Thrilling Cities

by Ian Fleming

  When we walked out together for Lee Thody to take some photographs, I asked him for the name of the best restaurant in the town, and he said ‘Angelo’s’. When I asked him about one in the yacht harbour in front of the Excelsior, he said, ‘Don’t eat there. The food’s O.K., but they’ve got a heavy pencil.’

  I have no idea how to equate the nicely spoken Signor Luciano of Naples with the old-time Lucky Luciano of Chicago, but I did take pains to check his present record in Italy and I found it so exemplary that it is reasonable to suppose that any teeth he may have had in America have been either drawn or self-extracted in exile. In March 1958, for instance, a magistrate’s special commission in Naples considered a police request from Rome that Luciano should be exiled from Naples to a small island or mountain village, on the grounds that he was involved in the international drug traffic. The commission ruled that there was no case against Luciano, who was ‘a free citizen as has been proved and conducts a perfectly regular life giving no grounds for censure’. The Public Prosecutor appealed against that decision, alleging that the evidence against Luciano had not been properly weighed, but the Italian Court of Appeals found ‘not even elements of suspicion’ against Luciano, and that he was ‘totally above suspicion of illegal activities’.

  Then, in March 1959, occurred the case which Luciano had described to me. The record says that the court found a certain Scibilia guilty of damaging slander against Luciano and did indeed sentence him to two and a half years’ imprisonment. Scibilia admitted he had sold false information about Luciano to the American Narcotics Bureau in Rome ‘to earn a few pennies’. This information was to the effect that Luciano had ordered the ‘disappearance’ of an Italian mayor because he had double-crossed him over a drug deal.

  What will become of the man and the myth? Apparently Mr Quentin Reynolds has been writing a story round him for Universal Pictures. How splendid it would be if the story could end with the adoption by the United States of the Luciano Plan for defeating the drug-smugglers, and with his triumphal return to America where, to the accompaniment of those heavenly choirs Hollywood does so well, Mr Luciano could be seen graciously accepting honorary membership of the Seminole Golf Club! [Mr Luciano died, peacefully, in 1962. I.F.]

  Before closing this little chapter, I must record, out of all context, a most extraordinary experience of our photographer, Mrs Lee Thody. We were talking about magic and superstition which, hand in hand with ardent Catholicism, are the mainsprings of the Neapolitan spiritual life. The dark belief in these things, which the Church is quite incapable of stamping out, is principally concerned with noting omens towards a winning number in the Lotto, or State Lottery, which is the passion of the Neapolitan. The sorcerer king of Italy is a famous soothsayer living in Rome called Francesco Waldman, and Lee Thody, who was interested in these things, had recently written an article about him. After finishing the article she went back to the soothsayer and said she would like to take some photographs of him. He was very reluctant to allow this, but when she pressed him he finally consented while warning her that the photographs would not be successful on that particular day. Mrs Thody, who, as I have mentioned, is a professional photographer of high repute, prepared her Leica with flash attachment, but though she tried again and again the flash would not work, though it had previously been in perfect order. She accordingly changed to her Rolleiflex and took several pictures.

  The next morning she took the two cameras to her developer who, first of all, checked the flash attachment to the Leica. It worked perfectly. He then proceeded with the development of the Rolleiflex plates. They were completely blank! Utterly bewildered, Mrs Thody returned to the soothsayer, explained what had happened and asked for another sitting. He reminded her that he had said it would be no good photographing him the day before, but said that it would be all right now. She took photographs of him with both cameras and they came out perfectly.

  From Naples southwards there is not only daemonology in the air, but also an atmosphere of almost medieval savagery and barbarism, well illustrated, I think, by this brief story of a recent occurrence in the deep south.

  A young farm labourer, Salvatori Funari, on his way to the fields, always took the same path past a farmhouse inhabited by four brothers and a younger sister, Antonina Guirlando, aged twenty-five. Salvatori used to wave to the girl as he went by in the morning and came back at night, and one day went so far as to call out ‘Buon giorno’. Weeks later the girl summoned enough courage to call ‘Buon giorno’ back. Then the youth took to stopping by the garden fence and exchanging a few words of village gossip, and this innocent habit went on for two years without any closer relationship, except that the girl began to wear her long black hair tied severely back, a local indication that she was engaged.

  One evening the girl was not in sight and Salvatori, on an impulse, knocked on the door. She opened the door, upon which he playfully kissed her and went off happily home.

  The girl reported the kiss to her brothers. They spoke darkly of family honour and at once called upon Salvatori, the four of them, and told him that he had dishonoured their sister and must marry her.

  Salvatori protested that he had done nothing dishonourable. It had just been a playful kiss and he was not yet old enough to marry. The brothers bought a revolver and gave it to their sister, and when Salvatori passed next day and shouted ‘Buon giorno’, she shot him dead.

  She protested to the police that Salvatori had dishonoured her, but the police doctor confirmed that she was still a virgin and she was duly committed for trial on a charge of murder, though I am ignorant of what sentence she received.

  Countless authors and sociologists have written about the stark, savage country south of Naples where all vestiges of the twentieth century, apart from an occasional Jolly hotel, have petered out, and we suffered no temptation to explore farther than Paestum. Instead we took the well-beaten sightseeing route from one five-star spectacle to the next, and on these I will briefly report.

  Capri: This island of dreams, vanities and myths is still, though probably not in summer, a place of enchantment and eccentricity, though the bathing on the minute, pebbled beaches flecked with black fuel oil is as hellish as ever. It is an enchanting place to do absolutely nothing whatever in except contemplate your navel, or other people’s, while trying to achieve a fashionable tintorella (sunburn). There are only five possible excursions – to the north, south, east and west or round the island in a boat – so, apart from getting sunburnt, people have nothing to do but squeeze on to the tennis-court size piazza and make, or fail to make, love. The failing – the refusals, broken unions, tears, recriminations – are the one source of energy on the island and the one topic of conversation. (Happy affairs are without interest. Only bad news makes gossip!) Thirty years ago, when I was last there, Capri was a great place for homosexuals, but the Homintern has now, lemming-like, left the island to seek greater privacy on Ischia and the more southerly and smaller islands north of Sicily. The only other perceptible change is the establishment by Miss Gracie Fields of a luxury restaurant and swimming-pool at the Piccola Marina of which she is the queen. Here, her privacy infested by every Tom, Dick and Ethel from England, she holds friendly court, and she was kind enough to invite us to luncheon.

  Capri has always had at least one ‘notable’, a famous person, nearly always a foreigner, whom every visitor wants to see.

  Gracie Fields has assumed the cloak of Axel Munthe and Norman Douglas and, apart from Emilio Pucci, the fashionable couturier, she is today the local star – a fame which this handsome, kindly, humorous woman from Lancashire wears, as her admirers will guess, with casual equanimity. She is happy there from May to October, but complains of being bored to death in winter when she takes flight for her old theatrical stamping grounds. In the winter, she laments, there is nothing to do in Capri but watch the television. ‘Boris [her charming and intelligent Russian husband] and the cook are thrilled by it. I like watching but I don’t know what the hel
l they are saying. Boris begins to explain to me and by that time the people on the screen are saying something else and I say what the hell, it’s a short life, and then we all go back to watching again. No, I don’t do much singing here. Occasionally we have a wing-ding when Sophie Tucker or someone else comes along, but there’s plenty of excitement. Sometimes a smart yacht puts in with friends. They come ashore and so-and-so gets me alone and starts crying on my bosom and saying her husband is trying to kill her. You know what people on yachts are! Well, I am probably having dramas over something here, the neighbours or rival restaurants or something, and someone is trying to slay me, so I say to my girl friend, “It’s the same thing all the world over, dear. Some man is always trying to strangle some woman. Don’t you worry about it.”’

  Boris gave us wine from their own vineyard to drink – perhaps one of the few bottles of true Capri wine on the island, for what is sold in the shops is nearly always a blend. He personally supervises the vintage and I said I had always been curious to know if the wine really was trampled by beautiful girls. He said definitely not. It was a tradition in Italy that to use women was very dangerous. During their menstruation periods, they are believed to kill all growing things they approach. Even in Italian agricultural colleges, he said, girls were not allowed to attend lessons on the farms or in the fields when they were in this condition. It was men who did the stamping of the wine. They soak their feet in a solution of leaves and herbs that each family keeps secret. This is an astringent preparation that closes the pores. At the end of the day they have to soak their feet in hot water to get the circulation going again.

  I asked him how their fine establishment on the beach was doing and he said very well, though there were too many Germans who brought picnic luncheons and ate them all over the place. They also were constantly arguing about the entrance fee. There had been one extraordinary man that week who had created a frightful row at the entrance. He had insisted on coming in, but had refused to buy a ticket on the grounds that the Germans were much better soldiers than the Italians and had lost thousands of lives fighting for Italy! Boris had been called to settle the row and had told the German that he could be Boris’s guest. This favour the German angrily rejected. He would not buy a ticket nor would he accept any favours from Boris. He just insisted on getting in for nothing on the grounds that the Germans were better soldiers than the Italians. When Boris had roared with laughter at this fantastic attitude, the German had stumped off, muttering darkly.

  We later encountered crowds of the Herrenvolk on the near-by island of Ischia – ex-stormtroopers who had gone to fat which they were trying to reduce by digging themselves graves in the radioactive beaches and covering themselves up with the volcanic sand so that nothing showed but rows of purple, sweating faces. The Italians are, on the whole, pleased to see them because, thanks to their frugality, they fill up the smaller pensions and rooms-to-let, and from the war-time experience of the two peoples they know a good deal of each other’s languages.

  A far more real pest of these regions is that new menace, the blaring transistor radio strung over the shoulder while the vacant-eyed carrier moons along hoping to far figura with his or her dreadful one-man band. In fact he is sounding the modern leper’s bell – ‘Keep away from me, I am the world’s chaos and malaise.’

  Pompeii is still, despite hordes of tourists, pimps and guides a very great marvel. We nearly killed ourselves there by refusing to hire a guide or buy a guide-book. We had forgotten how big it is and how quickly the giant cobbles, rutted by chariot wheels, murder one’s feet.

  There was one local phenomenon, at the door of the farfamed Lupanar – a totally unbribable custodian. He refused entry to my wife and she had to stand outside the little stone hovel with the wife of a Frenchman while he and I were allowed to enter the house of pleasure with its six tiny little bedrooms and the childish pictures high up on the walls to show you how to make love – if you were the right shape and extremely athletic. The Frenchman was indignant that his wife was not allowed to view the vaunted mysteries of this antique bordello. He continued to argue while the custodian endeavoured to shock us by translating some of the vulgar graffiti on the walls, and explaining the much-flaked little pictures. ‘You see,’ he said, his eyes gleaming, ‘that is the woman and that is the man!’ ‘Pah!’ shouted the Frenchman. ‘You think I have come a thousand miles from Paris to see that? Why, I was doing it myself when I was sixteen!’ ‘But this, Signor, and this!’ beseeched the guide. ‘Infantile!’ shouted the Frenchman. ‘These stupid Romans had no idea how to make love. And you mean to say you won’t let my wife see this nonsense!’ ‘Ah no, Signor, troppo pericoloso.’ ‘Merde alors,’ said the Frenchman, and we returned to our indignant wives.

  Far more beautiful than anything in Pompeii itself is the near-by Villa dei Misteri, only recently completely excavated. This large and very handsome dwelling was apparently dedicated to the mysteries of Dionysus or Bacchus that had to be practised in secret because of the scandals associated with them. Here the pavements and friezes are astonishingly well preserved, the latter, representing the initiation of a virgin into the secret rites, being far finer and fresher than anything in Pompeii. It is said that these enchanting paintings, so light and graceful, are copies of far greater originals that have been lost – no doubt the victims again of the coming of the Christians. This beautiful shrine is off the tourist track, but visitors to Pompeii would do well to cut short their rambles amongst those haunted ruins and spend some time at this exotic and haunted place.

  After this, Herculaneum held little interest except perhaps for those for whom the first plumbing, central heating and double-storied dwellings in history have a message. I found the ruins gaunt and melancholy, but the further excavations which have now been authorized may produce something more beautiful than the Neptune pavement in the women’s baths which is all that impressed me.

  Paestum, its splendid temples standing mutely and sadly beside the shore, filled me, since I do not greatly admire huge ruins however ancient, only with melancholy, but we were lucky to have luncheon at a small, out-of-the-way seaside albergo – the Olympia – and it was there, bathing on the vast, deserted beach, that we witnessed a most bizarre natural phenomenon, the life-cycle, or most of it, of two dung-beetles (?Scarabaeus stercorarius paestanus).

  I was sitting on the edge of the dunes, when two mediumsized black beetles appeared, laboriously pushing a ball of animal dung, about the size of a ping-pong ball. It seems that these were two female beetles, for suddenly a much larger beetle erupted from the sand, dashed down, wrested away the ball of dung, told one of the females to buzz off and proceeded to roll the ball furiously along the sand followed by his chosen wife. He didn’t push the ball with his nose, but, standing on his fore-legs, propelled it along backwards with his hind-legs – a most uncomfortable posture.

  Fascinated, we watched this operation for about two hours as the beetles scurried down towards the sea, their tiny tank tracks leaving a spidery, Tachiste sketch in the soft dry sand. The couple had many adventures – falling down sandy ravines, scrabbling up great mountains and around obstacles, and, all the while, through friction from the spiky feet and the sand, the ball of dung was getting infinitesimally smaller.

  I explained to my wife that the whole picture was a clear representation of our own existence. There was I, laboriously forwarding my career towards some unseen destination, while she fussed around in my wake and occasionally got in the way. The allegory was all the more exact in that Mr and Mrs Beetle stopped every so often and appeared to engage in a bout of fisticuffs or possibly love-display before Mr Beetle got his head down again and took up his sisyphean task.

  The sun was going down, but we still could not leave without witnessing the end of this titanic pilgrimage. For it was titanic. The two beetles had covered nearly a mile of beach – equivalent, presumably, to a human being crossing all Europe on the run. But now, perhaps because the setting sun had lit up the line
of sand-dunes and acacia clumps and provided the horizon that so many insects rely on to assist their sense of direction, the father beetle turned at last inland and hurried back towards the dunes.

  Once there, all became clear. He heaved the ball of dung up the shifting slope to a clump of grass, and there, carefully balancing his ball on a small ledge of sand, began furiously to dig under the grass roots. At one moment the ball looked like slipping down the slope, but the faithful Mrs Beetle, waiting at the entrance to the growing hole, scrambled to the ball and held it steady. After about ten minutes’ digging, Mr Beetle came back outside, collected his ball and accurately rolled it through the mouth of his home. Then he vanished after it, followed by Mrs Beetle, and the sand fell down and closed the entrance.

  We could only assume that now the two beetles would make love and bear children, and that the ball of dung represented the hoard of food on which the baby beetles would be nurtured until they could grow up and go out into this great sandy world in search of another ball of dung and another spouse – and so ad infinitum.

  *

  Our last bit of sightseeing was to Cumae, just north of Naples and adjoining Lake Avernus, into which, you will recall, the descent is so facile. Here is the grotto of the sibyl, and it was hereabouts that Aeneas approached the infernal world over the Styx. (I had not thought about these things since, as a youth, I had had to write out hundreds of lines of Virgil as a punishment.) The grotto, hardly visited by tourists, is a most doomful and awe-inspiring sculptured cave of Minoan origin. It is a hundred yards long, more than six feet wide and some eighteen feet in height, and leads through various ante-chambers, lit by great windows to seawards, to the circular inner chamber with a connecting bedroom where the sibyl, no doubt a simple peasant girl with the gift of second sight, was kept by her priests. Along the walls of the grotto are curious and unexplained channels in the sandstone and these were perhaps acoustic devices to carry the voices of the priests through the secret inner draperies when they had some sibylline prophecy to announce to the crowds outside. Other slots and holes in the walls were presumably for curtain rods and draperies.