Naples gets a lot of bad press. Almost everybody I spoke to prior to leaving
had a profoundly negative opinion of the city, citing the usual complaints
about “dirty,” “crowded,” “noisy,” “violent,” so on and so forth. Having spent a fair amount of time in places
that are actually dirty, crowded, noisy, and fairly violent, I was rather
skeptical; besides, hearing everyone trash Naples (no pun intended) made me
like the place right off the bat. The
fact that it’s the gateway to the major tourist magnets of Capri and the Amalfi
Coast and yet has remained staunchly un-prettified appealed to my inner
contrarianism, so I deliberately carved out time between returning on the
hydrofoil and going to Pompeii to experience its dirty, crowded noise for
myself (not so keen on the violence).
I had had this idea that, after I had landed from my
transatlantic flight and gotten a decent night’s sleep, I would be able to roam
the streets for a while before departing for Capri around noon; however, my
aunt had very kindly arranged for a driver to not only pick me up from
Capodichino and bring me to my bed and breakfast but to pick me up the next
morning and take me to the port. As he
passed my bag off to the b&b owner, who was clearly rather disgruntled
about having to wait up until 12.30am, my driver smiled and said he would see
me at 8.30 the next morning so I could get to the island nice and early. I negotiated this back to 9 because I was
starting to get that “I’m so tired I feel like I’ve been clubbed in the head”
sensation, and the idea of prying myself off a soft, warm, non-airline seat bed
a mere eight hours down the line was not particularly appealing.
So 9 it was, and my aunt had called it—being picked up by
the same smiley driver and having my luggage and dress carried straight onto
the hydrofoil was infinitely more pleasant than arguing with a grizzled taxi
driver and waiting in line with the hordes of day trippers.
There’s also a part of me that wonders if, given my history
of ending up in foreign police stations and other situations that become funny
once a few years have passed, she wanted to leave as little room as possible
for me to end up squealing at gunpoint in some Neopolitan back alley and
texting “can’t make the wedding, being held captive by local gang members lol.” Not an un-valid concern, to tell the
truth. As such, I figured I would have
to do my Naples exploring when I got back.
First off, it’s hard not to like a place with the stereotypical
Mediterranean climate where the sun rises over a string of mountains and
reflects off a picturesquely curving bay.
Around 7am, the air still has a slight crispness, which burns off as the
day slips into the summer balminess that continues well into the evening and
lets people take to the streets and piazzas for dining and drinking al
fresco. The weather here is pretty close
to perfect, and even the summer thunderstorms, like the one I caught the night
I landed, are very mild, and have the added benefit of clearing any lingering
haze. We were probably lucky, but it was
perfectly, flawlessly clear while we were there, with not a trace of the
oft-referenced pollution. Maybe it’s
vestigial from those years in the UK where a day over 70F was a rare, rare gift
to be cherished and reveled in, but I can’t entirely hate any place where you
can assume the sun will be out and it will be warm enough to wear open-toed
shoes (I even feel this way about our office in the San Francisco suburb of
Pleasanton, which depresses me in a lot of ways but regularly gets up to 90F in
the summer).
Weather aside, I’m kind of shocked that no one mentions how
stunning the city is architecturally.
Not only is it blessed with this amazing location on a wide gulf with a
perfectly framed view of Mount Vesuvius, the multicolored buildings of
central Naples are so picturesque that
walking down streets like Via Toledo feels like being in a 1920s film. Yes, there’s a bit of peeling paint, a few
shabby awnings, the occasional mess of weeds growing between roof tiles, and,
if you find this kind of thing “dirty” and offensive, myriad clotheslines
strung with drying laundry, but there is an undeniable elegance about the tall
windows and ornate iron balustrades set against their backdrops of burnt
sienna, ochre, terra cotta, and kelly green.
 |
| One of many handsome facades |
The lungomare, the promenade along the bay that stretches
north of the port, is particularly distinguished-looking, consisting mostly of
stately hotels fronted with cafes that look out onto the water, and even in the
early morning, you will be joined on your stroll by at least a handful of other
people doing the same. There are also
numerous piazzas, including the absolutely enormous Piazza del Plebiscito
(named for the 1863 plebiscite that brought Naples under the Savoys’ rule as
part of a shiny, happy, unified Italy), which resembles a slightly smaller,
newer, dingier, and less gilded version of the Vatican courtyard. Admittedly, the base of the central horse
statue is squiggled with graffiti, as are some of the columns forming the half
moon that flank the church of San Francesco di Paola behind it, but the space
is vast enough that it in no way diminishes the effect.
 |
| You have to give Naples points for its very large castle. |
 |
| Galeria Umberto, thing of splendor |
 |
| I never said it wasn't a dense city...but look at that amazing weather! |
While we’re on the topic, yes, there is a lot of graffiti in
Naples. It is definitely one of the
features that one notices straight away; it would be hard to ignore the sheer
volume (which, I imagine, also makes it hard to remove). It’s rather striking, though, how much
graffiti there is that simply says “ti amo” (I love you). Kind of touching, right? I personally would not choose to memorialize
my love that way, but I guess the sentiment is there. Quite a bit of it is political in nature as
well. The wall where I took the below
photo (“se non cambierà, come in Grecia”; rough translation: if things don’t
change we’ll turn into Greece) covered immigration, homophobia, corruption, and
the role of the church, and it was less than a block long.
As for the noise, Neapolitans are famous for being loud (we
have a Lucchese family friend who sniffs that they run around yelling like
their heads are on fire and then does her “Neapolitan impression,” which
consists of sticking her tongue out and waving her hands in the air), but I
imagine that a person would have to be really, really uptight for it to be a
genuine problem. We were able to hold
conversations over dinner without any problem and didn’t have to yell out the
window at any boisterous youths to keep it down because respectable people were
trying to sleep at this hour or anything.
In the evenings, the street is simply a place to talk or eat or smoke or
gamble or whatever, and it lends the city a distinctly buoyant air that you
simply won’t find in a place where the entertaining is done in someone’s
sitting room. Everyone seemed to be in a
good mood, enjoying the warm summer night, and instead of being mugged, cursed,
or pelted with rocks, I was offered several cheerful “buona sera”s. Mmm, yes, truly dreadful.
There’s a fairly constant and raucous symphony of horns
going during the day, which is also quite easy to ignore and is a phenomenon
hardly unique to Naples. As in most of
urban Italy, driving and crossing the street are both adrenaline sports, and
all you really have to keep in mind is that no one is actually going to run you
over so long as you aren’t a complete and total moron about it. A few mopeds came unexpectedly close to
flattening my toes, but once I stepped into the pedestrian crossings, the
traffic had no qualms about slamming on the brakes to let me cross, the drivers
transformed into docile Midwestern soccer moms for a few seconds before
flooring the gas pedal once again and screeching off into the distance. A Times
article from a while back described driving in the Naples area as “the least
relaxing activity on earth”; in the end, though, it all seems to work out.
One of the first things that piqued my interest in Naples
was the “camorra merda” scrawled on a concrete barrier to a construction site,
which translates literally to “shitty Camorra” but is closer to saying “fuck
the Camorra” in English. I spied this
with my nose pressed against the window of my black car on the way to get the
hydrofoil and promised myself I’d photograph it on my return. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember exactly
where it was; fortunately, I soon came across many more “camorra merda”
graffiti. This one is on the side of a
bank.
 |
| The flyer on the left says something about a personal mantra for inner tranquility; not sure if they're related. |
As literally every reputable source will tell you, it is
very, very unlikely that the Camorra will have anything to do with you as a
tourist. There are still regular murders
and extortion remains an issue, but unless you use your vacation to start your
own rival ring of organized crime, they will leave you well enough alone. Contrary to popular belief, Naples no longer
exists in the 90s, and even the much-maligned sanitation situation has
improved. I caught sight of both street
cleaners and garbage trucks doing their jobs, and fairly efficiently at
that. There’s rubbish on the streets (a
lot more than you’ll find in Positano or Capri, that’s for sure), and there are
still issues with landfill capacity, as the Camorra has sold a bunch of the
space for a fat and dirty profit, but I actually found Naples to be generally
cleaner than San Francisco. If you can’t
move past this, I recommend just looking upwards the whole time, because again,
the architecture is gorgeous. There is
also no stench of human urine emanating from the sidewalk nor any feces to
worry about stepping in, which I liked.
 |
| Waste collection is still rife with problems, but I can personally vouch that the streets get scrubbed on the regular. |
Back to the Camorra, briefly, because I find them
fascinating—nowadays you’ll actually see businesses with anti-pizzo stickers in
their windows, pizzo being the money paid to mafiosi to not burn down the
building, break people’s knees, etc. The
anti-pizzo movement kicked off in 1991, when Libero Grassi, a Palermo
businessman, got royally fed up and wrote an open letter to the Giornale di Sicilia that opened with “Dear
Extortionist.” I think we can all agree
that that takes some serious cojones.
Because this was really the first time that anyone had provided any kind
of pushback, there was a huge public uproar, and, not entirely surprisingly,
Grasso was offed nine months later.
Still, the letter got the ball rolling, and 2004 saw the formation of
Addiopizzo, a grassroots movement led by a generation of Sicilians who had
grown up with the Cosa Nostra murdering anti-Mafia judges, journalists, and
businessmen as a matter of course. Today
Addiopizzo is still quite active throughout the South and Sicily, though I’m
not sure if this speaks more to the shifting attitudes towards the Mafia or to
the fact that the Camorra, ‘Ndrangheta, and Cosa Nostra are still a colossal problem. Apparently pizzo is a €30bn per year
industry; the organized crime groups in Italy are estimated to have a €90bn turnover annually, which comes out
to roughly 7% of GDP. Welp.
Anyway, Naples. It is
still extremely improbable that you will suffer any ill treatment at the hands
of a mafia thug if you’re strolling around for a few days, and it is still a very
attractive city.
So after my morning walking along the lungomare, down Via
Toledo, through the Galeria Umberto, and across the Piazza di Plebiscito, I was
really wondering why everyone said Naples was that terrible. I mean, when I think of the terrible places
I’ve personally experienced, I think of Guatemala City, a polluted, grey
concrete hellhole with a staggering murder rate and absolutely nothing in the
way of attractions, unless you count murder as an attraction (I arrived at 6am
on a packed to the gills overnight bus from Petén and spent two hours in the
station holding my bag, trying not to look like an easily muggable 19-year-old
blonde girl while I waited for a connecting bus up to Lake Atitlán; mission
accomplished, but my memories aren’t particularly fond). A lot of people consider Delhi to be
terrible, which, although I found it exciting and fun and full of delicious
food, is much more understandable. Few
places on earth can rival Delhi’s noise, chaos, and open sewage ditches, and
there is the added benefit of either sweltering heat or damp, smoky cold
depending on the season. Detroit, from
what I am told, is also genuinely terrible.
But certainly not this ancient city full of outdoor cafes and Art
Nouveau masterpieces basking in the Mediterranean sun between the mountains and
the sea, right? I really didn’t get
it. Sure, there are nasty parts of
Naples, I reasoned, but even Marin County has its nasty parts.
Then I got on the train to Pompeii and got a better idea of
why good old Naples has this reputation. I literally had to stifle my laughter because oh my God, this train made everything I'd ridden in India look like the Oriental Express and Scotrail look like a bloody private jet. While the metro is clean, frequent, and easy, the trains going to the
outlying towns (including Sorrento) appear to be a 1980s hand-me-down from a
particularly grim city, perhaps somewhere in Romania or the Baltic states, made
all the less comfortable by the crush of humans who are all inevitably going to
(you guessed it) your same destination.
There isn’t any air-conditioning (ha!), so the solution is to crack open
the four-inch wide vents at the tops of the windows and hope (in vain) that
some semblance of a breeze circulates its way between the sweaty torsos all
pressed up against one another. The
train moves at a top speed of about 30mph, so putting any considerable distance
between yourself and central Naples is quite the time commitment, and on the
way, if there is room to turn your head and see out the window, you will be
treated to a visual feast of graffiti ranging from hastily scrawled “ti amo”s
to a 30-foot high portrait of Bob Marley complete with individually detailed
dreads and highly realistic-looking smoke pouring out of his joint. Should you be so lucky as to get a seat, you
will find yourself peeling the backs of your legs off the hard orange plastic
and shifting from side to side to mitigate the searing pain that will start to
radiate through your tailbone, though I’ll admit I find sitting on hard
surfaces more uncomfortable than most.
Needless to say, by the time we reached Pompeii and I crawled off the train,
I was quite happy to breathe in the fresh air and not be touching a clammy
stranger.
(Pompeii itself was great as well. Saddest part was the mummified dog; it just
looked so frightened. There are a lot of other people who have written things
about Pompeii that are far more interesting than anything I could hope to
produce, so I recommend looking one of them up.)
The ride back to Naples was less crowded, which improved the
experience somewhat, and was quickly eclipsed by yet another fantastic meal of
veal with porcini and insalata caprese, which confirmed for me that the city is
pretty alright. Had I not had an
overnight ferry to board post-veal, I would have gladly spent another day
there. I mean, really, if we’re going to
start judging cities based on their worst neighborhoods, they we might as well
condemn New York, Paris, London, and San Francisco, all of which are positively
fawned over by tourists, as shitholes too.
Go if you have the chance, and if you want to visit somewhere that’s
actually dirty, crowded, noisy, and violent, I can supply you with a list that
most definitely does not include Naples.
I’d also like to take a brief moment to discourage referring
to it as “Napoli” when speaking English.
Until you start referring to Switzerland as “die Schwiez” or Bangkok as “Krung
Thep,” it’s generally pretentious and irritating. Public service announcement over.
 |
| "I had the most amazing time in Athína. I mean, Athens. Sorry, the locals call it Athína and I just got used to calling it that too in the 72 hours I was there." |
