world’s most populous city with over seven million inhabitants. Naples had maybe a million or so, but it seemed that Naples was far more alive and crowded than London. People are crammed into the interstices of the city in a way that suggested they actually emerged from the stones.

Salita Tarsia is a narrow, steeply sloping street. To the right it continued up the hill to Piazza Mazzini, the junction of Via Salvatore Rosa and Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, which continued around to the top of the Vomero and the Castel Sant’Elmo. To the left, Salita Tarsia descended towards Via Montesanto and Piazza Montesanto. Strolling with what seemed to me inordinate slowness, my grandmother, aunt and mum caught up with me as I waited for them at the gate. How anyone could move so slowly without actually coming to a complete stop was one mystery of childhood that I never solved. I had seen funeral processions moving with greater speed.

Heading down the street towards Montesanto, I passed the open doorways of people’s homes. The buildings on both sides of the street formed a canyon, their façades pock-marked with narrow balconies, and criss-crossing the sky above me were the clotheslines, festooned with washing. The air was alive with conversation, snippets of conversations, arguments, declarations and denunciations blasted out of almost every doorway and window:

‘…was out until God knows when…’

‘…if I catch you doing that again, I swear I’ll…’

‘…so I said it wasn’t worth five hundred lire…’

‘…and then the doctor finally came…’

‘…don’t hit your sister…’,

‘…Gennaro’s finally got a job…’

‘…Fresh watermelon! Lovely fresh watermelon!’

‘…is having another baby, her sixth, maybe God’ll give her a son this time, povera criature.’

Rising and falling volume and inflection traced the emotional intensity of the speakers, reverberating across the increasingly foetid air of the street.

The voices came from all sides and all levels, either stridently female or whiningly childish:

‘Mammaaaaa! Mammaaaaa!’

‘Pasqualiiiiiiii!’

Every second boy in Naples was called Pasqualino or, more precisely, ‘Pashqualiiiiiii’. If they weren’t called Pasqualino, they were inevitably called Gennaro, after the city’s patron saint. When it came to naming their sons, Neapolitans demonstrated a shocking lack of originality.

The babble of