by Bill Bryson
14. Naples, Sorrento and Capri
I checked out of my hotel and walked to Roma-Termini. It was, in the way of most public places in Italy, a madhouse. At every ticket window customers were gesturing wildly. They didn’t seem so much to be buying tickets as pouring out their troubles to the monumentally indifferent and weary-looking men seated behind each window. It is amazing how much emotion the Italians invest in even the simplest transactions.
I had to wait in line for forty minutes while a series of people ahead of me tore their hair and bellowed and eventually were issued with a ticket and came away looking suddenly happy. I couldn’t guess what their problems were, and in any case I was too busy fending off the many people who tried to cut in front of me, as if I were holding a door open for them. One of them tried twice. You need a pickaxe to keep your place in a Roman queue.
Finally, with only a minute to spare before my train left, my turn came. I bought a second-class single to Naples – it was easy; I don’t know what all the fuss was about – then raced around the corner to the platform and did something I’ve always longed to do: I jumped onto a moving train – or, to be slightly more precise, fell into it, like a mailbag tossed from the platform.
The train was crowded, but I found a seat by a window and caught my breath and mopped up the blood trickling down my shins as we lumbered slowly out through the endless tower-block suburbs of Rome, picked up speed and moved on to a dusty, hazy countryside full of half-finished houses and small apartment buildings with no sign of work in progress. It was a two-and-a-half-hour journey to Naples and everyone on the train, without apparent exception, passed the time by sleeping, stirring to wakefulness only to note the location when we stopped at some drowsing station or to show a ticket to the conductor when he passed through. Most of the passengers looked poor and unshaven (even several of the women), which was a notable contrast after the worldly elegance of Rome. These, I supposed, were mostly Neapolitan labourers who had come to Rome for the work and were now heading home to see their families.
I watched the scenery – a low plain leading to mountains of the palest green and dotted with occasional lifeless villages, all bearing yet more unfinished houses – and passed the time dreamily embroidering my Ornella Muti fantasy, which had now grown to include a large transparent beach ball, two unicycles, a trampoline and the massed voices of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. The air in the carriage was warm and still and before long I fell into a doze myself, but was startled awake after a few minutes by a baleful wailing. A gypsy woman, overweight and in a headscarf, was passing along the carriage with a filthy baby, loudly orating the tale of her troubled life and asking for money, but no one gave her any. She pushed the baby in my face – he was covered in chocolaty drool and so startlingly ugly that it was all I could do to keep from going ‘Aiieee!’ and throwing my hands in front of my face – and I gave her a thousand lire as fast as I could drag it out of my pocket before Junior loosed a string of gooey brown dribble onto me. She took the money with the indifference of a conductor checking a ticket and without thanks proceeded on through the train shouting her troubles anew. The rest of the journey passed without incident.
At Naples, I emerged from the train and was greeted by twenty-seven taxi-drivers, all wanting to take me someplace nice and probably distant, but I waved them away and transferred myself by foot from the squalor of the central station to the squalor of the nearby Circumvesuviana station, passing through an uninterrupted stretch of squalor en route. All along the sidewalks people sat at wobbly tables selling packets of cigarettes and cheap novelties. All the cars parked along the street were dirty and battered. All the stores looked gloomy and dusty and their windows were full of items whose packaging had faded, sometimes almost to invisibility, in the brilliant sunshine. My plan had been to stop in Naples for a day or two before going on to Sorrento and Capri, but this was so awful that I decided to press on at once and come back to Naples when I thought I might be able to face it better.
It was getting on for rush hour by the time I got to Circumvesuviana and bought a ticket. The train was packed with sweating people and very slow. I sat between two fat women, all wobbling flesh, who talked across me the whole time, making it all but impossible for me to follow my book or do any useful work on my Ornella Muti fantasy, but I considered myself lucky to have a place to sit, even if it was only six inches wide, and the women were marvellously soft, it must be said. I spent most of the journey with my head on one or the other of their shoulders, gazing adoringly up at their faces. They didn’t seem to mind at all.
We travelled out of the slums of Naples and through the slums of the suburbs and onwards into a slummy strip of countryside between Vesuvius and the sea, stopping every few hundred feet at some suburban station where 100 people would get off and 120 would get on. Even Pompeii and Herculaneum, or Ercolano as they call it nowadays, looked shabby, all washing lines and piles of crumbled concrete, and I could see no sign of the ruins from the train. But a few miles further on we climbed higher up a mountainside and into a succession of tunnels. The air was suddenly cool and the villages – sometimes no more than a few houses and a church in a gap between tunnels – were stunningly pretty with long views down to the blue sea.
I fell in love with Sorrento in an instant. Perhaps it was the time of day, the weather, the sense of relief at being out of Naples, but it seemed perfect: a compact town tumbling down from the station to the Bay of Naples. At its heart was a small, busy square called the Piazza Tasso, lined with outdoor cafés. Leading off the square at one end was a network of echoing alleyways, cool and shadowy and richly aromatic, full of shopkeepers gossiping in doorways and children playing and the general tumult of Italian life. For the rest, the town appeared to consist of a dozen or so wandering streets lined with agreeable shops and restaurants and small, pleasant, old-fashioned hotels hidden away behind heavy foliage. It was lovely, perfect. I wanted to live here, starting now.
I got a room in the Hotel Eden, a medium-sized 1950s establishment on a side street, expensive but spotless, with a glimpse of sea above the rooftops and through the trees, and paced the room manically for five minutes, congratulating myself on my good fortune, before abruptly switching off the lights and returning to the streets. I had a look around, explored the maze of alleyways off the Piazza Tasso and gazed admiringly in the neat and well-stocked shop windows along the Corso Italia, then repaired to an outdoor seat at Tonino’s Snack Bar on the square, where I ordered a Coke and watched the passing scene, radiating contentment.
The town was full of middle-aged English tourists having an off-season holiday (i.e. one they could afford). Wisps of conversation floated to me across the tables and from couples passing on the sidewalk. It was always the same. The wife would be in noise-making mode, that incessant, pointless, mildly fretful chatter that overtakes Englishwomen in mid-life. ‘I was going to get tights today and I forgot. I asked you to remind me, Gerald. These ones have a ladder in them from here to Amalfi. I suppose I can get tights here. I haven’t a clue what size to ask for. I knew I should have packed an extra pair ...’ Gerald was never listening to any of this, of course, because he was secretly ogling a braless beauty leaning languorously against a lamppost and trading quips with some local yobbos on Vespas, and appeared to be aware of his wife only as a mild, chronic irritant on the fringe of his existence. Everywhere I went in Sorrento I kept seeing these English couples, the wife looking critically at everything, as if she was working undercover for the Ministry of Sanitation, the husband dragging along behind her, worn and defeated.
I had dinner at a restaurant just off the square. It was packed, but super-friendly and efficient and the food was generous and superb – ravioli in cream, a heap of scallopine alla Sorrentino, a large but simple salad and an over-ample bowl of home-made ice-cream that had tears of pleasure welling in my eye sockets.
Afterwards, as I sat bloated with a coffee and a cigarette, resting my stomach on the tabletop, an interesting thing h
appened. A party of eight people came in, looking rich and self-important and distinctly shady, the women in furs, the men in cashmere coats and sunglasses, and within a minute a brouhaha had erupted, sufficiently noisy to make the restaurant fall silent as everyone, customers and waiters alike, looked over.
Apparently the new arrivals had a reservation, but their table wasn’t ready – there wasn’t an empty table in the place – and they were engaged in various degrees in making a stink about it. The manager, wringing his hands, soaked up the abuse and had all his waiters dashing around like scene shifters, with chairs and tablecloths and vases of flowers, trying to assemble a makeshift table for eight in an already crowded room. The only person not actively involved in this was the head of the party, a man who looked uncannily like Adolfo Celli and stood aloof, a £500 coat draped over his shoulders. He said nothing except to make a couple of whispered observations into the ear of a pock-faced henchman, which I assumed involved concrete boots and the insertion of a dead fish in someone’s mouth.
The head waiter dashed over and bowingly reported that they had so far assembled a table for six, and hoped to have the other places shortly, but if in the meantime the ladies would care to be seated ... He touched the floor with his forehead. But this was received as a further insult. Adolfo whispered again to his henchman, who departed, presumably to get a machine gun or to drive a bulldozer through the front wall.
Just then I said, ‘Scusi’ (for my Italian was coming on a treat), ‘you can have my table. I’m just going.’ I drained my coffee, gathered my change and stood up. The manager looked as if I had saved his life, which I would like to think I may have, and the head waiter clearly thought about kissing me full on the lips but instead covered me with obsequious ‘Grazie’s’. I’ve never felt so popular. The waiters beamed and many of the other diners regarded me with, if I say it myself, a certain lasting admiration. Even Adolfo inclined his head in a tiny display of gratitude and respect. As my table was whipped away, I was escorted to the door by the manager and head waiter who bowed and thanked me and brushed my shoulders with a whisk broom and offered me their daughters’ hand in marriage or just for some hot sex. I turned at the door, hesitated for a moment, suddenly boyish and good-looking, a Hollywood smile on my face, tossed a casual wave to the room and disappeared into the evening.
Weighted down with good pasta and a sense of having brought peace to a troubled corner of Sorrento, I strolled through the warm twilight along the Corso Italia and up to the coast road to Positano, the high and twisting Via del Capo, where hotels had been hacked into the rock-face to take advantage of the commending view across the Bay of Naples. All the hotels had names that were redolent of another age – the Bel Air, the Bellevue Syrene, the Admiral, the Caravel – and looked as if they hadn’t changed a whit in forty years. I spent an hour draped over the railings at the roadside, staring transfixed across the magical sweep of bay to Vesuvius and distant Naples and, a little to the left, floating in the still sea, the islands of Procida and Ischia. Lights began to twinkle on around the bay and were matched by early-evening stars in the grainy blue sky. The air was warm and kind and had a smell of fresh-baked bread. This was as close to perfection as anything I had ever encountered.
On the distant headland overlooking the bay was the small city of Pozzuoli, a suburb of Naples and home town of Sophia Loren. The citizens of Pozzuoli enjoy the dubious distinction of living on the most geologically unstable piece of land on the planet, the terrestrial equivalent of a Vibro-Bed. They experience up to 4,000 earth tremors a year, sometimes as many as a hundred in a day. People in Pozzuoli are so used to having pieces of plaster fall into their ragù and tumbling chimney stacks knock off their grannies that they hardly notice it any more.
This whole area is like an insurance man’s worst nightmare. Earthquakes are a way of life in Calabria – Naples had one in 1980 that left 120,000 people homeless, and another even fiercer one could come at any time. It’s no wonder they worry about earthquakes. The towns are built on hills so steep that they look as if the tiniest rumble would send them sliding into the sea. And on top of that, quite literally, there’s always Vesuvius grumbling away in the background, still dangerously alive. It last erupted in 1944, which makes this its longest period of quiescence since the Middle Ages. Doesn’t sound too promising, does it?
I stared for a long time out across the water at Pozzuoli’s lights and listened intently for a low boom, like scaffolding collapsing, or the sound of the earth tearing itself apart, but there was nothing, only the mosquito buzz of an aeroplane high above, a blinking red dot moving steadily across the sky, and the soothing background hum of traffic.
* * *
In the morning I walked through bright sunshine down to the Sorrento marina along a perilously steep and gorgeous road called the Via da Maio, in the shadow of the grand Excelsior Vittoria Hotel, and took a nearly empty hover-ferry to Capri, a mountainous outcrop of green ten miles away off the western tip of the Sorrentine peninsula.
Up close, Capri didn’t look much. Around the harbour stood a dozing, unsightly collection of shops, cafés and ferry booking offices. All of them appeared to be shut, and there was not a soul about, except for a sailor with Popeye arms lazily coiling rope at the quayside. A road led steeply off up the mountain. Beside it stood a sign saying CAPRI 6 KM.
‘Six kilometres!’ I squeaked.
I had with me two incredibly useless guidebooks to Italy, so useless in fact that I’m not even going to dignify them by revealing their titles here, except to say that one of them should have been called Let’s Go Get Another Guidebook and the other was Fodor’s (I was lying a moment ago) and neither of them so much as hinted that Capri town was miles away up a vertical mountainside. They both made it sound as if all you had to do was spring off the ferry and there you were. But from the quayside Capri town looked to be somewhere up in the clouds.
The funicolare up the mountainside wasn’t running. (Natch.) I looked around for a bus or a taxi or even a donkey, but there was nothing, so I turned with a practised sigh and began the long trek up. It was a taxing climb, mollified by some attractive villas and sea views. The road snaked up the mountain in a series of long, lazy S-bends, but a mile or so along some steep and twisting steps had been hewn out of the undergrowth and they appeared to offer a more direct, if rather more precipitate, route to Capri town. I ventured up them. I have never seen such endless steps. They just went on and on. They were closed in by the whitewashed walls of villas on both sides and overhung by tumbling fragrant shrubs – highly fetching, but after about the three-hundredth step I was gasping and sweating so much that the beauty was entirely lost on me.
Because of the irregular geography of the hillside, it always looked as if the summit might be just ahead, but then I would round a turning to be confronted by another expanse of steps and yet another receding view of the town. I stumbled on, reeling from wall to wall, gasping and wheezing, shedding saliva, watched with solemn interest by three women in black coming down the steps with the day’s shopping. The only thing sustaining me was the thought that clearly I was going to be the only person tenacious enough to make the climb to Capri. Whatever lay up there was going to be mine, all mine. Eventually the houses grew closer together until they were interconnected, like blocks of Lego, and the steps became a series of steep cobbled alleyways. I passed beneath an arch and stepped out into one of the loveliest squares I have ever seen. It was packed with German and Japanese tourists. The tears streamed down my cheeks.
I got a room in the Hotel Capri. ‘Great name! How long did it take you to come up with it?’ I asked the manager, but he just gave me that look of studied disdain that European hotel managers reserve for American tourists and other insects. I don’t know why he was so snooty because it wasn’t a great hotel. It didn’t even have a bellboy, so the manager had to show me to my room himself, though he left me to deal with my baggage. We went up a grand staircase, where two workmen were busy dribbling a nice sha
de of ochre on the marble steps and occasionally putting some of it on the wall, to a tiny room on the third floor. As he was the manager, I wasn’t sure whether to give him a tip, as I would a bellboy, or whether this would be an insult to his lofty position. In the event, I settled on what I thought was an intelligent compromise. I tipped him, but I made it a very small tip. He looked at it as if I had dropped a ball of lint into his palm, leading me to conclude that perhaps I had misjudged the situation. ‘Maybe you’ll laugh at my jokes next time,’ I remarked cheerfully, under my breath, as I shut the door on him.
Capri town was gorgeous, an infinitely charming little place of villas and tiny lemon groves and long views across the bay to Naples and Vesuvius. The heart of the town was a small square, the Piazza Umberto I, lined with cream-coloured buildings and filled with tables and wicker chairs from the cafés ranged around it. At one end, up some wide steps, stood an old church, dignified and white, and at the other was a railinged terrace with an open view to the sea far below.
I cannot recall a more beguiling place for walking. The town consisted almost entirely of a complex network of white-walled lanes and passageways, many of them barely wider than your shoulders, and all of them interconnected in a wonderfully bewildering fashion, so that I would constantly find myself returning unexpectedly to a spot I had departed from in an opposing direction ten minutes before. Every few yards an iron gate would be set in the wall and through it I could glimpse a white cottage in a jungle of flowery shrubs and, usually, a quarry-tiled terrace over-looking the sea. Every few yards a cross-passageway would plunge off down the hillside or a set of steps would climb half-way to the clouds to a scattering of villas high above. I wanted every house I saw.