Before the ash curtain descended, it seems the inhabitants of Pompeii
were pretty frisky folk. There are threesomes, there are foursomes,
there are moresomes. There is Pan enthusiastically copulating with a
goat and Leela in the embrace of her swan. There is a naked lovely
mounting her lover in a position that was possibly known as the
“charioteer” in Roman times. I particularly like the chap wrestling with
his own phallus, which seemed to have turned on him like a wild beast.
To anyone who knows Naples, the lack of visitors is both one of the
mysteries and the joys of the city. Imagine turning up in Florence and
finding that no one else had the sense to include the city on their
packed itineraries. The Uffizi would no longer be a crowd-management
crisis. It would be bliss.
Blissed-out Naples, of course, makes
cautious, conservative Florence look and sound like a convent. This is
not a city of restraint; the full-on traditions of Pompeii, just around
the bay, are alive and well here. The voices are loud, the greetings
boisterous, the pizzas fabulous, the driving atrocious, the architecture
glorious, the religious rituals weird, and the policemen more
fabulously turned out than a Gilbert and Sullivan rear admiral. And the
phalluses in the gabinetto come with cupid wings and trailing bells.
Naples’ peeling sepia walls tell you a lot about the city. They are
devoted to passion and death. We will come to death later, as we all
must. But the passion is everywhere – the canoodling couples, the
flirtatious gazes, the lovelorn graffiti. Naples walls are crowded with
breathless declarations of love. Te Amo, Maria, I love you, Maria. You
are my destiny, Luca. Marry me, Gabriella. I dream of your kisses,
Livia. Wait for me, Marco.
Naples is "raw, passionate, secretive, generous, dilapidated, glorious, vibrant and unabashedly corrupt" (Photo: Alamy)
In this heady atmosphere, I fell for Naples. No one would accuse the
centro storico, the old historical centre, of being pretty, but she is
darkly and ravishingly beautiful. She is also raw, passionate,
secretive, generous, dilapidated, glorious, vibrant, and unabashedly
corrupt and corrupting.
I love her theatricality, the oriental
chaos of her streets, the architecture that began with the ancient
Greeks and ended with the Baroque. I love the fat, sensual Neapolitan
vowels. I love the scruffy bars where coffee is served zuccherato, ready
sweetened; the pasticcerie with the delicate sfogliatelle bursting with
cream; the friggitorie, with their roaring wood-fired ovens and
bubbling pizzas; the gilt, the bevelled mirrors and the painted Belle
Époque beauties of the Café Gabrini; the extravagance of the opera
house, the oldest in Europe, where Verdi was once musical director and
Caruso, a Neapolitan, got such a poor reception he vowed never to
return.
But what I most loved was her resistance to
gentrification. There are smart and fashionable districts such as
Chiaia, where beautiful people parade between expensive boutiques and
elegant cafés. But the beating heart of this city, the old quarters of
the centro storico, the crumbling palazzi, the anarchic streets, have
not been sanitised with trendy wine bars and branches of Zara. Naples
was shabby chic before the phrase was invented. And she remains
stubbornly herself. Trying to fit her up for cool metrosexual
gentrification would be like trying to get Boris Johnson to model men’s
haircare products.
Ruins at Pompeii (Photo: Alamy)
What the city lacks in stripped warehouses of international brands, it
makes up for in artistic treasure. At the
archeological museum, once
you have torn yourself away from the delights of the Gabinetto Segreto,
the exquisite mosaics and paintings from Pompeii are among the most
beautiful Roman artefacts in Italy. Up at the
Capodimonte museum, the
former Bourbon Royal Palace, look for the splendid Riberas and El Grecos
and for Caravaggio’s dark Flagellation.
Down in the dense lanes
and alleys of the centro storico, there is another great Caravaggio –
he was in Naples on the run from a murder rap in Rome – in the Pio Monte
de Misiercordo: the startling and complex Seven Acts of Mercy. Up the
street in the Capella Sansevero lies the poignant marble figure of the
veiled Christ; the detail of the drapery over his body is a typically
Neapolitan flourish of virtuosity.
Around the chapel is a
collection of statuettes illustrating the virtues. I couldn’t help but
notice that there was nothing very modest about Modesty. The gossamer
material of her see-through blouse snagging sexily on her nipples was
much more erotic than anything in the gabinetto.
Like some
metaphor of place, some pointer to multilayered complexity, there are
vast subterranean worlds beneath the Neapolitan pavements. In a small
flat off Vico Gigante, I found the trap door beneath an old woman’s bed
that leads to a Roman theatre, only discovered in 2003. At the church of
San Lorenzo Maggiore I followed a flight of steps down 10 metres and
2,000 years to a street of Roman Neapolis. I passed a bakery, looked in
on a wine shop, stepped into a laundry and a bank. While Pompeii is
inundated with tour groups and droning guides, I was alone here with the
ancient world.
Back on street level, boys were thumping a
football against 12th-century walls. Above me the balconies were
bannered with laundry, tiny thongs almost lost between granny’s
bloomers. A group of girls passed, casting looks of casual contempt at
the young men drooling in their wake. A Vespa appeared; the man riding
pillion was balancing a sofa on outstretched arms.
Pulcinella bust on the Via Dei Tribunali (Photo: Alamy)
A band suddenly burst around a corner, brass instruments blaring and
drums pounding. Bathed in sweat, stout men carried banners of the
Madonna. On the reverse were photos of the recently deceased. The
musicians were buskers for the dead. Friends and relations dropped coins
into a proffered hat and bowed their heads as this noisy memorial
parade passed.
Naples seems as obsessed with death as it is with
sex. Among the ragged declarations of love, death notices are plastered
on the walls like old adverts, with grainy pictures of the deceased.
They announce dates of memorial masses, paid for by the family, and
performed on the anniversary of their death.
Halfway along Via
dei Tribunali – the ancient Roman street that bisects the centro storico
– I found the church of death. Weeds sprouted from the dark facade of
Santa Maria delle Anime del Purgatorio ad Arco and bronze skulls perched
on plinths beneath iron railings. As I climbed the steps, a chill
seemed to descend on the street. I might have been arriving at Dracula’s
castle.
Prayers to the dead are central to Catholicism. But in
Santa Maria the practice of praying to the dead was banned in 1969. It
turned out that the worshippers, who were getting out of hand with the
fervour of their devotions, were praying to the wrong dead.
At
the back of the nave, a guide opened a trap door and led me down a
flight of stairs. At the bottom we emerged in another church, a replica
built directly beneath the one above. In this underworld church, the
walls were grey and unadorned; we had entered the domain of the dead.
Skulls stared at me from the niches around the walls among a litter of
bleached bones. Around them were petitioning messages, faded
photographs, dead flowers, plastic jewellery. In a far corner, a young
woman pressed her forehead against the stone walls murmuring the secrets
of her heart to the dead.
Traditionally this church underground
has been a burial place for the anonymous dead, for those who died
without family or memorial. I gazed down through grilles in the floors
at these paupers’ graves. A cult developed around these souls trapped in
purgatory, a kind of spiritual bargain. People came to pray for them,
to help their passage to paradise. In return, the living sought their
help in their quest for husbands, fertility or good fortune.
The
Vatican stepped in to put a stop to this unseemly glorification of the
poor, pointing out that worshippers should have been upstairs praying to
the saints, the apostles, the Virgin. But this is Naples, resistant to
authority, and the petitioners still make the descent to the underground
nave. The young woman had finished her prayers and stood for a moment
in the ghostly nave. She seemed distressed. The guide offered comfort,
asking why she had come. “For love,” she said. “I have come for love.”
Looking out to the bay and Vesuvius beyond (Photo: Alamy)
It was Goethe, in love with Naples and his Italian mistress, who
popularised the phrase “See Naples and die”, promoting the idea that
nothing could ever outshine this city. It is the bay, of course, that
prompts the greatest swooning with a panorama that stretches from the
great bulk of Vesuvius, past the Sorrentine peninsula to Capri, stalking
the horizon like a ghost.
But Goethe wasn’t just talking about
the bay. He loved the city, the enthusiastic chaos of the centro
storico, and its capacity for extravagance in everything from grief to
architecture, from love to pastries. It is time for visitors to reclaim
it.
Writen by Stanley Stewart reporter at "the telegraph"
