Naples '44

by Norman Lewis

  July 12

  In the months at Naples I have visited in the course of duty every town within thirty miles of the city with the exception of Pozzuoli, and a free day provided an opportunity to go there as a tourist in a CIC jeep.

  There may be some hidden significance in the fact that Pozzuoli had endured the experience of our occupation with such indifference and calm. Somehow it seems to have contrived to stand apart from the war, to have been overlooked by raiding planes, and bypassed by armies whether attacking or in retreat. I found it very different both in appearance and atmosphere from any other small town in the Naples area. It was quiet and self-absorbed. There were no soldiers about, and none of the troublesome human parasites that fatten on them. It would have been quite possible to imagine that one was not in Italy at all here, but in some drowsy coastal town in the Levant. Naples is coloured in austere greys and sombre reds. Pozzuoli indulges in sedate sea-washed pinks, and hangs green shutters at its windows, many of which come to a point in the Venetian style. The presence of several cupolas heighten a Turkish effect. The people lacked the nagging curiosity of Neapolitans. Nobody found some excuse to talk to me. Nobody had anything for sale. I remembered having been told that the natives of Pozzuoli are quite separate by customs, traditions, and probably even blood from the Neapolitans, and that they speak a markedly different dialect. It may also be of significance that Pozzuoli is outside the Zona di Camorra and its secret tribal life, which encircles the town and reaches the sea by way of a narrow corridor some miles to the north at Mondragone, which is a Camorra town.

  It was at Pozzuoli, and Baia – a couple of miles farther on in the curve of the bay – that all the richest, the most profligate, and the most terrible of the Romans built their seaside villas and the gay and gracious landscape is steeped in the black legends of their doings. Here Nero murdered his mother Agrippina and, inviting his friends to view the body, handled the limbs and discussed with them their good and bad points. Here in the labyrinthine basement of the Carceri di Nerone, he devised new tortures and experimented on his prisoners. A mile away in his headland villa, Tiberius was smothered by Macro, his Guards’ Commander. The rings can still be seen, seven feet under the water in the old mole of Pozzuoli, to which the ships were fastened when Caligula brought four thousand vessels back from all parts of the Empire to construct a bridge over the Bay, to refute a prophecy that he could no more become Emperor than ride a horse across the Bay of Baia.

  Pozzuoli put on extravagant wild-beast shows and gladiatorial fights in its amphitheatre for the entertainment of its holiday visitors. In AD 305 San Gennaro was thrown to the lions there, after which, being rejected by them, he was beheaded. A chapel has been built on the supposed site of his martyrdom, where a piece of rock stained with his blood is on view. The dried blood brightens in colour, and becomes damp in sympathy and exact synchronisation with the miraculous liquefaction, twice yearly, of the saint’s blood in the cathedral at Naples.

  The extraordinary truncated volcano, known as the Solfatara, is at the back of the town. I strolled over the surface of its flat crater-bed, which is about three-quarters of a mile in diameter. This, composed of a grey but glistening amalgam of mud and crystalline sulphur, puffs vapour and bubbles sulphurous liquid through numerous fissures. The shallow, scrubby walls of the crater a hundred or so feet in height smoke everywhere like the sides of an old burning rubbish dump that cannot be put out. People had come here on curative pilgrimages and were standing as near as they dared to the bubbling fumaroli to benefit from the vapours. Others had stripped off most of their clothing and crammed themselves into artificial caves in the walls of the crater where they could cook themselves gently while drawing the sulphurous gases into their lungs.

  I lunched at Vicenzo a Mare on its low cliff outside the town. They had no meat, as was to be expected in these times, but could supply ceciniella – tiny blind sand-eels fried in batter, followed by raw shellfish; noci – ‘sea nuts’, and fasulari – bean-shaped bivalves – all these specialities of the locality. They were accompanied by Falernian wine, a sparkling, sulphur-flavoured local vintage, praised by Horace, who seems to have been much impressed by everything associated with this region. While the wine might have aroused curiosity rather than admiration in a London restaurant, it was well suited for drinking on a hot day and in these surroundings. I was told that in ancient times the wine would have been served warm. It was to Vicenzo a Mare that Cuoca, last of the great Camorra chieftains, was brought, back in the ‘twenties, for what was to be his funeral feast, by the underlings who had decided to depose him. Here he was feasted, praised, hugged, kissed and then – full of wellbeing, and at peace with the world – taken away to be stabbed to death by a specialist armed with a mattress-maker’s needle.

  There can be few areas of even the Mediterranean world to hold a candle to this for sheer concentration of reverberating place-names, of ruins and legend. Everywhere lie the tumbled vestiges of palaces, temples and baths. About three miles from Pozzuoli behind Monte Nuovo, a small volcano which appeared overnight on September 30, 1538, is the Lago Averno, the Lake of Avernus of the world of antiquity: a small, reed-fringed sheet of water universally believed to have been the entrance to the underworld. It was here that Aeneas was conducted by the Sibyl to the nether regions. The lake made a formidable impression on the writers and poets of those days, who were overawed by the sense of doom inspired by what they saw as its sombre surroundings, and the unearthly twilight that fell upon it with the sinking of the sun. It was believed that no bird could fly across the lake owing to its poisonous exhalations, and Homer described its shores, in the Odyssey, as being inhabited by the dismal and sunless Cimmerii.

  Nevertheless, Lago Averno came as a disappointment. Scenically it was insignificant. I had come prepared to respect Homer’s Cimmerian gloom, but the gloom was not there, neither was there any of the enchantment or the sense of mystery to be found in the lake-scenery of so many countries of the European North. The sun shone, swallows in their hundreds were dipping on the water’s surface to take insects, a cheerful-looking fisherman had just come ashore and was collecting his meagre catch, and a woman hung up her washing outside a lakeside shack.

  This part of Italy has few lakes to offer, and those that compete for attention with Lago Averno are the Lago de Fusaro and the Lago Lucrino, both of them quite featureless lagoons. Clearly the authors of antiquity had to do what they could with the material at hand.

  Cumae is a mile away just over the hill, and here the emotional experience was of a very different order. The road passed within yards of the cliff cavern of the Sibyl, visited for counsel in their hour of extremity by so many emperors and kings of the Mediterranean world. Virgil speaks of ‘its hundred entrances, and as many issues, whence sound in many voices the oracles of the prophetess’. Standing there at the mouth of this tremendous chambered corridor cut deep into the rock, it was entirely possible to believe this. Down through the openings in the cliffs, their faces pitted with innumerable caves and sanctuaries, lay the ruins of the most ancient of the Greek colonies in Italy. Here the spell remained, and here the sense of the grandeur of the past was overwhelming. Cumae would have been worth a journey of any length.

  July 24

  Naples is extraordinary in every way. At the end of the last century, Scarfoglio, leading Italian journalist of his day, wrote, ‘This is the only Eastern city where there is no residential European quarter,’ and the witticism still seems to hold good.

  Last week a nobleman in our street was lifted by his servants from his deathbed, dressed in his evening clothes, then carried to be propped up at the head of the staircase over the courtyard of his palazzo. Here with a bouquet of roses thrust into his arms he stood for a moment to take leave of his friends and neighbours gathered in the courtyard below, before being carried back to receive the last rites. Where else but in Naples could a sense of occasion be carried to such lengths?

  Last week, too, Evans and I were sent to
rummage through the apartment of Prince Pignatelli, whom we were told had been arrested for espionage while serving with the OSS. The apartment was like a silk-lined womb – an absurd Hollywood filmset from a De Mille Biblical epic, that wearied the eye with the glitter of gold. The Prince had gone off in a hurry to meet his fate, leaving his possessions in disarray. A satchel on a bedside table with a porphyry top contained half a million lire, and beside it stood a glass of wine into which gold leaf had been stirred. A cupboard held great flagons of Chanel perfume, and several hundred pairs of silk stockings, each pair worth the price of the honour of any woman in Naples whose honour was for sale. The impression this place gave was of the worship of luxury as a cult. A number of Neapolitan aristocrats claim descent from the great families of ancient Rome, and they may be still under the influence of legendary Roman excesses. We are told that certain Neapolitan ladies, after the custom of Poppaea Sabina, did actually take baths in milk, before the present shortages put a stop to the practice.

  A few hundred yards from Pignatelli’s Aladdin’s cave begins the district of Vicaria where the population is the densest in Europe – possibly in the world. In Vicaria three thousand people are crammed in each acre. At this moment they live on the indescribable residue of offal bought in the slaughterhouses, on fishes’ heads and tails, roots dug up in the fields, and in the last resort, it is to be supposed, even the occasional cat, since we have been told that the carcase of a rabbit is never displayed in a butcher’s shop without the head that guarantees its identity.

  Three hundred thousand of the population of Naples inhabit bassi. In the Vicaria district up to three people occupy every two square metres in a basso. It is to these surroundings that most streetwalkers bring back their customers. The chances are, when they arrive, that there will be tenants in the room – such as bedridden old people lying in wall bunks – who have to stay. These simply turn their faces to the wall. All things in Naples are arranged with as much civility as possible.

  July 26

  Some of our recent adventures in the course of duty almost fall into the category of episodes from an Ashenden story by Somerset Maugham.

  Last week someone had to be chosen from the Section to go to the internment camp at Padula, collect a female internee who was in some way so important that she was not even mentioned by name, and take her to Rome for interrogation. The woman was described as being of great charm and beauty, and potentially dangerous. John Dashwood, providing these intriguing details, made her sound quite like Dumas’s Lady De Winter. The thing was, said John with a smirk, that she was not to be allowed out of the supervision of whoever it was took her to Rome for a single minute. While in Rome she would be deposited in the women’s prison for the night, if her escort thought fit, but if he preferred not to do so he would have to devise some other means of absolutely safe custody for her.

  George Hankin, the only one of us, probably, who suffers from deep religious scruples, got this job. Needless to say, the lady spent the night in prison.

  My own Maugham-ish experience, two days later, was to go to Capodichino airport to collect an Italian general supposed to have been seized, drugged and kidnapped in Switzerland by members of our mysterious 100 Section, and take him to Poggio Reale. The 100 Sectionman came down the steps with the General in his grip, held out his hand for my paper, subjected me to a penetrating and power-saturated look, handed over the General, shook his head at the offer of a glass of marsala, clumped back up the steps, and took off.

  By contrast the General’s personality seemed a cosy one. I was very sorry not to have been able to ask him the details of what had happened to him, and am quite sure that he would have been happy to unburden himself.

  August 3

  Salvatore Loreto, known to us for his exploits as an infiltrator and saboteur with 10th Flotilla MAS, turned up – of all places in the PW ward of Cancello Field Hospital, having been put out of action and captured on some hit-and-run mission behind our lines. I was sent to the hospital to decide whether it was secure enough to hold a man of Loreto’s tigerish reputation, or whether he should be transferred to the prison infirmary in Poggio Reale. To my huge astonishment, I found in charge of the ward none other than Sister M. of the 100th General in Algeria. Here, working behind the barbed wire, and under wretched conditions of heat, flies and dust everywhere, she remained her usual charming and efficient self, and was clearly adored by the prisoners in her charge – most of whom were in dreadful shape.

  Loreto was the only Italian in the ward, and he had been atrociously wounded. The Sister considered him a medical curiosity, being the only wounded man she had ever seen having a hole clean through his body, through which the light could be seen when his wounds were being dressed. When I bent over him he mistook me for his brother, put his arms round my neck, and began to weep and ramble on about episodes of our shared childhood: ‘ti ricordi? … ti ricordi?’ – do you remember? I sat by Loreto’s bed for a moment, while he went on dying from numerous causes. The Sister had done all she could for him. There were small burns on his chin from the cigarettes she had lit for him and put in his mouth, and when, after his voice had trailed off into a long silence he suddenly croaked a faint plea for one of the sweets she kept ready, she silenced him with a fruit gum.

  ‘How long will he last?’ I asked.

  ‘Hours. Maybe a day. Two days at most. The German in the next bed is going to die soon after six o’clock.’

  The head of the German in the next bed was enclosed in a kind of helmet of gauze and bandages. His face had been blown away, she said, and he had no eyes, and only a hole for a mouth. He had tried to commit suicide by tearing away the dressings from wounds in other parts of the body in the hope of provoking a fatal haemorrhage, and now his hands were fastened by straps to the sides of his bed. He was being kept alive by nutrients and stimulants fed through a tube into a vein.

  ‘How can you be so certain about the time?’ I asked.

  ‘I go off at six,’ the Sister said. ‘Tonight’s my free night, and my boyfriend’s coming to pick me up. While the German’s alive I have to stay with him, so at six the tube will have to come out. He’d be dead by morning anyway.’

  August 12

  An order out of the blue to move to Benevento to take over the security from 418 Section and a detachment of Canadian FSS, all of whom are pulling out. Fortunately the arrangement by which one man will replace twenty is a temporary one, intended to last a month. I packed up my gear, left at six this morning on the motorcycle, and was in Benevento by ten.

  This ancient city of fifty thousand inhabitants was purposelessly destroyed in May of last year by an air-raid carried out by Flying Fortresses, and now, fifteen months later, it shows no signs of resurrection. The beautiful eleventh-century Lombard-Saracenic cathedral is only a shell, and its unique bronze doors have disappeared. I am told that only one house in five has been left standing. The custom here is to wear mourning for seven years for a close relative: father, mother, daughter or son, so the whole population is dressed in black. The poverty of these people is beyond belief. My office is in a police station, incredibly shattered by the bombing. All the ceilings are down but the plaster has just been swept into corners; sheets of cardboard are nailed over the windows. A great crack running from top to bottom of the building has been plugged with plaster-clogged wire mesh. The water supply is only turned on for a few minutes a day. One is warned to leave the tap on to collect what drips come through. Eventually a small yellow pool collects in a bowl over the dark sediment it precipitates. The porter of this place is stark naked under a torn British despatch-rider’s raincoat – my first experience of an old-style lazzarone. On my way here I passed a row of thirteen- or fourteen-year-old scugnizzi sitting masturbating on the rim of a broken fountain.

  The departed Canadians have left a bad memory in Benevento. It was the Sergeant-Major’s habit to carry a whip with which he flogged people out of his way as he strolled through the streets. The man who controls t
he town now is Marshal Francesco Altamura of the SIM (Secret Police) who has been ordered by Naples to place himself at my disposal. He is handsome, good-humoured, quite imperturbable and exudes sinister power. Altamura overshadows even the ‘principal citizen’, who although certain to have been the local mafioso, appointed through Vito Genovese, is strangely ineffectual and old-maidish, and spends much of his time catering to the whims of a demanding old father.

  This evening I was taken by Altamura to meet the town’s notabilities. These included a prosperous coffin-maker, and the owner of what the Marshal described as the best-kept brothel in Southern Italy. The coffinmaker’s business was brisk. The death-rate here would probably equal Britain’s in the Middle Ages, and there was some typhus in the area. Our man’s products were in exceptional demand for many miles around, being lead-lined, which, it is believed, will keep their contents intact until the Resurrection Day. I learned that the lead is from the Cathedral’s roof, and had been stolen from the ruins. The brothel-keeper was first to offer a bribe. He had another establishment in Naples, closed through loss of protection by the AMG officials, who were in the pocket of his competitors. It would be worth 100,000 lire to him if someone (like me) would speak a word in the right place to get it going again.

  This overture reminded me of a slip of paper handed over by the member of 418 Section from whom I took over. I read it again:

  CARABINIERE 100 lire

  BRIGADIERE 200 lire

  MARESCIALLO Mozzarella cheese

  PRINCIPAL CITIZEN Spaghetti (Tagliatelle preferred), or Mozzarella cheese

  COMMISSARIO PS Bottle Sarti

  MARCHESA M. Keating’s Powder or similar