I fear that I do not do justice to any of the places I have visited, or the people whom I have met. Writing is like drawing a map: you attempt to create a convincing fake, a sufficient approximation, to allow someone to abstract reality, pretend to stand above it even while they move through it...kind of like a maze.
Surely my experiential maps are full of dead ends, skip crucial landmarks, embellish excessively about this or that turn that could have been described in a handful of words. So how can I begin to walk you through a city such as Napoli, overwhelmed as it is with vital detail, and which demands navigation in three dimensions more completely than any other city I have ever visited?
I described Roma as dirty (which, again, I very much hoped to deliver as a message of how beautiful I found Roma), but Napoli leaves Roma in a 10-meter thick layer of its grimy, glittering, flapping and mouldering dust and debris.
One endless, descending stairway was bedazzled by bits of shattered bottles. A tin rooftop a stone’s throw below a hillside road had collapsed beneath the weight of its impromptu glass depository. Trash piled everywhere - streetsides, landings, stairways, on main and side streets without regard to foot or vehicular traffic. Likewise, plenty of poop was on display. Paper, plastic, pieces of food, pieces of clothing - a bric a brac of human history.
Garbage has been an issue for Napoli on more than one occasion. While there, I did some quick research and discovered that bureaucratic or infrastructural challenges have led to collection crises in the past. At one point, the trash problem was so bad that citizens burned it in the streets in protest. At another point, in the far distant past, abandoned aqueducts beneath the city became illegal dumps, where at many points the refuse was many meters deep (I will return to the aqueducts).
But if I talk only about garbage, I have been completely unfair to this brilliant, stacked and subterranean sprawl that, when you stand atop it, seems to reach as far into the distance as the eye can see until it almost crawls up the misty mountains on three distant sides. On the fourth edge, for all I know, the city plunges into the sea and contains several more kilometers of aquatic neighborhoods.
Cinque Terre was good preparation for Napoli which, in its aggressive sprawl, rolls uphill for an impressive duration. Look up - and up, and up. Witness 20 and 30 storey apartment buildings built upon hills already towering half a kilometer above the city center and its network of ant trails far below.
To reach my lodging in Napoli, I could take a metro subway and then a funicularo (sort of a tram up a hillside) - but that would have been boring. The scenic route involved about a mile of hiking through a crowd of shoulders, scooters, shop owners, infinite and maybe actively-multiplying street vendors, restaurants spilling onto the sidewalks and occasional cars all seeping together to form the kaleidoscopic maze otherwise known as Via dei Tribunali (the other, more famous shopping street is called Spaccanapoli, literally “Naples Splitter,” as I learned). Anything that can be sold will be sold, on these two streets.
Napoli street view, the next evening
(Oh, for a hundred street pictures of Napoli...streets too narrow for cars, or in which laundry hung from every window, or piled with goods and restaurant tables, and all swimming with people)
I traversed, snaked, stopped and started, dodged and that was only the beginning. After the gauntlet of commerce, I faced a stairway to rival anything Cinque Terre has to offer. 265 steps up, out of the soup, out of the shade, out of the comfort of cool, city breezes. Having mounted this second obstacle, I turned and was rewarded with a marvelous view of the city - the first time since arriving that I began to appreciate just how large Napoli is.
Let me catch my breath...
I was not done yet, however. After mopping my brow (and arms, and neck, and even my back) with a thoroughly saturated handkerchief, I took a brief, horizontal jog and then climbed part of a second tall, tall staircase - this time just 43 steps. But still, the trip to my short-term home was not over. Having reached the gated arch of my apartment, I lugged my snail shell belongings up a total of 70 more steps, spread over 3 staircases that were cute by comparison with their elder siblings, before finally reaching my goal.
There is more?!
Of course, that is a poor choice of words, because every step of that first trip across Napoli was my goal. And the views from my host’s apartment were even more magnificent than the top of that first staircase (itself now maybe five storeys below me).
Wow...and then to sweeten the view, a magnificent thunderstorm
As night fell, the views bloomed with light. As I alluded to earlier, Napoli is hugged on three sides by grand hills and mountains, while a port vents its fourth side. The sun sets upon the mountains, offering an untameable frame to this wailing, singing, honking soup of living paint and sculpture and performance art, forgotten stories and recovered histories.
During my stay I discovered even higher vantages - and much lower ones - for Napoli is the truest example of a metaphor I used earlier in my travels: history that stands on its own shoulders. Napoli does not just reach liberally east and west, north and south, and upward - it scoops down deep into the earth and the dim recesses of time, as well.
One of the aforementioned, even higher vantages
Much of the rock beneath Napoli is tufo - a type of rock that is soft and easily carved. The city streets hide catacombs - at one point pagan graveyards, some as old as the 2nd century, some consecrated by Christians as early as the 5th and turned into combination graveyard/churches. Many cave walls preserve remnants of very old frescoes. And then we discover that these catacombs bury other, even deeper secrets - sometimes other, older churches, sometimes the remains of Roman aqueducts.
Catacombi di San Gennaro - entrance
Catacombi di San Gennaro - church number 1
Catacombi di San Gennaro - fresco from church number 2 - Faith, Hope and Charity
Catacombi di San Gennaro - ceiling fresco of Jesus from church number 2
Catacombi di San Gennaro - church number 3 - this is an area below 1 and 2
(and there is a church number 4 off to the right)
Napoli rests on itself and under itself. It exists in many periods of time at once. It occupies many social and political statuses at once. People from many countries seem to live here, and as I read recently (yes, Wikipedia) it is one of the oldest continuous human settlements. It has been a crucial center for the Roman empire, the capital of the Kingdom of Naples, and also the capital of the Two Sicilies (thanks again, Wikipedia). As my host explained, it went from being a prosperous and powerful city to one predated upon by its stronger northern neighbors (this is not the first time I heard about the famed tensions and rivalries between North and South Italy). In sum, Napoli is one of the most cosmopolitan places I have ever experienced - demographically, spatially, temporally.
Some of its monuments befit its grandeur. I visited two statues of saints that perch atop pillars perhaps 10 storeys tall - even at this, the saints are dwarfed by their surroundings, but if you stand near them, you feel their gentle, protective gaze. They are tall enough for the moment, and Napoli and its people, as my host attested to, are also tall enough: they persist, they adapt, they survive. With an abundance of tools at their disposal, I believe they will be ready for whatever happens next.
Piazza del Gesu Nuovo - statue is Obelisco della Immacolata
Piazza San Domenica Maggiore - statue is Obelisco Guglia di San Domenica
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