by John Keahey
Most books on the history of Italy begin with the Romans. A few might dedicate a sentence or two acknowledging the peninsula’s prehistoric Bronze Age and Iron Age tribes, or the colonizing Greeks who first brought what today is recognized as modern-style democracy, and Western art and culture, to this then remote, fertile land.
The Greek cities these colonials established, which one hundred years ago Gissing sought to rediscover, rimmed the sole of Italy’s boot. Many others spread northward, along the west coast to a point near the ankle. In Italy, Greece’s oldest and northernmost settlements were on what is now the island of Ischia, at nearby Cumae and, where I am standing now, Neapolis. Greece also had colonies in Sicily and in even more distant locations such as southern France.
In his journey ten decades ago, Gissing missed some of the more remote Greek centers—then still-buried cities that had to wait until the twentieth century to be uncovered by archaeologists. The precise locations of others recorded in ancient writings still have not been found.
The Encyclopedia Britannica sheds some light. Cumae, founded in the mid-eighth century B.C.E.—about 740—is believed to be the oldest Greek colony on the southern Italian mainland. The one on the island of Ischia was slightly earlier, perhaps the first in Italy. More than three hundred years later, Cumae was overwhelmed by Italic tribes, who inserted their own culture and language into the daily community life. Republican Rome, moving to expand its grip beyond the Tiber, conquered the city one hundred years later, in the mid-fourth century B.C.E., and Cumae became a quiet country town, ultimately vanishing in the Middle Ages. In modern times there is nearby Cuma, whose name alludes to the vanished city’s original Greek appellation.
Neapolis was luckier. It was founded one hundred fifty years after Cumae, probably as an extension of that and other colonies. But unlike Cumae after its subjugation, Romans, enamored of Greek culture, allowed Hellenic Neapolitans to preserve their language for nearly one thousand years, well after C.E. 400. The term Hellenic refers to the flowering of Greek culture, art, and philosophy roughly from the time of Alexander the Great to Julius Caesar in Rome, or 336–31 B.C.E. The Roman elite built palaces around the temperate Gulf of Naples and used this Greek center as a pleasure resort.
In 1897, Gissing was only interested in visiting southern Italy’s known Greek centers. For his one-month trip in November–December 1897, he left out of his itinerary the colonies that extended into Sicily and into the south of France. He was familiar with colonies in Sicily and later lived in France, but he never wrote specifically about them.
I am here to follow the path Gissing laid out in his classic travel narrative By the Ionian Sea—Notes on a Ramble in Southern Italy, first published in 1901, just two years before he died, and in print almost continually since.
Chapter 2
A Hand in the Pocket
I had arrived in Naples a day earlier. Walking off the Rome train into the city’s heart, I carried preconceived notions that this strange and beautiful city—built over idyllic, ancient Neapolis—was dangerous. My concern, I soon discovered, was well founded.
Naples, with its purse snatchers and pickpockets, can be as unsettling as the guidebooks warn, especially to tourists who foolishly dangle cameras and bags off of shoulders, or stuff credit cards and cash into pockets.
But Naples, with its sights, sounds, and smells, is fabulously ambrosial as well. Outdoor markets are everywhere. At the fish-sellers’, swordfish heads sit on beds of ice, dull, filmy eyes peering upwards, spikes pointing to the sky. Octopus and squid, gathered in that day’s misty pre-dawn, lie in tangled heaps. Mackerel, sardines, and all types of shellfish pepper the slippery, ice-encrusted tabletops.
Elsewhere in these markets that seem to spring up spontaneously from one neighborhood to the next, heaps of tomatoes, peppers of all shapes and sizes and shades, tumble out of turned-over baskets, alongside several different kinds of lettuce and other green, leafy things I have never seen before. I ask the names, am told, and then, overwhelmed, promptly forget the just-proffered words.
People are talking with, gesticulating at, touching, one another. Naples is alive—despite the apparent poorness of its many quarters.
Still I am nagged by the potential of danger to the unwary. I try to be aware of where I am or whether I am being watched, frustrated that I cannot completely relax. I remind myself that if this were Los Angeles or New York City—two cities I would not hesitate to visit—I could be blown away by a mugger intent on getting the few dollars in my pocket. Here, guidebooks and friends have told me, such sudden and direct violence is rare, especially against tourists. But if you let down your guard in crowded buses or on narrow, jammed streets, you might feel a tug at your shoulder bag or, more likely, never even realize your pocket has been picked until long after you have stepped off the bus and it slowly dawns on you that, somehow, you feel lighter.
I have learned that, unlike American muggers, most Italian thieves steal in like cats and tiptoe out again. Fortunately, the law-abiding citizens—most of the people—with their joy of life, basic “Italian-ness,” more than make up for a thief’s callousness.
I discovered both the good and the bad during my journey that I began in early 1998, a few months past the centenary of Gissing’s departure from Naples for the cities of Magna Graecia.
Gissing, by all contemporary accounts, was a dour man. He found little about 1890s southern Italy to praise; his joy was confined to daydreaming about life in the time of the Greek colonists. He voiced numerous laments that today, against the backdrop of modern Italy, seem silly. The worst Gissing could say in print about Naples was that the Neapolitan organ-grinders he had first heard during brief visits in the late 1880s had disappeared because of police intervention. And that the city seemed to be growing in an awkward, nonclassical way.
If only my modern reality were that simple!
I did not know I was twenty dollars lighter until seconds after stepping off a trolley near the port. The crowded trolley had wound its way along the foot of the city where it rims the Gulf of Naples. The setting was picturesque, intoxicating—the stuff of postcards. I was heading to the port to find out if there was a boat that could take me south to Paola. After Naples, Paola was Gissing’s first stop along the Tyrrhenian coast. The tiny village, perched on the slope of the coastal mountains, was, in the days before extensive railroads and north–south freeways, the logical place to begin the narrow, twisty climb by carriage over an ancient road into interior Calabria and Gissing’s first major stop, Cosenza.
In reconstructing events of my unnerving encounter aboard that tram, I remember someone’s knee bumping into my leg. I must have written it off to the fact that I was standing on a crowded trolley, and, frankly, I was mesmerized by the sounds, feel, and smells of the place. We passengers were bunched at the middle exit, waiting for our stops. I climbed off at the port, still unaware of what had just happened. A few steps later, it sank in. I reached into my pocket, already knowing what I would not find there.
I glanced back at the tram, disappearing in the light haze ahead—relieved that my credit cards and other cash were hidden elsewhere. The twenty dollars or so in lire wasn’t important. The money clip, a souvenir from Mexico, was. I muttered evil thoughts as I turned and continued walking to the port ticket office.
I knew there was a train to Paola, but had hoped to get there as Gissing did, aboard a small coastal boat. “Niente, signore!” Nothing. Boats to Capri, yes. To Messina or Palermo in Sicily, yes. To Paola, no. “Il treno, signore,” the ticket seller said, pointing behind me toward the city and in the general direction of the stazione centrale.
I nodded, turned, and began a long walk into the heart of the old city. I had had enough of crowded trams for a while. My adventures with Italy’s darker side, finally catching up with me, were not over. I still had lessons to learn.
On a narrow, crowded street—my guidebook said it originally was laid out by the Greeks—a burly young man with dark, curl
y hair hanging in shiny ringlets around his shoulders slipped up behind me as I waited with other pedestrians for a small delivery truck to back out of our path.
Once again lost in thought, probably imagining what this constricted street might have looked like two thousand five hundred years earlier, I was pulled backwards by a sharp tug on my small shoulder bag, which contained my notebook, guidebook, and map. The young man yanked several times. Barely holding on to my balance, I pulled back, swinging out my leg and catching him with my toe on the side of his leg, just above his knee. He let go and ran into a side street, jumping over, and disappearing behind, an orange construction barrier.
Shaken—and, despite all the warnings I had read, stunned by such un-Italian direct confrontation—I hurriedly walked away, clutching the bag containing my irreplaceable notebook. In mid-stride, I felt a tap on my shoulder. A middle-aged woman who had seen what happened told me in hurried, breathless Italian that I must keep my bag between my body and the building, not toward the street. She smiled and patted my shoulder. I muttered thanks and moved away.
Moments later, a young woman, a ragazza, who appeared to be a student and who had her leather backpack twisted around to her front, both arms through the straps, stopped me. She, too, had witnessed the assault and had run after me.
“Napoli is very, very dangerous,” she told me in perfect English but still using the Italian pronunciation of her city’s name. She figured me to be exactly what I was: an American tourist. “You must always watch your bag and keep it at your side, toward the building,” she said, repeating the older woman’s admonition and the advice I had read a dozen times in guidebooks.
“I am so very sorry and I apologize for my beautiful city,” she said, looking almost tearful. “And you appear injured.” She pointed to my hand, which was dripping blood from the cuticle of my little finger. “Here.” She grabbed my arm and led me into a farmacia (pharmacy), a few feet away. She asked the clerk inside for some tape, explaining in rapid Italian what had happened.
The young clerk ripped the small bandage from its wrapper and pulled it tightly around my finger as I stood there numbly, feeling light-headed and probably in mild shock.
I asked the clerk how much. “Niente,” nothing, she said. Then, in a level voice that sounded more like a warning than a passing farewell, the clerk said, “Buona fortuna, signore.”
Outside, the young woman continued: “There are few jobs here and some of the young people use desperate means. I am so sorry.” I thanked her profusely. She smiled, then turned and walked away, clutching her “backpack” tightly to her chest.
I looked for a quiet place—a church perhaps, or a tree-lined park—where I could relax, unwind, and contemplate the events of the last few minutes. I ambled along, careful to keep my bag between me and buildings, and marveling at the kindness of strangers. They, not petty thieves, are who I choose to remember when I think of my brief time in Naples.
Chapter 3
Tales of the Conquerors
I long to linger in Naples. I know there must be redeeming qualities under the grime of this crumbling, congested city. One of the best descriptions I have read of this place and its modern challenges is in Midnight in Sicily, by Australian Peter Robb. He wrote that Stendhal described Naples in 1817 as “the most beautiful city in the universe.” Stendhal and Goethe each called it one of the three great capitals of Europe, alongside London and Paris. This is hard to believe today.
The city’s role in Europe changed when Italy was unified in 1861. Vittorio Emanuele II, the king of Sardinia, became the king of a united Italy. By 1861 the Spanish Bourbons had lost their influence and Naples became a provincial capital. By 1870, the new nation’s political machinery had been moved to Rome.
This unification process followed after Giuseppe Garibaldi, born in Nice before that Italian city was part of France, led an expedition to liberate the South from the Bourbons, who had been given sway here by Austria decades earlier. Historians still debate Garibaldi’s motives, but when he heard of an anti-Bourbon revolt in Palermo, he decided it was time to conquer Sicily, long held by the Neapolitan Bourbons. Without much support from the government in the North, he recruited the famous “Thousand,” actually, according to one source, 1,087 men who largely were northern Italians and nearly all students, young professional men, and artisans. Only about one hundred of these “red shirts,” so called because of the uniforms they wore, were southerners.
These volunteers sailed from Genoa, landed in Sicily in May 1860, and, with rusty muskets and bayonets, took the island in the name of Vittorio Emanuele within two months. The Sicilians supported them, but started taking matters into their own hands. Garibaldi had to suppress a series of peasant revolts before he could set his sights on liberating Naples—and all the South—from the Bourbons in the name of the northern Italian king.
In August 1860, Garibaldi, fortified by thousands of new volunteers, crossed the Strait of Messina and easily won a series of skirmishes against the Bourbons on the mainland. Three weeks after landing, he took Naples. Neapolitans welcomed Garibaldi as a hero because they did not like the Bourbons. The city’s largest square, in front of the main train station and now choked with cars and buses, is named for him, as are many main squares throughout Italy. But the Neapolitans were not enthusiastic about being part of a united Italy; they gave the king a lukewarm reception later that year.
This ambivalence of the early Neapolitans is characterized by their reaction when Rome became the nation’s capital in 1870 after it had been wrested from the pope. Naples’ leaders changed the name of a main boulevard from the Spanish appellation of Via Toledo to Via Roma. People in that section of the city simply refused to use the new name. The old name, Via Toledo, now is back in favor, and contrary Neapolitans still often refer to the street as Via Roma, despite what the street signs and official maps say. It is typically Italian that they see no confusion in this juxtaposition that does much to confuse the casual visitor.
So, in the 1860s and the immediate decades after, Naples and southern Italy played virtually no role in the unification process. The South was simply invaded once again, this time by idealistic northern liberals, and then turned over to “northerners who never wanted to rule the South, and who certainly had not fought for it,” according to Martin Clark, author of The Italian Risorgimento. The North “acquired it not because the Neapolitans themselves wanted that outcome, nor because of any feat of arms by the [northern] army, but because a great guerrilla leader and military genius [Garibaldi] so decides.”
* * *
And Naples over the decades lingered on, devolving into a third-world city filled with squalor and besieged by cholera well past the middle of the twentieth century. In the early 1970s, Robb tells us, nearly half of Neapolitan houses lacked bathing facilities, and only one-fifth had indoor toilets.
The city today is fighting back, say my Italian and expatriate friends—some of whom still refuse to come here. But I wonder if the struggle is overwhelming. The Neapolitan crime organization, the camorra, is growing. Young people, like the ragazzo who yanked at my bag and picked my pocket, have few employment options. Meanwhile, as in troubled American cities, televisions blast messages of prosperity and images of material wealth into the crowded, shabby homes in Naples’ desperate center, showing the people how the rest of the world—and especially northern Italy—lives.
There is prosperity “everywhere but in the South,” a young man told me during a brief, but revealing, conversation at a bus stop.
Modern Italy has another danger as well: the automobile. It is distressing most everywhere along the peninsula, and in Naples, particularly so. Narrow, Neapolitan streets follow the course of Roman and, before them, Greek, roadways. In modern times, many of these streets remain only wide enough for two passing chariots. Yet, much of the day, they are jammed by honking cars and smoking buses, or are torn up for resurfacing. Roads remain under construction for months, even years, with utility lines exposed
and few walkways provided for pedestrians, who regularly navigate rubble, loose cobblestones, open pits, piles of dirt, and cars parked on sidewalks.
Much of the street work during my visit in early 1998 was along the busy Via Toledo—or, depending on one’s politics, Via Roma—the major artery designed and built under the Spanish viceroy Don Pedro de Toledo in 1536.
I walked past one spot on the Via Toledo/Via Roma where drainpipes from under a building were dripping evil-looking liquid into a hole dug near the edge of the torn-up street. A disconnected sewer line waiting to be reconnected? How long it had been like this, uncovered, uncapped, I had no idea. There were no workers in sight. Perhaps it would be untended for days, weeks.
It was a strange contrast: many people wearing stylish coats, furs and leathers, pushing past me on the narrow, temporary sidewalk, a few feet from an open sewer line, in front of stores hawking the latest fashions. Mysteriously, in a city rampant with poverty, the stylish stores seem to survive, and the people generally appear healthy and well fed.
Here, across busy streets, pedestrians do not have the right of way. They must pick their openings, looking left and right, arms tucked in, holding possessions close like a footballer heading for a score. Traffic lights and Walk lights, only colorful window dressing in this troubled and crowded city, are ignored.
My distress over jammed streets, open sewers, and what appeared to my American sensibilities to be abject poverty all contrasted sharply with Englishman Gissing’s now ludicrous 1897 lament that organ-grinders had disappeared. His consternation had even carried over to Paola, my destination the following day. There, he bemoaned in the late 1890s that rural Italians were not wearing their traditional garb—their colorful costumes that painted such an idyllic, stereotypic picture in his mind.