European Journey 1953, Part Six – Naples

Like many another Mediterranean city Naples looks better seen from a distance. Approached from the sea, preferably at first light, its beauty takes your
breath away. Close up too much of it is an offence to eye and ear and nose.

Mr. Sean O’Faolain (see Note 1 below), who was here only last year, calls it “that big raucous, dusty, scrambling, lying, lousy, lively, lovely port.” And try as I will I can’t improve on that. He’s got it in a phrase.

Forcing my way down the crude colourful length of its main street, Via Roma, I asked myself: “Was there really a time when this human ant-hill seemed heaven-on-earth?”

Yet there was a time, and not so very long ago at that, when a signal recalling you to Naples also, as like as not, recalled you to life.

For six months the front line was never more than 40 miles away. Only an hour’s ride by jeep from the muddy hell of the Carigliano, Gigli was singing “Traviata.” In the morning you might still be buying cameos in the Galleria and planning a long, leisurely lunch, eaten from a white tablecloth. By nightfall you might be fighting for your life again in a waterlogged slit-trench — if you were not already dead.

After 24 hours in the place you hated it. But once away from it you yearned for it with a hopeless, insatiable longing.

All the time I lived in Naples — and towards the end of the war I lived there almost permanently — I hated it almost as much as I loved it, for its brazen, laughing acceptance of life.

In those days Naples would forgive any sin but hypocrisy. She knifed you in the back and said a prayer for your soul.

Today Naples has become almost respectable. Like a reformed rake she likes to pretend that her past, if not exactly blameless, was grossly exaggerated. The generation of shoe-shine boys who used to swarm over you like a plague of man-eating ants has turned into a race of handsome, arrogant dandies who stretch their bronzed shapely limbs in the sunshine.

They toil not, neither do they spin: yet each has his auto-cycle and his girl-friend. And the pockets of each elegant latest-from-Hollywood suitings are stuffed with crisp, clean lira.

Today it is safe to stroll at night through the evil-smelling alleys behind Piazza Dante (though it might be as well to leave your watch and wallet in the hotel).

Nothing could ever effectively clean up Naples. But at the moment she is doing a nice job of whitewash.

The villas up on the Vomero seem more affluent than ever. The shops in the Via Ciaia, once such pathetic little bazaars, now offer unrationed luxury from behind the thickest plate glass I’ve ever seen: two of the finest hotels in Italy have sprouted from the burnt-out ruins along the Via Caracciola, which, now that it has been neon-lit from end to end, can once more claim to be the finest waterfront in Europe.

Oh, yes, there’s a great deal of pulling down and building up again. Now that all the banks and churches and cinemas have been rebuilt they’ve time to turn their attention to less essential works such as apartment houses and slum clearance.

“The only thing wrong with Italy is that there are too many Italians” they told me in Rome. They weren’t being cynical: they were stating cold, unemotional fact. There are too many Italians in the world. Italy is one of the most crowded countries in Europe. In France there are 75.1 human beings to the square kilometre; in Italy there are 146.9.

Well, a million of them are here in Naples. They live in every sort of human — and inhuman — habitation, from super flat to sewer. They sprawl in the sun on penthouse roofs and crouch and shiver in caves that burrow deep under the Via Roma itself.

Nowhere else in Europe will you see squalor and splendour living so close together and accepting it as an inevitable way of life.

Your friend the Baron may live in an elegant apartment up two flights of stairs perched high above a tumble-down courtyard.

Grubby kids scream and fight all day on that staircase. Strings of washing, like carnival bunting, hang below his window. And to reach it his fashionable guests must step across a one-legged beggar asleep in the sun with his back to the monogrammed door.

Nobody thinks it odd. But then there is no word for “slum” in Italian…

I called on my good friend the Principessa di Parco Margherita. She is not a princess, of course. It was just a title I awarded her in the old days when I used to watch her picking her way, so trim, so elegant, so perfectly turned out, through the filthy alleys that spew out from Via Sergente-Maggiore.

An English housewife would turn pale at the thought of penetrating the noise and smell of the Via Sergente-Maggiore even in broad daylight. To the Principessa it might have been Bond Street on a May morning.

She moved through it all like a royal procession.

Perhaps it was years of dealing with the Via Sergente-Maggiore that made it comparatively easy for her to cope with the war. For three years she had Germans, British, and Americans billeted on her in turn. She stood up to them all: bullied them, cajoled, wheedled, commanded, had her way with all of them.

For some months in 1944 there was doubt in some official quarters in Naples as to whose word carried most authority — General Eisenhower’s or the Principessa’s.

She won battle after battle in German, English, and Italian. She outflanked and outmanoeuvred them, drove them out from behind each deeply entrenched official regulation until they were in full retreat…

Watching the Principessa in action I knew that no matter how badly she may have lost the war, with women like these Italy could never lose the peace.

And there she is now enjoying the fruits of victory, a little older, a little plumper perhaps, but still perfectly turned out, with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, facing up confidently to a future which is probably more uncertain in Italy than anywhere else in Europe.

The little apartment in the Parco Magherita is much as it always was but it glows with a new elegance. No longer is her wealth calculated in the number of cakes of soap and chocolate and cartons of American cigarettes carefully hoarded in her bureau.

Her husband, the dapper ex-cavalry officer turned car salesman, is earning real money again. He can sell all the sleek shining new cars that come rolling down to him from Turin.

In 1939 there were three Fiat agencies in Naples selling 30 cars between them every month. Now there are twice as many agencies selling twice as many cars.

They cost a million lira each those cars. But a million lira is not quite £600 by our reckoning. The customer pays by instalments: £200 down and the rest over two years. But he’s usually resold it before it’s a year old.

This glib money-talk, involving millions of lira, makes your brain reel at first. It’s only when you get your feet on the ground again and work out that a kilo of butter which cost 12 lira before the war costs 1,200 lira today and discover that even a kilo of macaroni — the staple food of every Italian — has rocketed from two lira in 1939 to 170 lira in 1953, that you begin to get things in their right perspective.

Every Italian bank clerk is a millionaire now — in lira.

But, all things considered, the Principessa is doing very nicely. During the war I used to give her a lift sometimes in an Army truck. Now she has a car of her own. She and her husband can afford to be members of an exclusive social club with headquarters on that lovely bay itself, and plan occasional jaunts to Rome.

How long this prosperity is going to last she doesn’t know — nor I think does she very much care.

Down the hill in the Via Ciaia the walls shriek with Communist slogans and drip with the paint-splashed hammer-and-sickle. The Principessa — and a couple of million women like her — trip serenely by on their way to market and to Mass, too concerned with planning tonight’s supper or what Maria will wear for her first Communion to bother about the frenzied writing on the wall.

As one earnest young Italian Communist complained sadly and bitterly to me: “The greatest mistake we ever made was to allow the women to vote. It was a unique experience for Togliatti (see Note 2 below). He was beaten by 20 million women.”

Reproduced with permission
© 2024 Newspapers.com

Note 1 Sean O’Faolain: Irish author – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seán_Ó_Faoláin
Note 2 Palmiro Michele Nicola Togliatti: Leader of Italy’s Communist party – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmiro_Togliatti
 

Jerry F 2024
 ;