Details
Naples, stuck between the world’s most famous volcano and the deep blue sea, is beautiful and ugly in equal measure. It can be an intimidating place – anarchic and only sporadically law-abiding. The traffic is terrible and peace and quiet is hard to find. But it’s an extraordinarily vivacious city, the food (especially pizza) is great, opera, classical music and jazz are ingrained in its culture and the treasure trove of sights hidden away here is at times overwhelming.
Ask an Italian from Rome or the north about Naples and they will throw up their hands in despair and tell you it’s a part of Africa. It is indeed dirty, overcrowded and impossibly chaotic – more like Marrakesh than Milan. But probe these gentrified folk a little more, and they may tell you with something approaching admiration about the Neapolitan Renaissance, the cultural rebirth of a once-grand city.
Areas that were considered no-go are now reasonably safe, and some of the many churches and monuments semi-permanently closed for “renovation” are now genuinely restored, or at least open, at least some of the time.
Volcanos aside, the city and its surroundings are also geographically blessed: for while the ever-present hulk of Vesuvius bears down on the city, with the fruitful hills of the Sorrento Peninsula plunging to the well-endowed Amalfi Coast on one side and the ornamental beads of Capri, Ischia and Procida out to sea on the other, you’re never far away from captivating scenery. Towns and villages cling to cliffs or cluster around harbours in true picture- postcard style and views are colourful and panoramically spectacular. And if it’s history you’re after, the once-buried wonders of Pompeii and Herculaneum to the east are only slightly more amazing than the ruined marvels of the Campi Flegrei to the west, while to the south, crumbling Paestum is the most majestic of them all.
Naples has a lot of history to get over before it can feel properly at ease with itself. It has a strong but also confused sense of civic pride and tradition: its dialect betrays its mixed parentage, particularly its Spanish and French influences. For hundreds of years it was tossed from one set of rulers to another, and still has a profound anti-establishment feeling, and a distrust of outsiders.
To really understand the psyche of the city, however, it is necessary to look at the relationship between Naples and Vesuvius. Though Neapolitans will feign something like blasé indifference when asked about their volcano, the reality is much more significant. “Il Dominatore”, they call Vesuvius, and its glowering presence rising above the city is quite clearly a factor in both the Neapolitans’ endemic fatalism and in their hedonistic love of the good life. By extension it can probably be considered partly to blame for Neapolitan driving, extreme levels of superstition and the fact that around signs “severely prohibiting” ball-games, there will almost always be four or five games of football in progress, occasionally using the same signs for goalposts.
Covers:
Pompeii, Herculaneum, Sorrento,Capri, Ischia, Procida, Amalfi Coast, Paestum, Caserta
