The Serpent Coiled in Naples

By Marius Kociejowski

A travelogue revealing the hidden stories of Naples.
 
In recent years Naples has become, for better or worse, the new destination in Italy. While many of its more unusual features are on display for all to see, the stories behind them remain largely hidden. In Marius Kociejowski’s portrait of this baffling city, the serpent can be many things: Vesuvius, the mafia-like Camorra, the outlying Phlegrean Fields (which, geologically speaking, constitute the second most dangerous area on the planet). It is all these things that have, at one time or another, put paid to the higher aspirations of Neapolitans themselves. Naples is simultaneously the city of light, sometimes blindingly so, and the city of darkness, although often the stuff of cliché. The boundary that separates death from life is porous in the extreme: the dead inhabit the world of the living and vice versa. The Serpent Coiled in Naples is a travelogue, a meditation on mortality, and much else besides.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Release date: Sep 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781909961807

Marius Kociejowski

Marius Kociejowski, born 1949, is a poet, essayist and travel writer. Among the books he has written are The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool – A Syrian Journey, now reissued by Eland, and a sequel, The Pigeon Wars of Damascus published by Biblioasis in 2010. His first collection of poetry, Coast (Greville Press, 1990) was awarded the Cheltenham Prize. His most recent books are God’s Zoo: Artists, Exiles, Londoners (Carcanet, 2014), The Pebble Chance: prose & feuilletons (Biblioasis, 2014), Zoroaster’s Children and other travels (Biblioasis, 2015) and Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2019). He has recently completed another travel book, The Serpent Coiled in Naples. He lives in London, England where, until recently, he worked as an antiquarian bookseller.

Book preview

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The Serpent Coiled in Naples

Spare a thought for Jacopo Martorelli, il professore. Born in 1699, this most erudite figure was a philologist and Regius Professor of Greek antiquities at the University of Naples. We remember him, if at all, for his ability to believe absolutely in his own theories and to be unruffled by anything as trivial as solid evidence to their contrary. In 1756, he published a 738-page treatise, De regia theca calamaria (‘On a Royal Inkpot’), complete with prolegomena and detailed notes, which drew on the recent discovery in Puglia of a bronze octagonal jar that was subsequently housed in the museum at Portici where it first tickled his imagination. I would have known nothing of the book were it not that a few years ago a copy of it strayed into the antiquarian bookshop where I work and where it is still available for inspection and improbable purchase. I shall blow the dust from it for the first comer. Its previous owner told me its chief value for him lay in the reproduction of an ancient inscription, one of several in the book, the original of which disappeared not long after publication. The book therefore provides the only proof of its former existence. Sadly I neglected to make a note of which one it was, and as this was secret knowledge that apparently only the seller was privy to, the link is now forever broken and an ancient artefact has been twice lost. Since then, the book has been the object of nobody’s curiosity except, very briefly, mine. What I was able to glean of its contents came of my having had to catalogue it, and resorting to the instant information the internet provides. The book is bound in plain vellum, unlettered on the spine although there would appear to be traces of interference, possible erasure, or even, judging from the razor-like scoring in the material, excision, and it weighs roughly the same as two bags of oranges. The Latin text is liberally sprinkled with Greek and Hebrew, which makes the typography attractive to the eye. It is, I repeat, for sale. When finally somebody falls for it, which could be any time between now and forever, it’ll be a small miracle.

Quite incredible was the effort that went into Martorelli’s researches, the findings of which might nowadays fill up to ten pages of a quarterly magazine devoted to antiquities. After all, just how much can be said about an object so simple? It resembles all inkpots in that whatever it might look like on the outside, and this is a handsome enough example, on the inside it is designed to do what inkpots are meant to do, which is to hold ink. So what was so special about this one? A great deal, apparently. This is where things begin to unravel. The ‘prophet and founding hero of modern archaeology’, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, writes of his Italian contemporary that he had ‘grasped this public opportunity of revealing everything he knows’ and that ‘the gods opened for him a wide field, in which he could indulge himself in mythology and ancient astronomy. At the same time he pours out whatever can be said about inks, pens, the art of writing, and the works of the ancients.’ This is a polite enough verdict on a case of severe logorrhoea. The only cure that works in such instances is total abstinence because one does not whittle away such verbiage – one expands, as does this sloppy old universe, with ever bigger areas of darkness between the tinselly bits and pieces.

Martorelli set out to prove, on the basis of a single object, that the earliest use of a pen and inkwell could be dated to the Jews of ancient Egypt and Greece. As theories go, it was not such a bad one – a fledgling science has to begin somewhere. The Romans had their inkwells ranging from the simple terra sigillata to highly ornate ones with mythological scenes depicted on their surfaces. My hunch is that the less literary minded of them went for the more decorative style in much the same way our possessors of fountain pens inlaid with jewels tend to use them only in order to sign fat cheques or wobbly peace treaties. The Egyptians began to use inkpots when their writing shifted from stone to papyrus, which is a natural enough progression. The Jews of ancient Palestine had them too. There was one discovered in the scriptorium in Qumran. The Greeks, I don’t know what the Greeks did, but presumably they, too, used them. Clearly there was a work to be written on the subject and in all probability there would be inkpot enthusiasts such as one finds nowadays for military memorabilia, tram tickets, postage stamps, cigarette cards, salt and pepper shakers, sugar cube wrappers, and barb wire. It may be reasonably assumed that in his research Martorelli did not poach the work of other scholars nor, for reasons that will become clear, would they later poach his. Were he playing forward for S.S.C. Napoli he would have had the field to himself.

So why the glum face? Sadly for him the Neapolitan government forbade circulation of his book on the grounds that it leaked confidential information on the archaeological discoveries then taking place in nearby Herculaneum, which were the province of the newly established and highly distinguished Accademia Ercolanese, the fifteen elected members among whose names Martorelli’s is most pointedly not to be found. Booksellers also refused to stock the title because much of it was devoted to denigrating the work of a fellow philologist and archaeologist by the name of Alessio Simmaco Mazzocchi who, incidentally, was one of the esteemed Ercolanese circle and much revered by his contemporaries. Academe, even then, was prone to mudslinging exercises. This might serve to explain the illegibility of the book’s title on the spine. Although it was not a work one would care to have seen on one’s shelves it might have afforded private amusement all the same. We know that Herr Winckel-mann owned a copy although it is not the vellum-bound book he is holding in Raphael Mengs’s portrait of him. De regia theca calamaria is too cumbersome to pose with in one hand. It can’t even be read in bed with ease.

Those were the very least of Martorelli’s troubles, however, because his theory might have held water, or even ink, had the inkpot been an inkpot and not, as was clearly the case, a jewellery box. A whole reputation was skewered on a single mistake. One can easily imagine the mortification he must have felt at seeing so much effort go to waste. One can just about hear the distant laughter emanating from the gang Ercolanese. According to the potted biography in the Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, Martorelli entered a period of ‘profound existential crisis’ during which time – and here, one might say, is a sure pointer to his character – he blamed his publishers for having given the go-ahead to the book’s publication. Thenceforth, as a result of the self-inflicted harm done to his reputation, he would publish all further academic studies under a different name.

It is hard to say what goes on in a man’s mind at the best of times, but it was soon after that Martorelli began to lose his proverbials and diverted his vast mental energies towards proving that Homer – yes, the very same – lived in Naples and founded the university there. We will have to suppose it was not, as previously reported, Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, stupor mundi – ‘astonishment of the world’ – who opened it in ad 1224, it was Homer, author of some agreeable verses. Maybe, though, Martorelli had blundered onto something. There has been a theory doing the rounds of late to the effect that much of what we take to be Greek culture was in fact exported from ancient Italy to Greece and not, as most historians would have it, the other way round. There is a major work, published by a major university, devoted to that very premise, Giovanna Ceserani’s Italy’s Lost Greece (and before we say of her what has been said of Martorelli, here’s something to tease the brain a little: why are the best instances of Greek temples found not in Greece but in southern Italy? And what about their chronological sequence? Paestum looks forward to the Parthenon). Still, the idea of there having been a University of Naples some centuries before Christ is a bit of a stretch and, worse still, according to our heroic scholar the heroic poet created the Chair of Greek Studies which, centuries later, he himself would fill, and which would leave no one in doubt with respect to his academic pedigree.

This is not to suggest all his other academic efforts were without value. On Via Tribunali one can step into the Pontano Chapel built in 1492 by the humanist Giovanni Pontano in memory of his wife Adriana Sassone, and where, in 1759, at the order of the king, Carlo di Borbone (otherwise known as Carlo III, King Charles III of Spain, Charles V and VII, the intricacies of which are better left to the historian to disentangle), Martorelli oversaw its restoration and had the Greek and Latin memorial inscriptions on the floor moved onto the walls. It was done with exquisite taste. Among them is Pontano’s epitaph, the last words of which contain the astonishing message, ‘You know who I am, or rather who I was: But I, good Stranger, cannot know thee in this Darkness: Pray Heaven, thou may’st know thyself. Farewell.’

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Would that Martorelli knew enough to know himself he might have been spared our mirth. Author of some learned treatises on Greek tragedy and comedy, and a master of Greek syntax for which, to give him his due, he developed a most effective teaching method, Jacopo Martorelli died on 21 November 1777 in the pleasant surroundings of the Villa Vargas Macciucca di Ercolano, not so very far from the scene of his professional suicide.

Why should I settle on a fool, albeit a learned one, when Naples was, and had been for a long time, the seat of philosophical enquiry? After all, St Thomas Aquinas, the greatest mind of the Middle Ages, wrote the third part of his Summa theologiae there. Why not begin with Martorelli’s contemporary, Raimondo di Sangro, a genius in so many spheres? The composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi? The great thinker Giambattista Vico? The answer is this: I find in Martorelli a strange brotherhood. We who pursue, and seek to finesse, a single line of thought, who do so regardless of the consequences, and who take our bearings not from the stars above but from their reflection on choppy waters, do we not dip our pen into the same inkpot sometimes? Are there not a thousand intellectual premises that amount to little more than a thousand hot air balloons, only for them to be shot down one by one? Are there not scores of Martorellis beneath our very own noses? If, as I believe, enthusiasm is the engine that drives the universe, ought we not to stifle our laughter a little? Jacopo, hear me. I, too, may have fallen victim to an idée fixe.

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Which is this: all over Naples I showed people a sentence that, for quick access, I wrote on the inside cover of my notebook, and which, if my source is correct, is a Sicilian proverb: ‘Mai temere Roma, il serpente se ne sta attorcigliato a Napoli’ (‘Never fear Rome, the serpent lies coiled in Naples’). It’s the sort of line one likes to trot out at dinner parties although there’s got to be sufficient menace in one’s voice for it to chill the blood a little. It was used in an American TV film, Gotti: The Rise and Fall of a Real Life Mafia Don, which one critic dismissed as being ‘too detailed for casual viewers and too inaccurate for enthusiasts’ and whose total aesthetic value may not have been equal to its single most quotable line. Admittedly I seized upon the proverb before I ever got to Naples. It provided me with a title before I knew what the book’s contents would be. It was like being handed a physical law for which I had yet to find a theory, one that I’d make fit no matter what, there being something of the Jacopo in me. Would it be too much to say that by tenor alone the line carries its own inner truth? Sadly I’ve been unable to chase the serpent to its source, but then what makes a proverb a proverb is its anonymous nature and the way it has been polished by time. And then there’s the problem of how best to interpret it. Matthew 10:36 has been cited: ‘And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.’ It’s what most gangsters learn by rote, but never fully absorb because sooner or later they make a mistake. The serpent for them tends to strike from within the family circle. There is, I think, even more juice to be squeezed from the pomegranate. The proverb seems to be loaded with metaphysical significance. What applies to Naples applies to the universe. Soon I began to see that serpent everywhere. I place the emphasis on attorcigliato, which means ‘twisted’ or ‘coiled’, a thing so tightly wound it might snap at any second, at which point it’s best not to be anywhere within striking range. Admittedly the serpent occupies but a tiny place in the city’s mythology and so while I do not want to push an image at the expense of veracity it serves as my personal take on the lives of the people I met there. So tightly wound are the hairsprings in their watches that a single turn more and all their best efforts come to naught. The Naples I have come to love breaks hearts.

What the sentence brought out in the Neapolitans I showed it to was, in the main, puzzlement or a shrug of the shoulders until finally one man roared with laughter, saying, ‘Yes, perfect! Very nice!’ Domenico Garofalo is a mover, a man who makes things happen. Certainly he has done his bit for culture, and, among other things, he is involved in organising festivals and contemporary dances, which was how I met him. I had lost my way in the Spanish Quarter when I stopped to ask for directions, and after giving them to me this friendly man in his early forties suggested I come back later for a performance he had organised at the theatre opposite the café where he was lording it over his coffee, as did Garrick in front of his theatre. I made my excuses. I walked on. I dined. I mulled it over. I went back. A couple of days later, I met him again in the quietest spot in Naples, the newly restored, staggeringly white, courtyard of the Convento di San Domenico Maggiore. Domenico’s enthusiasms took me in a hundred directions, from jazz and dance to a Neapolitan rap band called La Famiglia (in particular a song of theirs called ‘Odissea’, which compresses into five minutes the whole history of Naples beginning with ancient Parthenope), the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the writings of Hegel (about which I know little, although I was made to understand Naples is a Hegelian place) and Blaise Pascal, and onwards to Giacomo Leopardi and Curzio Malaparte. There was no saying where next he’d take me. Willing to go high and low, eclectic by nature, Domenico was a most reliable guide.

A few minutes later, in the Piazza del Gesù Nuovo, he pointed to the statue of the Virgin Mary on top of the baroque Obelisco dell’Immacolata. ‘Look,’ he cried, ‘there’s your creature!’ And indeed, beneath the foot of the Virgin, was a coiled serpent. Nothing so unusual in that, it being a common enough feature in Christian iconography, but I had been vindicated by the very best of authorities. She wouldn’t stand for any nonsense. Domenico invited me to look again at the statue and tell him what else I could see because it would bear on another matter we’d been discussing only minutes before, which had to do with the inextricable relationship in Naples between the living and the dead and how one might simultaneously inhabit both worlds. We’d agreed that any description of the city’s duality was best located there. We had spoken of skulls and of the people who adopt them, the cult of anime pezzentelle. What was I meant to be looking at? I squinted my eyes a little. All became clear when Domenico pointed it out to me. When viewed from the sunny side, so to speak, the front of the statue of the Virgin represents life, but when seen from the dark side, and with perhaps somewhat deliberate eyes, it becomes, especially at night, the Grim Reaper. It is an optical illusion and probably accidental, although there has been the suggestion it was so rigged by members of the Sanseverino family, whose noses were put out of joint when their palace was perforce turned into the church of Gesù Nuova as punishment for their having taken the wrong side in a political row. Whatever the case, the statue’s dualistic nature has entered the city’s folklore.

The folkloric: this, apparently, is where I’ve been required to take extra care. I had been warned by certain people solicitous of its reputation that I was to avoid any depiction of Naples as a folkloric city. A bit of me thinks this is a species of political correctness because while its inhabitants are quite right to avoid stereotypes of themselves, it does seem to me that there is nothing as purely illustrative of a people as its folklore. Or could it be that talk of the folkloric gets in the way of the actively folkloric, such that it becomes a species of embarrassment or, even worse, a call to arms? My solemn warners have a point. As soon as one summons the folkloric it dies. We have seen what happens when it is recruited for nationalistic causes. Those pretty little folk costumes all of a sudden become sinister. The Polish writer on theatre, Jan Kott, who visited Naples in 1962, writes: ‘Never before did I realise that folklore means a view from outside, from an alien circle. One cannot consider oneself as a part of folklore; or rather one cannot do so with impunity … Folklore made conscious immediately becomes a stall with readymade souvenirs, a circus, or a masquerade.’ So yes, one wants to come up with something better than an oleograph in which there is only a tenuous connection between the subject and the prefabricated brushstrokes. And besides, one doesn’t go looking for truth in Naples because one is liable to plunge headfirst down an intellectual sinkhole. This is no idle simile. The sinkhole has become a feature of Neapolitan existence, whole buildings disappearing into the cavernous spaces below. There are times when from the bottom of one of them one can hear Jacopo’s ghostly voice.

So when did the folkloric acquire such a negative connotation in a city where one might still purchase for oneself a red horn pendant to ward off ill fortune? There’s the first mistake. The red horn, which really is a repackaging of the apotropaic phallus the ancients wore, has no power unless it is presented to someone else as a gift. I do not wish to put the red horn sellers, those purveyors of ‘readymade souvenirs’, nice people many of them, out of business, and tourists ought not to be discouraged from the belief that good fortune can be purchased for as little as a couple of euros, but maybe they ought to be educated as to how the red horn operates and instead of buying one for themselves buy a dozen or so for friends and relatives. One does see those pepper-like shapes from time to time at the entrances to houses, maybe not quite as plentiful as in bygone days but still to be found where modernity has not taken all the gusto out of life. I saw one at the entrance of a car repair on the road going up to the cemetery at Fontanelle. If ever there was a need for a red horn it was there.

The truly folkloric begins to disappear when the conditions of life improve. There is poverty in Naples, plenty of it, some of it very raw indeed, but not as physically wretched as when the great social commentator and novelist Matilde Serao wrote of it in the 1890s. She pleads after the end of a cholera outbreak:

Do not abandon Naples again, when you are caught up in politics or business; do not leave this place – which we all must love – once more to its death throes. Of all the beautiful and good cities of Italy, Naples is the most graciously beautiful and the most profoundly good. Do not leave Naples in poverty, filth, and ignorance, without work and without help: do not destroy, in her, the poetry of Italy.

Serao’s book Il ventre di Napoli (‘The Belly of Naples’, 1884) is at once a damning indictment and a cry of love. Would she still make claims for the city’s goodness, I wonder, or would her heart have snapped at the pyramidal crime zone that is Scampia? She may have caught a whiff of the biblical Gomorrah (not the film and, later, the TV adaptation of Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah which Neapolitans say is wildly inaccurate, although it keeps them glued to the screen). Old fools say things get worse. I reckon Serao would love it still but with a more desperate love. Contemporary poverty resides in a pile of empty syringes and may be all the worse for it, a species of spiritual as well as physical malaise. The composer, ethnographer, and writer, Roberto De Simone, informs me there are now ex votos, made of gold, of syringes given by people who have recovered from drug addiction. It is human nature that when people are defined as one thing or another, they tend to squeeze willingly into the mould made for them, a trap difficult to escape. A school teacher and friend of mine, Mariagrazia Barsanti, when speaking to me of the Neapolitans and of the terrible generalisations visited upon them, both from inside and outside Italy, could not have been clearer: ‘They want, and deserve, deliverance.’ We were sitting at the outside café just off Via Toledo. There was a bit of a cool breeze. As the sun moved we had to shift our chairs in order to stay in the warm light. They want, and deserve, deliverance. Profound words, I shall seek to keep them before me at all times.

Can we really speak of deliverance without its sister, survival? Giuseppe Marotta in his book of short stories L’oro di Napoli (1947) writes:

An ability to get up again after every fall; a remote, hereditary, obstinate and intelligent endurance. Rolling the centuries away we may perhaps find its origin in the convulsions of the earth, the sudden gusts of deadly vapour, the waves of lava engulfing the hills, and all the dangers that have from time immemorial beset human existence in this corner of the world. This endurance, then, is Neapolitan gold.

A few lines later, he is more specific.

Only a few steps away is the sea, distant and solemn before the city’s martyrdom as if it were a basin of holy water. As soon as there is no more danger from the skies, I told myself in May of 1943, the Neapolitans will dip their fingers in this kindly water, make the sign of the cross and go back to their work and play.

Marotta walks to one side of me on this journey, a melancholy figure, gentle to the point of hate, and on the other side of me is Malaparte who is merciless, cynical, and cruel to the point of love. They stare in separate directions, not a word passing between them.

There is a Neapolitan saying that compares the city to another north of it: ‘If Naples were to open all its doors, Rome would disappear.’ A hidden city, it most certainly is. I was to have physical evidence of this. I was in the Museo Diocesano when a terrible heaviness pulled at my eyes, something akin to weariness of its baroque excesses. I had been excited only by a stone slab with the letter ‘Y’ carved into its surface. I will speak further of its significance. I was about to leave when I noticed a small door at the back. I passed through it and found myself in what was an older church, the Santa Maria Donnaregina Vecchia, when I felt a sudden rise in my spirits, and, as I went deeper into it, the only visitor there, I found myself entranced by the frescos, the greater number of which had turned a reddish hue after a fire in 1390. And then there was another door and behind it yet more extraordinary treasures. This idea of a door leading to another door and yet another serves perfectly as a way to understand Naples.

Domenico had one more thing to show me. I could have stood all day staring at the wall of the Gesù Nuova and missed out on yet another aspect of the city’s secret lore. The building, constructed in 1470, renovated between 1584 and 1601, was originally the palazzo of the Sanseverino family. The original façade, done in the so-called ashlar or bugnato style, with small jutting pyramidal stones, was preserved when inner structural changes were made. The overall effect is rather grim, a bit like a prison wall, and gives little hint of the opulence to be found inside, which, again, is rather too baroque for my taste. I strained to see what Domenico said was there to be seen. Again I failed. Barely visible to the naked eye are seven different marks spread, in various combinations, over the entire surface of the building. It used to be said of them that they constituted some kind of secret code, carved into the volcanic stone by stonemasons, and that they were positive symbols meant to drive out the negative. If so, then I hope the stonemasons got out of town quickly because there would be fires, earthquakes, and two collapses of the church’s massive dome. It was also suggested that the marks refer to the caves from where the volcanic stone, called piperno, originally came. Now there is an even more extraordinary theory. According to the art historian Vincenzo De Pasquale the incisions are Aramaic letters, each, as was briefly the practice at the time of the building’s construction, representing a different musical note, so that in effect the entire façade of the church is a vast musical score, most probably for plectrum instruments, lasting some forty-five minutes. It is impossible at ground level to read them from right to left and from bottom to top, as the scholar invites us to, and so only the Grim Reaper, if his eyes are equal to the task and if he could turn his head at a sharp angle, would be able to grasp the whole. The music, which has been given the title ‘Enigma’, is there to be listened to, on the internet, arranged for organ rather than strings. I begin to wonder whether Professor De Pasquale might not have taken the Jacopo route. Quite simply, it’s boring, there being insufficient variation in the music, if that’s what it’s meant to be, to hold the listener’s attention for more than a couple of minutes. The best that can be said for it is that it is a shade sinister, the soundtrack to a low-budget horror film. The mystery is not so much solved as deepened. If, to begin with, the building was a palace and not a church then the presence of these symbols would surely have had an esoteric rather than religious purpose. All in all, it was a strange thing to do. Small wonder it has entered the city’s folklore. Basta! We mustn’t go there. The city’s got a hard nose. The coffee, though, is exquisite. What do they do to it that a single shot of it takes one into the realms of the divine? The playwright Eduardo Di Filippo, in his play Questi fantasmi (‘These Ghosts’, 1946), says it must be toasted to ‘the colour of a monk’s mantle’.

One might suppose that the erection of the Obelisco dell’Immacolata, which doubled up as a plague column (or votive spire), would have passed without argument, but when plans for its construction were announced the owner of a nearby palazzo, Duke Nicola Pignatelli, objected, saying he feared the obelisk might tumble into the entrance of his home. This was not such a peevish complaint given that the city sits in an earthquake zone. On the other hand, the entrance at the far corner of the Piazza del Gesù Nuova, at 53 Calata Trinità Maggiore, is just a little too far away for any real damage to be done to it. He was well out of shot of a flying halo. So what was Pignatelli’s complaint exactly? Surely it was the Virgin’s close proximity that set his teeth on edge. What would She say to what was going on behind the handsome façade of his home? In 1761, at the time of the obelisk’s construction, one of Pignatelli’s guests was Giacomo Casanova. There is not room enough here to go into the latter’s complex relationship with women, and besides he was considerate enough to leave behind ten volumes of his life and times and amatory adventures. The scholar Judith Summers remarks of Casanova’s ability to move among women: ‘He has the knack of addressing them as if they were his equals, and undressing them as if they were his superiors.’ It was at the Palazzo Pignatelli di Monteleone, within sight of the Virgin, that he took an amorous interest in the ‘mistress’ of the impotent duke. Leonilda was, in modern vulgar parlance, Pignatelli’s ‘eye candy’. Casanova saw in her an opportunity for more than merely greets the eye and then writes that ‘the seductive features of this charming girl were not altogether unknown to me’. When one evening he was introduced to her mother, Donna Lucrezia, all became horrifyingly clear. Eighteen years earlier, when Donna Lucrezia was married to a man called Castelli, another semi-willing cuckold, Casanova had a fling with her and, unknown to him, nine months later, she gave birth to a daughter, Leonilda. Casanova describes his immediate reaction: ‘My hair stood on end, and I relapsed into a gloomy silence.’ A rekindling then took place, such as sometimes happens with old flames, and it was with their daughter in attendance, as voyeur, that Casanova demonstrated he was nothing if not inventive in his sexual escapades:

I must draw a veil over the most voluptuous night I have ever spent. If I told all I should wound chaste ears, and, besides, all the colours of the painter and all the phrases of the poet could not do justice to the delirium of pleasure, the ecstasy, and the license which passed during that night, while two wax lights burnt dimly on the table like candles before the shrine of a saint.

If Leonilda was not physically involved with Casanova that night, she would be several years later, on the occasion of her marriage to yet another cuckold. It’s amazing what the incestuous Casanova shouts at full volume in his prose. The wonder of it all is that the Virgin did not of her own accord climb down from the top of her obelisk and, despite the two threatening anthropomorphic faces at the tops of the columns glaring down at her, pound her fists on the entrance to the Palazzo Pignatelli di Monteleone.

Very few are the historical centre’s buildings and monuments that do not have a story to tell. Blood, tears, and semen have seeped into, and ooze from, every crack of the old town centre. Quite often, very often, it’s blood. Walk the five minutes it takes to get from the Piazza del Gesú Nuova to the Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, and inside the entrance to the palazzo diagonally opposite you’ll find the spot where the composer Carlo Gesualdo dumped the repeatedly stabbed corpses of his unfaithful wife, Donna Maria d’Avalos, and her lover, Duke Fabrizio Carafa. When, late on the evening of 16 October 1590, Gesualdo told his manservant Pietro that he was going out hunting the latter remarked on the improbable hour for such activities. ‘You shall see what hunting I am going to do,’ his master answered. Already I can hear the low thunder of timpani, an explosive crescendo, and then the music ebbing in diminuendo along with the lives of the leading lady and her very handsome lover. One can imagine Verdi setting the line to music. Actually there are several operas based on Gesualdo’s life, one by the Russian Alfred Schnittke, another by the Italian Salvatore Sciarrino and, most intriguingly, yet another by the Neapolitan Francesco d’Avalos who was a descendant of Donna Maria’s uncle. At one point it was rumoured that the composer owned the bed in which Donna Maria was murdered and that one night he’d left a tape recorder running on it, just to see whether there were any noisy spirits on the loose. When morning came he discovered on the recording a strange singing voice, which he immediately transcribed for one of the arias in his opera. ‘Non é vero,’ he confessed shortly before he died in 2014, ‘it’s not true’, but there are times, especially in Naples, when denials are taken for avowals, and there are stories that Donna Maria’s scantily clad ghost is still to be met with in the small hours.

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Where there’s space on a wall there’ll be a scrawl of some kind for sure, and where there’s mess to be made it’ll be made. A man walking past my café table throws his empty cigarette pack on the ground where there are plenty of other bits of rubbish. There is no getting around the fact that Naples is a bit of a shambles. I have become a subscriber to James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling’s ‘Broken Window Theory’, which can be summed up best by quoting the article they wrote for the Atlantic Monthly: ‘Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside. Or consider a pavement. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates.’ As theories go, it is remarkably, indeed pleasingly, simple. It allows for that nebulous thing known as human nature. What they describe can be just as easily extended to the graffiti covering so much of Naples, even the churches. If there are three instances of it, why not add a fourth or a fifth? It has reached the point where there is so much graffiti one doesn’t notice it any more. I can almost swear those natives who extol their city’s beauty haven’t noticed the mess, which, in a way, is not such a terrible thing because it means they have been able to penetrate mere surfaces.

There are times when the graffiti congeals into something perversely aesthetic, something which photography captures better than the human eye. The street art is another matter altogether. Some of it, in particular the paintings by cyop&kaf in the Spanish Quarter, are on a level of excellence rarely encountered anywhere, but only Banksy’s Madonna con la pistola in the Piazza dei Gerolomini is treated with reverence. It was covered with plexiglass after a petition of over 16,500 signatures was raised in order to protect it from damage. An earlier work of Banksy’s was vandalised, although what is one to say when the vandals vandalise the vandals? What is one to make of the handgun above the Madonna’s head where a halo is meant to be? Sacrilege? Or are we to understand that religion and crime are the polarities of Neapolitan existence? The Madonna is under the auspices of the Pizzeria Dal Presidente whose owner Agostino ’o Pazzo (‘Augustine the Crazy’), born Antonio Mellino, was famous for his daring exploits on a motorcycle in the streets of Naples during the 1970s. Youths have been following his example ever since. Meanwhile, the latest word on the street is that Banksy may be of Neapolitan lineage. It is not such a distance from Bristol to Naples.

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A lady from South Carolina, a lemony squeeze of Tennessee Williams in her voice, told me that Naples would be a great place if only someone took a hoover to it. She said this with an accompanying hand gesture worthy of a native of the city she professes to love. She sees possibilities for the place, which begs the question: were Naples to be given the ‘once-over’ might it not cease to be Naples? It has been described by its own inhabitants as a paradise occupied by devils (‘Napoli è un paradiso abitato da diavoli’), a saying so old it has become something of a proverb if not an actual cliché. It has been credited to countless people. Certainly there is enough to appal the visitor, but it never ceases to amaze me how many tourists are oblivious to the city’s many treasures. It is also a city in whose historical centre people still actually live. Irene Vecchia, Pulcinella maestra,* in order to demonstrate the truth of this, took me to the covered arches of Via dei Tribunali where she pointed to a curious groove, probably centuries old, in the stone pavement. She invited me to follow it to its source. A fishmonger sloshed water over his fish, which then ran from the basin into the groove and from there into the street. ‘You see,’ she told me, ‘there has always been a fishmonger in this spot.’ What she was demonstrating is that life, real life, continues here as it always has done, which makes the historical centre of Spaccanapoli almost unique among Italy’s old city centres. The fact that much of it and the Spanish Quarter have been gentrified of late is no cause for celebration, although at the same time it is be wondered why the inhabitants do not respect their surroundings more.

* Pulcinella is a stock character in the Neapolitan puppetry tradition. We will be gradually making his acquaintance throughout this book.

There is another view of Naples, which is that rather than being populated by devils it is a place where the poor find it close to impossible to climb out of the rut of their lives, and so, guided by a sense of fatalism, they become irresponsible. Why not throw your cigarette butt on the street if the street’s a mess anyway? Broken Window Theory. And yet they love their home. What Harold Acton says of eighteenth-century Naples holds true: ‘The large population of the people, including the sturdy lazzaroni who lived from hand to mouth, were united by certain quasi-religious sentiments, of which the most intense was the love of home. Naples was their home, associated with all that makes life beautiful and sacred.’ I spoke to a young woman of eighteen who comes from the district of Secondigliano, a rough zone, and she spoke of it with something that sounds a lot like love. Acton continues: ‘Those who had no private property and who could neither read nor write were bound to Naples by a deep and poetic tie. They belonged to this land, this sea; here they multiplied and luxuriated in the benign climate, accepting their lot without questioning the inequalities of fortune any more than the caprices of Vesuvius.’ Neapolitans may complain about their city, and certainly it is in many respects deplorable, but then they hate to see it derided by others. Some of the saddest songs, ‘Santa Chiara’, for example, are about being separated from the city they love, and at the same time being reluctant to return to it for fear of what they might find gone.

Domenico Garafalo speaks of his city in terms of Eros and Thanatos, love and death, death and love. Domenico is a ‘believer’, which is to say he believes Naples is the cultural capital of the south of Europe. If only more people would believe it as well, so he finds it all a bit of a struggle. Barcelona, he says, doesn’t compare. It’s pretty, but fake. Naples as the manifestation of Eros and Thanatos was our big theme.

‘It is a city of love,’ he told me, ‘a city of music and art, and on the other side we have darkness – the Camorra, murders, robberies. Those people care only about what they can touch. Their end is simply to survive. This is the dark side of Naples. Many of my friends from high school and university have left here, all of them looking for happiness, but what is saddest of all is that they leave thinking nothing can be changed. So why bother any more? Who is going to change things, however, if everyone leaves?’

I think I saw something in Domenico’s eyes, which maybe his mind had not yet had time enough to register, that one day soon he’d be leaving Naples. And indeed he did, and the fact of it makes him ache.

‘An old man I met a couple of months ago,’ he continued, ‘is a wine entrepreneur and before that he was an engineer and now he is working on this new venture. He asked me, In your opinion what is the most important quality required to do something risky in this place? I answered that you have to be brave. No, he scoffed, you have to be stupid! You have to have the courage to be stupid because if you think too much about starting up something you won’t do anything at all. Just do it! Over these past ten years I have done and maybe changed things a little and now I’m quite happy to be here. I want to see the world, of course, maybe even live elsewhere, but for now I want to believe in the dream that this, my city, can be my home. It is not so easy. A lot of people here feel it’s not really their home. Pasolini said, The last part of a human being is Naples. He found in the people here a humanity that he never found elsewhere. It was the same with Leopardi. It’s incredible that a man like him could at the end of his short life have felt so alive here. Naples is a city of life but at the same time it is a city of death. One mirrors the other. They have to be together in order for either of them to exist. St Augustine said something nice on the subject of good and evil. When people asked him why, if God is so good, did He invent the Devil, he replied that in order to understand the light one needs shadow. Only then will the light be important, like a star or a lighthouse. This, for me, is the real war between good and evil, this continual battle between shadow and light. First, however, they have to co-exist. If there is no shadow, the light is too strong. Without the light, it is too dark. This is our human condition, somewhere in the middle. We are made of both light and dark. In this respect Naples is a real mirror to humanity. Where I disagree with many Neapolitans is that they don’t accept a part of our city which is true. We are angels and devils at the same time.’

We discussed Curzio Malaparte’s The Skin, the most searing book ever written about Naples, a depiction of the city in 1944 when, after getting shot of the Germans, the Neapolitans fell before the Allies, the women turning to prostitution in order to feed their families. Domenico sprang a surprise on me.

‘We are the bitch of the Mediterranean for sure. We dominate the dominators. This is a matter of history, it’s what happened here over the centuries. We are almost addicted to this idea. It’s not cultural prostitution, it is physical, and as such it becomes a way to understand the world. It’s deep inside our language. There is a story about our word for orange, purtuallo. Whether or not it’s true I don’t know, but legend says that every so often the French gave out oranges for free and they’d say to the people Pour toi (for you) and gradually the word became purtuallo.* There are many such situations where domination has changed the language. This improved the culture of Naples. Someone said if you can understand Naples you will understand the world. We live so close to each other, one on one. The actor Marcello Mastroianni when he was asked his thoughts on Naples replied, "If I am in Milan and bump into an old friend, he’ll say, ‘Oh my God, you’ve aged!’ but if the same thing happens in Naples the response will be, ‘Oh God, we are getting older. Let me get you a coffee.’ We have this Neapolitan phrase Tien’m ca te téng, which means Hold onto me and I’ll hold onto you." We know we need each other because it is too tough to handle things here alone. This sense of a collective is deeply felt here. If someone in the street gets sick four or five people will stop. People care, but at the same time you might lose your watch.’

I was reminded of a joke, most probably concocted by someone from the north of the country. A man is sitting on a train when the conductor passes. ‘Excuse me,’ he says, ‘can you tell me when we arrive in Naples?’ The conductor answers, ‘Hold your wrist level with your eyes and study the minute hand on your watch. Keep it there. When your watch disappears, you’ll know we’ve arrived.’

* The stronger possibility is that the word derives from the Greek for orange, portokalia.

‘When I was in Brazil three years ago,’ Domenico continued, ‘I worked in the favela, the slums, with a Canadian NGO who was taking pictures with his cell phone. I said to him, Put that thing down, we could have problems. He replied, Yeh, but I’m free to take pictures. Yes, I replied, and they are free to rob you of your cell phone and your wallet. It is not a question of rights, it is a matter of respect. If I go into the Spanish Quarter dressed au couture or wear an expensive watch they might rob me. You have to be smart enough to understand what it is you are going into. It is not a question of freedom because they live there. You are not living there. You go into their territory and so you have to respect what might happen there. It is not right, of course, it may not be fair, but it’s the truth. As it turned out I was the only person in the group in Brazil who was not robbed. They joked, saying it was because I’m Neapolitan. And I said, No, it’s because I take care of myself. C’mon, you see children here sniffing glue. There is something more important than the picture you can take of them. This is common sense, of course, but I got this from living here in Naples. Often I read in the newspapers about tourists who are robbed here. I feel badly for them and I feel badly for my city, for the negative publicity this creates. I repeat, it is not right, but it is a matter of taking care. What I hate is when I see the kind of tourism in Naples that resembles a kind of safari in which people go into the poorest, most raw, quarters to see the human beasts living there. They see people from afar. They see something that scares them and excites them at the same time. This is not the right way to behave.’

It was time for Domenico to go. Just before we parted company he told me something else. Was it mischief I detected in his voice or had he himself been taken for a ride?

‘And don’t forget Dracula’s grave is here.’

A local Italian newspaper, Il Gazzettino, on 11 June 2014, ran a short article to the effect that the tomb of Vlad the Impaler, the horrid original for Bram Stoker’s rather more elegant Dracula, had been discovered in the church of Santa Maria La Nova in central Naples. The tomb had everything going for it – the image of a dragon, a couple of sphinxes, an inscription in some indecipherable language, and a mysterious heat radiating from the stone. I won’t go into the painstaking details that ‘prove’ the symbols spell out the name of Vlad III Drăculea or indeed Vlad Ţepeş, but word of the discovery quickly spread throughout the world and it is not without a little national pride that it can be announced the first newspaper in England to pick up the story was the august Daily Mail, whose better headlines include ‘Angry Queen Punches PM In Drunk Rage’. According to the scholars (whose names I will not repeat here because I would rather not embarrass them back into the limelight they created for themselves, and, besides, they may have been suffering from the enthusiasm of innocence), Vlad the Impaler, previously believed to have been killed in battle, was instead taken prisoner by the Turks who then ransomed him to his hitherto unheard-of daughter in Naples, Maria Balsa, which, in the circumstances, was most generous of the Turks given that Vlad won his moniker after impaling so many of them. Our scholars, meanwhile, staked their reputations on proving this was indeed his tomb, which would have been news to its occupant Matteo Ferrillo, Count of Muro. The best we can say is that the closest Dracula ever got to Naples was through the budding genius of Bram Stoker who was not unfamiliar with the place, having visited his parents there in 1875, some twenty-three years before the publication of the book that later spawned a thousand movies. As for the discoverers of ‘Dracula’s tomb’, the spirit of Jacopo Martorelli watches over them, whispering molto bene. So, too, say the tour guides, extra coinage spinning in their eyes.

What Neapolitans cannot be accused of is mediocrity. Their normal life exists at the poles of high and low, and hardly ever in-between. What one observes on any day in the street is pure theatre. This is not to present a folkloric picture, but simply to say that the boundaries between public and private have been long dissolved. There is no place for the theatrical to spill but onto the street. When summer comes, people move their cramped dining area outside. Jean-Paul Sartre, who was not deeply enamoured of the place, had to concede that Neapolitans are ‘the only people you can actually watch living their lives, from top to bottom, head to toe’. The modern Neapolitan writer, Luciano de Crescenzo, puts it slightly differently, ‘I have a concept of Naples that is not so much of a city, per se, but rather an ingredient of the human spirit that I detect in everyone, Neapolitan or not.’ Love the place or hate it, very rarely is it met with