Tales from Naples and Sorrentine Stories

By Anne Barriault

Tales from Naples is inspired by the author’s travels to Italy over the years. Best described as contemplative travel writing, the essays observe life on a trip to Naples and Sorrento and offer observations on the arts and humanities in the form of a memoir.


Tales from Naples follows on the heels of Moroccan Musings (Xlibris Press, 2013), a collection of essays based on the author’s time spent in Marrakech and Fes. That book received a travel writing award from the Chanticleer Book Review.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781669870449

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Copyright © 2023 by Anne Barriault.

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.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 03/17/2023

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Neapolitan Tales and

Sorrentine Stories

Prologue

Big Moutarde

Fruit of the Sea

Smoking Cats and Sorrentine Dogs

Persephone’s Water Buffalo

Bird on the Head

Lookie, Lookie, USA

Giants of Ischia

Westie on a Vespa

Epilogue

ILLUSTRATIONS

By Jeryldene Wood

Vesuvius Landscape

Fish with Teeth

Smoking Cat

PROLOGUE

Y OU MAY OR may not recall that Boccaccio’s Decameron begins in 1348, when seven women and three men meet at the church of Santa Maria Novella in their plagued city of Florence. From there, this brigata, as Boccaccio calls them, travels to the hilltop town of Fiesole to escape the raging pestilence. For ten days in the Tuscan hills, they wait out the epidemic by amusing one another with storytelling. Ten stories a day for ten days.

Since first writing these essays several years ago, I am now reviewing them during yet another modern-day plague. A virus, spreading with alarming rates worldwide and mutating, has taken many loved ones from us and now keeps us, the lucky ones, quarantined at home. Time to ponder projects, new and old, time to fight the fear and lassitude that hold us in their grip, time to count our blessings and be grateful. Time to see another collection of essays into print. Do I love Naples, as much as I have loved Florence or Venice or Rome? No, indeed. But I have loved the friends who have continued to make these journeys with me. We have lost some dear ones along the painful and heartbreaking way. But looking back, the memories created by experiences have crystallized into precious prisms. A bit blurred by hoar frost now, but when scraped ever so gently, the frost melts and the recollections warm again and still hold at the center.

Our modern-day Decameron began in K’s freshwater pool in Goochland, Virginia. My brigata, a very close group of out-of-town friends I consider to be my third family, were visiting over Memorial Day and staying in my tiny Richmond townhouse. K graciously invited us to relieve the city heat with a swim at her home in the country since she and P, her husband, would be out of town. So we found ourselves splashing about that sunny afternoon, contemplating the impending realities of our fiftieth birthdays and the immediate realities of our bodies in swimsuits. Then B hatched the brilliant idea—we should celebrate our benchmark birthdays in an Italian villa. We’ve got to go. Life is short. We’re all going to die! proclaimed our idea man.

His would become the battle cry each time the group needed to be rallied—visit after visit, trip after trip, villa after villa. Our pact that day was sealed when my husband R dove naked into the pool. Much to the group’s dismay but never really to its surprise, R always seemed to be doing that, in one way or another, literally or figuratively, during our reunions.

Four villas and multiple birthdays later—and during the unaffected, uninfected pre-covid-19 era of innocent travel—the participants of this little group, in various combinations, celebrated in Tuscany, Umbria, the Campania, the Sorrentine Peninsula, and Sicily. You might say the core of the group consisted of four highly intelligent, incredibly sophisticated, handsome men—two pairs of gay partners, actually—and four unconventionally beautiful, witty, and intelligent women always in various states of marriage and non-marriage. We were usually joined each trip by a few other souls brave enough to venture forth with us. Armed with guidebooks, umbrellas or sunhats, cameras, sensible