Thrilling Cities

by Ian Fleming

  The sheer harshness of motoring in Italy shocked all the more after a night spent in one of the few bedrooms attached to one of the three greatest restaurants of France, the aforesaid Père Bise at Talloires on Lake Annecy. There, I am ashamed to say, an injudicious combination of the Pere’s pâté de foie gras chaud en croute followed by gratin de queues d’écrevisses was too much for a stomach attuned for three weeks to the milder pabulum of Wienerschnitzel mit grunem Salat. But I had not allowed this disgrace to diminish the enchantment of one of my favourite beauty spots in Europe, and the slow meander through the High Savoy and over the Mont Cenis pass, opened ten days before, and the descent towards Italy through fields of gentians, alpine crocuses and white and sulphur anemones, were a beautiful transition from the douce north to the brazen south of Europe. Then Turin, Milan and the broad, silken ribbon of the Autostrada del Sole that hurtles the motorist down south to Florence. And there to be met by the full impact of international tourism combined with the appalling tumult of post-war Italy.

  Florence was a rude shock, but Rome – in preparation for the 1960 Olympics – was worse. The city may not have been built in a day, but it has now been almost rebuilt in under two years, and we arrived in the last stages of the pandemonium. Bridges, bypasses, stadia and new housing settlements, being rushed to completion in a turmoil of dust, road drills and excavators, had converted the city into a maze of closed roads, badly marked detours and axle-smashing craters. Maddened and confused, the great ants’ nest of anyway hysterical Romans scurried hither and thither amidst the welter of high-frequency horn and exhaust notes trying to get where they wanted before the great boot of the town-planners gave their nest another kick. In the circumstances, the foreign motorist could only make blindly for the Tiber and savagely cling to it until, sweating and exhausted, he reached the blessed darkness and peace of his hotel bedroom.

  The whole of Rome, and of most other Italian cities, is a Zona di silenzio. Frequent notices to this effect are, of course, a waste of lath and paint. The whole psychology of the Italian, particularly of the Southern Italian, is based on far figura, to ‘cut a dash’. With the advent of the motor-scooter, this posturing, previously expressed through flashy clothes, exaggerated tones of voice, expressions and gestures, has now been vastly reinforced by the attachment, apparently to every Italian male, of a chattering two-stroke engine, an electric horn and an exhaust pipe. The use of these instruments, known as sputnikare, gives him an even greater illusion of importance and power. The amount of noise he can make with his vehicle, particularly via the exhaust pipe, has come in some obscure way to represent a virility symbol, and for the police to pray silence is as vain as to tell Italians not to lend grandeur and emphasis with their hands to the simplest of conversations.

  Italy, in 1959, had nearly seventeen million visitors, of which the British furnished one and a half million. In 1960, I understand, bookings were considerably down on 1959, with Britain in particular sounding the retreat, and the authorities were understandably worried. Since Italy has now lost my own custom in the foreseeable future, perhaps I can give her a word of advice.

  It is not that the ordinary Italian, while loathing and despising all tourists, milks him with the minimum of grace of the maximum amount of money, nor that prices are ridiculously high for the services, and particularly the food, available in most of Italy, but that sheer noise and ugly chaos are literally driving the ordinary tourist to distraction.

  The problem is bad enough in most modern cities, but in Italy the frenzied hysteria in the towns is definitely injurious to the health of the northern visitor – to his senses and to his nerves. As for the spoliation of the architectural beauties of the country, I recommend the minister concerned with tourism to visit Siena and there to note that the perspective of the pink, shell-shaped piazza that has enchanted for five centuries is now utterly lost since, amazingly, the piazza has become a parking place for charabancs and motor cars. Against such vandalism, of which every visitor has his pet example, what can a small handful of archaeological custodians and museum curators in Rome hope to achieve in preserving the beauties of Italy? Only a lack of receipts at the turnstiles is likely to have any effect. It was a blessing to hack one’s way out of the suburbs of Rome and on to the Appian Way for Naples – a beautiful road, through the Pontine Marshes, that meets the sea at Terracina. Ten miles farther down the new coast road you come, after Sperlonga, to the first of several road tunnels through the cliffs, and just before it, behind barbed wire, are the excavations of Tiberius’s grotto, which my wife and I were determined to visit. You are supposed to have a letter from some high authority in Rome to gain access to the site, but the name of the Sunday Times worked with the guardian and we scrambled down through the clumps of wild love-in-the-mist, and scuttling green lizards, to the scene of the excavations and the hutments which house some of the rich treasure-trove of sculpture – alas, all in fragments – recovered since 1957 under the direction of Professor Jacopi.

  The huge grotto that opens to seaward and that has now been completely cleared of rubble is splendidly romantic – a grandiose water-folly adjoining the foundations of what must have been a handsome belvedere standing back from the shore-line of the graceful bay of Sperlonga. In the floor of the deep grotto there is a twenty-foot-wide circular swimming-pool fed by a fresh-water spring. In the centre of the pool stands a square pediment that may have held an enormous group of Laocoon wrestling with his serpents. One single marble leg of this statue and bits of the serpents have been recovered, and the leg alone is seven feet high. Adjoining this circular pool are large fish-tanks fed tidally with seawater, and the custodian suggested, rather fancifully perhaps, that these had contained the giant Moray eels to which slaves were fed to improve the flavour of this famous Roman delicacy. The walk round the swimming-pool had been terraced with bright blue mosaic, and statues are thought to have been arranged as sculpture for the interior walls of the cave, while some may have stood guard at either side of the entrance and on the headland to the east. But these are nothing more than theories, for at some time the beautiful cavern with all its elegant eccentricities was smashed to fragments, perhaps with the advent of the Christians some hundred years after the date that has been provisionally given for the creation of the grotto.

  I wonder if Tiberius really was such a monster as we have always heard. It seems that his memory aroused such loathing that even long after his death people were still savagely smashing the vestiges of the monuments he had left behind. Were Tacitus, Suetonius and Juvenal, who tore at him like maddened wolves, any more than high-class gossip writers? No doubt that is heresy. But the fashion of giving historical idols feet of clay makes me wonder if some of the traditional villains don’t deserve the opposite treatment. Real monsters are even more difficult to credit than real saints. I was still musing on this weighty theme when we arrived in Naples.

  To the hardened traveller the almost bestial harshness of Naples comes with nearly the same shock as one’s very first visit to the Continent. Here there still thrives the true ‘foreigner’. Here you are still cheated, jostled, burgled and generally intimidated by the inhabitants as you were at, say, Calais in your early teens. It is as if, as you arrive, the whole town licks its lips and says, ‘Here he comes,’ and you are then set upon with a relish and an ingenuity which never slacken until you have got away again with your life and the relics of your purse. During the war, Naples took on the whole might of the American Base Headquarters in Italy and skinned it like a rabbit. Submarine telephone cables across the Bay had huge sections cut out of them for the sake of the copper wire, heavy tanks, crippled in the taking of the city and temporarily abandoned, gradually melted away as if they had been made of ice-cream, and the ordinary G.I. was skinned, boned, consumed and spat out as if he had been one of those flannelly Neapolitan fish they force you to eat in their restaurants.

  The chief operators in this process of eviscerating the foreigner are the packs of teenage delinguent
i operated, Fagin-like, by older gangs, that infest the poorer quarters of the city. One particular trick they had with the errant G.I. has a macabre genius that will forever haunt me. The G.I., preferably a negro, on pleasure bent, would be enticed into some den and there sold a bottle of venomous hooch. When he had consumed this firewater and fallen unconscious, the ragamuffins would drag him out into an alley, put him on a handcart, and wheel him off through the back streets to where the Fagins would be waiting. The boys would receive some small change for their trouble and the body of the G.I., complete with clothes, wallet, wristwatch, etc., would be put up for auction among the Fagin co-operative. Sold to the highest bidder, he would then be stripped of all his belongings and hustled off into the hinterland where, when he recovered, he would be put to manual work in some distant vineyard until, through undernourishment or some other cause, he became useless. He would then be banged on the head and left somewhere down by the docks for the military police to collect.

  Little remains of those golden days except the black market in cigarettes, liquor, etc., still copiously fed from Tangier and Beirut, and a thriving market in pornography. Dirty postcards were offered me at 9.38 one morning – a record in my experience. There is also the narcotics traffic to America which is so cunningly and successfully manipulated that the Italian and American secret services can find nothing better to do than put the blame, by rumour and innuendo, on a gentleman called Mr Lucky Luciano.

  Just before Raymond Chandler died, some eighteen months earlier, I arranged for him to visit Naples and meet Lucky Luciano in the hopes that Chandler, fast running out of a desire to write about anything, would have his imagination stirred by the man who was the last surviving fragment of the myth of the Al Capone era. Chandler came back to England convinced that Luciano had been framed by fellow gangsters and offered up as a hostage for their own safety to the Attorney-General, Mr Dewey. Chandler, to my delight, became very excited by this new view of Mr Luciano and sketched out to me the plot of what might have been a most exciting play on the story of a wronged gangster. But he thought that Luciano had been so harshly treated by fate that he decided to write to him to ask permission before embarking on his project; however, Luciano never replied to his letters. That finished the idea so far as Chandler was concerned, but when I planned to visit Naples I made arrangements through Mr Henry Thody, ‘Our Man in Rome’, to meet Lucky Luciano and come to my own conclusions about him.

  This was not an easy thing to do. Lucky Luciano is leery of publicity, perhaps because he modestly realizes that he is famous only in a role which he would prefer to forget. He is also tired of being pursued, every time the American fleet is in, by gawking sailors who assure him fervently that the only things they want to see in Italy are him and the Pope. But the meeting was arranged and the day after our arrival Mr Luciano came to tea in the formal surroundings of the Hotel Excelsior.

  Lucky Luciano is a neat, quiet, grey-haired man with a tired, good-looking face. Whether he deserves the notoriety attached to his name or not, he has certain physical characteristics which one associates with men of power and decision – unsmiling, rather still eyes, a strong, decisive jaw-line and a remarkable economy of movement and expression. We sat chummily in the comer of the vast lounge, my wife, Mrs Lee Thody (a brilliant free-lance photographer who, thanks to Luciano’s trust in her, had been able to stage the tea party), Lucky Luciano and myself, and the polite handing round of sugar and milk and the dainty nibbling of biscuits amused me. Mr Luciano’s general appearance of a minor diplomat or government official fitted in well with this civilized ritual. He was well dressed in casual grey tones, white silk shirt and dark tie, and he was expensively, though unobtrusively, barbered and manicured (by two barbers every morning, I understand). It was only when he talked that undertones of Runyonese gave evidence of his past in Chicago.

  ‘There is this man which I told you tries to frame me, which is this man from the Narcotics Bureau. I have the evidence of this frame stamped by a judge of this court in Palma and in Catania which is where the retrial takes place. There is this mayor who is murdered which I am supposed to have done, together with a kidnap in Tangier and a lot of other stuff which is about people I never even heard of, and this son of a bitch’ – (embarrassed pause) – ‘if you’ll pardon the expression, this person says I am involved in these things, things I never even heard of until I read them in the newspapers. Well, you know what happens? The Italian police get to look into this frame which has been dreamed up by the American Narcotics Bureau and I am asked to attend the trial. The judge which is looking after the case asks me if I know anything about these things, and when I say no he says then you may leave the court. And then the prosecution gets up and asks three years for this guy for perjury for trying to frame me, and the guy gets two and a half years. See what I mean? These American Narcotics people are always trying to frame me. For why? Which is because they can’t think of anyone else to frame for all the narcotics going into the United States. They are always making fools of themselves these people. How do you suppose I can live peacefully here in Naples, where everybody knows everybody’s secrets, if I am mixed up in things like that? I guess these guys is mad at me because I call them “the bicarbonate policemen”, which is because they are always getting guys lined up on account they have been drug-smuggling, and they get an agent to go to these guys to buy dope, and these guys take the money and say thank you very much, and hand over a secret-looking packet, and when the Bureau opens it up why it’s just bicarbonate of soda.’

  We all sympathized. Then I asked wasn’t it true that the bulk of the drugs getting into America came from Italy? No, said Lucky Luciano, that was old hat. Now, as he read in the papers, it was coming from Mexico. ‘And do you know what, Mr Fleming? It’s all the fault of the American Government. They are not handling this narcotics problem right, which is why it goes on getting worse every year. Washington is spending billions of dollars every year trying to stamp out the traffic, but that is not the way to stop it. You have to realize, Mr Fleming, that this stuff is expensive, you need maybe two hundred dollars a week to get the stuff and who has that kind of money? So the mainliners have to steal or murder to get the money to buy the stuff. So what ought Washington to do? They ought to set up clinics all over the country where you can register as a drug-taker like you do in England, and go and get your dose for nothing, for free. So every time you go to the clinic, which has plenty of entrances so you won’t be recognized, you get tapered off a fraction, a very small fraction. So in the end you get cured, see? The point is, Mr Fleming, that if you can get your drugs for nothing, you won’t have to rob or murder somebody for the money to buy the stuff. So the middlemen, the traffickers, will go out of business, and then you have no law enforcement problem and no smuggling. Ya see, Mr Fleming, it’s just the way you spend the money – on setting up clinics, or on law-enforcement that cannot work and that only makes the problem worse.’

  I agreed that this made excellent sense and asked why he didn’t put the whole thing down on paper and send it to the President. Lucky modestly shrugged his shoulders and excused himself on the grounds that he had not got all the figures and the details to back up his plan. I urged him to go ahead, and I still do so. The idea of the ‘Luciano Plan’ to beat the narcotics problem, in connection with which he was originally sentenced and extradited from the States, seemed to me just the gimmick to ‘send’ the beatniks and hop-merchants who are the main consumers in America.

  I then inquired why it was that all the great American gangsters, with the exception of Legs Diamond and one or two others, were, and still are, of Italian origin, and whether the Mafia operated as briskly in the United States as it is alleged to do. Rather speciously, I thought, Mr Luciano lightly dismissed the whole idea. It was just, he said, that nowadays people in America seemed to have a down on the Italians. As for the Mafia, that was just something for the journalists to write about. Did it operate in Naples? Mr Luciano shrugged the whole existen
ce of the Mafia away. It was all boloney, he said. It was just to make the stories better for the journalists.

  I personally feel that this total denial of the darker side of the moon does not contribute to the dignified and highly respectable front that Mr Luciano presents to the world. He is, of course, right to try and forget everything connected with the youthful way of life with which he is credited, but to express ignorance of the daily face of Italo-American crime is surely an affectation. But no doubt Mr Luciano is right in that an incautious word to a journalist, particularly anything critical of his present habitat, might lead to exaggerated headlines and a diminution of the genuine friendliness with which he is regarded in Italy, and particularly around Naples, where he is well known for an exemplary life and generous private gifts to charity. His one dream is to be allowed to get away from the Naples area where he is confined and settle somewhere else where, above all other amenities, there must be a golf course – a recreation he misses most of all. Here in Naples, since the death of a much-loved lady companion, he has nothing to occupy his mind except three miniature Dobermann Pinschers and watching his diet which, on medical advice, is exceptionally frugal.

  I urged him to write his memoirs, but he said, sadly and truthfully, that nobody would read them unless they were all about the bad things in his life. Nobody wanted to read anything good about him, although the original case against him had now been proved to have been a frame and he had received complete exculpation from the courts.