Literary Places

by Sarah Baxter

  Naïve ingénue Lucy and her chaperone leave quiet Surrey for a very proper Italian trip, ticking off what the Baedeker guide prescribes. At the Pension Bertolini they are distraught at having rooms looking into a courtyard rather than over the Arno. Two Englishmen, who have river views, suggest a swap. And there begins Lucy’s coming of age, a struggle between her old-fashioned upbringing and a fiery new independence. After only days she’s witnessed a murder and had her first kiss. If England is vanilla, Florence is tutti frutti – all colours, all flavours.

  You can’t stay at the fictional Pension Bertolini, nor the hotel that inspired it. In 1901 Forster stayed at Pension Simi, on the Arno’s north embankment, looking over the river to the cypresses of San Miniato and the Apennines’ foothills. Pension Simi no longer exists. And anyway, the outlook immortalised in the 1985 film of A Room with a View is from the Arno’s south bank, looking over the rooftops of the historic centre.

  However, no matter where you stay, you can walk, as Lucy did. The frame of central Florence has changed little since the Renaissance. It’s the same compact jigsaw of narrow alleys lined with elegant palazzi, grand churches and medieval chapels. There are world-class art museums – the Uffizi, the Bargello – hung to the rafters with Titians, Botticcellis, Donatellos, Raphaels. Sculptures worthy of galleries can also be found scattered willy-nilly, lodging in loggia or guarding piazzas.

  Just as Lucy does, you can turn right along the riverside Lungarno delle Grazie, past the Ponte alle Grazie bridge (the 1227 original now replaced by a post-war reconstruction) to take ‘a dear dirty back way’ to the church of Santa Croce. Lucy gets lost, drifting down streets, finding herself in the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata, admiring the cherub reliefs that decorate the Foundling Hospital: ‘she had never seen anything more beautiful’.

  Finally she arrives before Santa Croce, with its ‘black-and-white facade of surpassing ugliness’. A matter of taste, perhaps. This striking neo-Gothic frontage is a 19th-century addition; the basilica was founded in the 13th century, and its vast, austere interior houses matchless frescoes by Giotto and other masters, as well as the tombs of Michelangelo and Machiavelli. There’s much to admire, and much satisfaction to be gained from appreciating the artworks deemed the finest – a bourgeois trait that Forster lampoons. But maybe, like Lucy, Santa Croce will leave you cold. Because arguably Florence is best not when studied but when felt.

  Later, Lucy finds herself in the Piazza della Signoria, the city’s main square and long the centre of political life. Dominated by the Palazzo Vecchio, it’s a veritable outdoor museum; a replica of Michelangelo’s David stands where the original did, before it was moved to the nearby Galleria dell’Accademia. It’s in this piazza that Lucy witnesses a murder, faints onto George Emerson and sets her life on a new trajectory. Hopefully you won’t witness bloodshed, though Cellini’s statue of Perseus with the head of Medusa ensures a hint of the macabre.

  You can also follow Forster’s English folk – by bus rather than horse and carriage – to Fiesole, a tiny hill town just northeast of the centre of Florence. This is where Florentines come to seek green space, where the views of the Arno Valley are spectacular and where, given a chance, you should do as George and Lucy did and sneak a kiss in a field of violets.

  Florence is culturally magnificent, from the priceless art at street level to the tip of the Duomo’s cupola. But there’s also the Florence of the senses, the city that comes alive when you feel its hot sun on your skin. When you loiter over lunch, take a slow passeggiata in the cooling afternoon, watch a pink-orange sunset, sip a glass of good Chianti. When you stop questing for information but think of ‘nothing but the blue sky and the men and the women who live under it’.

  NAPLES

  Which?

  My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (2011)

  What?

  Southern Italian city of dirt and danger for two young girls coming of age

  THE CLOSE-PACKED, dirty-white apartment blocks compress the stinking heat. It’s a thick fug of frying panzerotto, ripening tomatoes, trash and urine, two-stroke engine oil, fish on the turn, neglect. Residents of the windowless ground-floor flats stand on their doorsteps, peeling vegetables, smoking cigarettes and gossiping in an impenetrable, passive-aggressive, sing-song dialect that rattles along with the passing trains. In spit-’n’-sawdust bars, disperazione – the hopeless – drink to escape. But somewhere a bell rings and children run from the schoolyard with their friends and their book bags and, perhaps, their minds on a brighter future …

  A darkness enveloped 1950s Naples. And it wasn’t just the ever-present threat of nearby Mount Vesuvius, which had blown rather dramatically in 1944. It was a street-level wretchedness; the ugly stains of poverty and socioeconomic squalor, plus a simmering violence that – like the volcano – could erupt at any time. The southern city had been poor before the Second World War but afterwards lay in tatters: Naples was bombed around 200 times, more than any other Italian city. The rich could buy their way out. But most Neapolitans had to scrape by in the grime left behind.

  It’s into this sphere of dirt and danger that Elena Ferrante throws Elena ‘Lenù’ Greco and Lila Cerullo, heroines of the author’s four Neapolitan Novels. The first book, My Brilliant Friend, follows these two bright young girls as they come of age in the middle of the century, in a dingy city suburb where life prospects are bleak.

  Just as pseudonymous Ferrante does not give her real name (the author’s identity remains a mystery), nor does she name the ‘neighbourhood’ at the heart of her novels. But it’s widely believed to be the Rione Luzzatti, a working-class area just east of the Centrale station and bordered by the Napoli Poggioreale prison. Still bossed by the camorra (Naples mafia), this rione has a reputation for grime and crime, and isn’t for wandering into alone. But there’s a Neapolitan authenticity to these scuffed alleyways of Fascist-era blocks, barred windows and graffiti smears. Indeed, Luzzatti feels little changed from the 1950s, offering the dedicated Ferrante pilgrim a glimpse back into Lenù and Lila’s world.

  The wide Via Taddeo da Sessa is most likely the novel’s infamous stradone, the wall-like main road that demarcates the edge of the girls’ existence. It can be followed all the way to the murky ‘tunnel with three entrances’ on Via Gianturco, down which Lenù and Lila make their first attempt at escape, hoping to walk to the coast: despite living in a port city, just a few miles from the sea, they have never seen it for themselves. Within the heart of Rione Luzzatti you can almost conjure the novel’s characters: a baker – like Signor Spagnuolo – creating oozy cream puffs and crisp sfogliatelle; a modern Enzo selling fruit, not from a cart these days but from the bonnet of his car; a ‘mad widow’ type, like Melina Capuccio, shrieking over the street-strung laundry.

  In counterpoint to this earthy grit is more affluent Naples, specifically the sea-facing Chiaia neighbourhood: shiny, manicured, populated by women who seem to ‘breathe a different air’. On occasion Lenù and Lila dip into this rarified realm, which Ferrante maps with far more precision. It’s possible to follow the pair – and the wealthy, elegant people – down pedestrianised Via Chiaia, past Via Filangieri’s high-end tailors’ shops to Piazza dei Martiri’s patriotic monument and into the leafy park of Villa Comunale. Walking here was, says Lenù, ‘like a border crossing; a dense crowd and a sort of humiliating difference’.

  Ending on Via Caracciolo, ahead lies the sea – ‘But what a sea!’ – with Vesuvius brewing across the water; potentially a whole new world in the distance. And yet. Behind is all of seething, seedy, splendid, seductive Naples, with its power to pull people back.

  BERLIN

  Which?

  Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin (1929)

  What?

  Indefatigable German capital with a dark and dazzling past

  LIFE SWARMS around the square. S-Bahn trains and electric trams disgorge an endless stream of people, hurried feet weaving around the wide, paved plaza, eyes scanning the department
stores and advertising boards, mouths wrapped around Ketwurst hot dogs and multifarious conversations. Each person has their own trials and triumphs: bankers, builders, adulterers, crooks, cabaret stars – who knows? Each writing their own story in this great metropolis …

  For author Alfred Döblin, Berlin wasn’t just a city – it was the city. He grew up in the German capital, worked as a doctor in one of its slum neighbourhoods and once called himself a ‘Berliner with vague notions of other cities and regions’. He only moved away under duress – after the 1933 Reichstag fire, Berlin was a dangerous place for a left-leaning Jew. But before Döblin went into exile, before the country was in full thrall to the mania of Adolf Hitler, he wrote his masterpiece: Berlin Alexanderplatz.

  The novel, published in 1929 during the years of the Weimar Republic, follows convicted murderer Franz Biberkopf as he’s released from prison. Biberkopf is determined to go straight but can’t quite free himself from the city’s seedy underbelly. He falls in with a gang, commits robbery, loses an arm, finds solace with a prostitute, gets framed for her murder and slowly loses his mind. But while the book is Biberkopf’s story, Döblin makes clear that his miserable antihero is just one of many souls surviving in this heaving city – at the time, the third-largest in the world. Berlin Alexanderplatz is an evocation of Berlin itself, capturing it at one of its headiest and darkest moments.

  Via an expressionist collage of newspaper reports, biblical stories, drinking songs and urban slang, Döblin brings the city to life, from the sewers up, recording its cacophony, machinery, meteorology, mundanity, enormity. By the turn of the last page, Berlin has been heard, breathed, imbibed.

  The novel’s backdrop is rife with violence, struggle and sin. The action plays out in the turbulent late 1920s, when Germany was clawing itself out of the First World War doldrums; a period of economic hardship and political unrest but also unprecedented cultural vitality, creativity and liberalism, as people sought respite from the recent horrors. Berlin Alexanderplatz snapshots this complex moment, when architecture, art and literature thrived, the nouveau riche were leading decadent lives but the proletariat were starving – in 1928, around 133,000 Berliners were unemployed. There’s a sense of foreboding too. Hitler made his first public speech in Berlin in 1928, the year before the novel’s publication; the rise of Nazism is imminent.

  The working-class Alexanderplatz district is the ideal setting for Döblin’s urban portrait. ‘Alex’ lies in Mitte, the heart of Berlin, both geographically and culturally. A transport hub since the Middle Ages, in the 19th century the district’s main square was used as a cattle market and parade ground, but by the 1920s it was one of the city’s raciest spots, a hotbed of nightclubs, burlesque shows, prostitutes, cocaine dealers, high hemlines and homosexuality.

  Today, Alex is transformed. Alexanderplatz itself was largely flattened by Allied bombs during the Second World War but was rebuilt in the 1960s, when it was the centre of East Berlin. At this time, the square was pedestrianised and flanked with the dull, concrete Plattenbau-style architecture favoured by the DDR. Also, more notable landmarks were erected: the huge Centrum department store (now the Galeria Kaufhof mall); the Weltzeituhr (world clock), which shows the time in 148 cities; and the copper bowls of the Brunnen der Völkerfreundschaft (Fountain of International Friendship). Lording over everything is the 368 metre- (1,207 foot-) high Fernsehturm (TV tower), completed in 1969 to provide a strident symbol of Communist power. It’s still Germany’s tallest building. Lifts – or 986 steps – lead up to the tower’s sphere, where a visitor platform and rotating restaurant offer sweeping views. Quite the eyrie from which to look down on Döblin’s much-changed but indomitable city.

  NORDLAND

  Which?

  Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun (1917)

  What?

  Spectacular Norwegian wilderness where quiet heroes might prevail

  A SIP of water from a purling stream. A handful of bilberries. A lichen-crusted log on which to briefly rest. The land provides. Steadily, invisibly, the ripe soil below nurtures the spruce and pine, the tiny ferns and cow mushrooms, the paint-splatter of wildflowers. A hare bounds across the grass, a grouse sputters from the heathers, the forest gently soughs, but otherwise all is quiet. This place is now. But it could be then. Or – with hope, with care – tomorrow. A timeless place of simplicity and awe …

  The county of Nordland encompasses more than a third of Norway, but only around 5 per cent of its people. Even today, this feels like pioneer country. A landscape of coastal mountains, narrow fjords and pine, birch and aspen; a region of Sami people, old superstitions, northern lights and midnight sun. The world in which Knut Hamsun was shaped.

  Hamsun was born in 1859 to peasant farmers in central Norway. But his childhood was spent in Hamarøy, north of the Arctic Circle, where he worked on his uncle’s farm. He didn’t go to school until he was nine years old. The land was his early education. And the land is the lead character in his masterpiece, Markens Grøde – Growth of the Soil.

  This 1917 novel follows the quietly courageous endeavours of Isak, a strong, monosyllabic farmer-settler, and his wife Inger, a woman with a harelip and ‘good, heavy hands’. To begin, Isak sets out alone, seeking ‘a place, a patch of ground’. On his chosen plot he chops, hoes and sows, building a home with nought but sweat and brawn – an understated hero. With the passing of the seasons, he meets Inger, has children, lives a life of ‘little happenings and big, all in their turn’. There are some black moments – not least infanticide – but there is also an evocation of rural life in all its uncomplicated beauty.

  Growth of the Soil was a hit. In 1920, Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, chiefly for this saga of strife and struggle. It encapsulated the life of pioneering Norwegian homesteaders at the beginning of the 20th century. Norway only gained full independence in 1905; Hamsun’s tale of a man claiming his place was nation-building fiction from an author with a love of agrarian society, homeland and blood-and-soil nature.

  These beliefs had a darker consequence. They chimed closely with the ethos of Nazi Germany, and Hamsun became an outspoken supporter of Adolf Hitler and National Union Party leader Vidkun Quisling, who collaborated with the Nazis after they occupied Norway in 1940. Hamsun even gifted his Nobel medal to Joseph Goebbels. This has muddied the author’s legacy. Some scholars laud him as the best of a generation, even the ‘father of modern literature’, but, no matter how great the work, many cannot forgive his wartime stance.

  Because of this, it wasn’t until 2009 – on the 150th anniversary of his birth – that one of Norway’s greatest novelists was commemorated in a significant way. The striking Knut Hamsun Centre, which draws architectural inspiration from the region’s stave churches, sod roofs and rugged mountains, sits in the village of Presteid in Hamarøy, on the banks of the Glimma River. It’s not without controversy. But it offers an exploration of both the writer’s words and world views. And the view from the tower, over the countryside that inspired the writer, is undeniably splendid.

  Also, there’s nothing controversial about the soul of Norway’s Nordland – the land itself, the soil of Isak and Inger. Exploring its hills, fjords and forests lies outside politics. Indeed, it’s pleasingly democratic: the Norwegian law of allemannsrett (Everyman’s right) grants any individual permission to hike, camp and forage on another’s land, as long as they do so respectfully. So you can head into the wilderness and claim, for one night at least, a land of your own.

  ST PETERSBURG

  Which?

  Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866)

  What?

  Imperial Russian city that can mess with a man’s soul

  THE CITY in July: humid, suffocating, penetratingly bright. The sun barely sets during these summer ‘white nights’; it glitters almost 24/7 on the canals, the baroque domes, the Neoclassical palaces and the Soviet tower blocks. It seems to swing like a spotlight, exposing everything. Or maybe that scrutiny is all i
n the mind – a hot-bothered brain, addled by issues of penury, morality, faith and murder …

  Founded by Peter the Great in the early 18th century, St Petersburg was planned to be Russia’s ‘window on the West’. This modern capital, built on swampland by indentured labourers, grew quickly; by the 1860s it was overcrowded, and rife with poverty, crime and disease. This is the city of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Like Dickens’ London, Dostoyevsky’s St Petersburg is desperate: there are, he writes, ‘few more grim, harsh and strange influences on a man’s soul than in Petersburg’.

  Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the world’s first psychological thriller, follows impoverished ex-student Rodion Raskolnikov who, in desperate need of money, devises a plan to rob and kill an unscrupulous old pawnbroker. Mental torment ensues. It’s a tale rooted in time and place. Not only does it exude the stink and suffocation of St Petersburg’s streets in July, circa 1866, it delves into the great philosophical debate dividing society at the time: should Russia embrace its place in Europe or return to its folk traditions? Dostoyevsky – conservative, religious, Slavophile – was of the latter school of thinking, and viewed rising Western ideas of nihilism, rational egoism and secularism as dangerous to the country’s future.