Napoli!

One of the things you don’t plan for on a mid-summer vacation is getting a bad cold. James returned from summer camp the day before we left with a cold, and although for him it was just some trivial sniffles, Juliet has not been so spared. The last day in Rome she was showing signs of wearing down, and we hoped it would pass quickly, too. Alas. The bug has taken her down.

We left Rome bright and early on the Frecciarossa, Italy’s version of the bullet train, and arrived in Naples in one hour’s time. Even hopped-up on ibuprofen and Coco-Cola, Juliet was tired and sullen. The plan was to drop bags, then explore the city, including its world-class antiquities museum which houses the treasures of Pompeii. As in Rome, our hotel is a rehabbed former manse of some 18th-century lordling, complete with ornate ceiling and frescoed walls (it sounds very posh, though these places are surprisingly inexpensive, especially considering how centrally-located they are). The accommodating staff allowed us to check in at 9:30 AM and Juliet pretty much went right to sleep. The early start also KO’ed James, who took an uncharacteristic nap next to his sister (then Erica fell asleep, but that’s hardly newsworthy). I left to do laundry in the hottest, tiniest laundromat in town. With this heat, we’re just churning through underwear. Around noon, I woke James up and he and I headed out to the museum, while Erica stayed in with Juju.

It's pronounced Frek-ari-OH-sa

The NAMM (Museo Archaeologico Nationale di Napoli) is housed in a palatial former university building that’s as ramshackle as the city. We were directed to download the museum map, but that didn’t work, so we spent a good two hours lost in a maze of formerly elegant, now well gone to seed, hallways, passageways, and rooms with forty-foot ceilings, pondering the treasures of the Roman patrimony. Here the priceless collection of gargantuan statues of the Farnese Marbles, there exposed wiring, dry rot, peeling paint, leaking ceiling tiles, weedy courtyards, and vast expanses of dirty blank walls. At one point we stumbled on the amazing House of the Fawn mosaics (many of which are extremely lewd, making for an awkward few minutes for James), and did the best we could to understand them with less-than-adequate signage. We didn’t get to see the crown jewel of the entire collection, the massive Alexander Mosaic, as that was off display being restored (though no one was working on it at 1 PM on a Thursday…). Ditto the impressive Farnese Bull, the largest sculpture ever discovered from ancient times, except it wasn’t even being restored, it was just sitting behind an old tarp and we had to crane our necks to get a glimpse of a piece of it. Meanwhile, the Aphrodite Kallipygos was nowhere to be found. It was only when James spotted it through a window that we went looking for a way into its room, but the door was walled up but some unpainted plywood.

Famous Pompeiian Mosaics!

Hulking Torsos!

Butts!

After the museum, we trekked back through the Old City to our place to check on the gals. Naples is gritty, it’s often said, a city of faded grandeur, and that’s pretty much what we’ve seen. The capital of an independent kingdom for much of its existence, Naples amassed vast wealth in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries and was a hot spot for Renaissance and Enlightenment art, culture, and philosophy. Before 1860, it was the richest city in Italy, and the largest city in Europe after Paris. But Italian unification saw power centralize on the new capital, Rome, and the riches of Naples’ treasury were emptied to pay for the new capital’s expansion and the industrialization of the North. With the money went the intellectuals and artists, and soon poor (and becoming poorer) Napoli and the agricultural south languished, its former glory stagnating while local animosity toward northern bureaucratic governance grew. This lead to the rise of the Commora, the Italian mafia which filled the power vacuum. Corruption damned economic and cultural progress, and some 4.5 million Neapolitans and southern Italians emigrated to the United States. Today, our stereotypical Italianisms—checkered table clothes, Mama Mia!, spaghetti, O Sole Mio, the mob, etc.—derive from the culture of that late-19th Century Naples the immigrants left behind.

The one is Milan does...not look like this

The gritty Spaccanapoli

Cool staircase

Since then, Naples’ progress has been slow, far slower than cities like Milan and Turin in the north. Corruption still lingers, money is tight, and things just kind of fall apart. Scaffolding is everywhere, covered in layers of dirt and graffiti indicating it’s been there decades. Densely packed neighborhoods (this is the densest city in Europe) feature few squares or open spaces, giving the city a congested feel. The streets mainly predate cars and have not been enlarged, and everywhere drying laundry hangs on strings tied between buildings, sometimes for a hundred feet or more over the street. Diego Maradona, the scandal-plagued Argentine who played for the local Napoli team in the 1980s is worshipped here, with shrines and murals with his visage on every corner, and memorabilia sold in every shop in town, suggesting the power of distraction for a people inured by hopelessness. 

When you walk around here, you feel the old. It is fascinating, and I kinda love it, partly because the city still feels so alive. Living in small, grotty apartments (which mainly lack AC) means people spend most of their time outdoors in the streets. Music blares, vendors hawk their goods, and people eat their meals and drink their beer and spritzes standing around gossiping and talking about soccer. 

It’s also partly because I’m fascinated (voyeuristicaly -speaking, I know) by the whole backwards-facing quality of life here. I don’t mean “backwards,” like Neapolitans are rubes. I mean it in the sense that they live now among things that constantly recall previous glory days. This old palace or church was once the bleeding edge of cultural progress, now it’s a grubby shell held up by steel reinforcements (themselves already old as dirt) and some guy has fashioned a makeshift stall in its portico to sell cheap trinkets. There’s pride in this idea—“hey, we may not be great, but we used to be, and here’s proof, right behind this palate of plastic water bottles I’m selling,” but also sadness. 

Augustine referred to this phenomenon as the “saeculum scenescens”—the “aging world”—to indicate the sense in which the world is declining as an old person does. By and large, Rome isn’t like this anymore, it’s too rich now. But it used to be like this, spending much of the last two millennia facing backwards. The Forum, for example, was a cow pasture until the late 19th Century; the Coliseum hosted the events for which it is known for about 300 years in total, but for the majority of its existence has been the refuge of squatters, residing in shacks built up against its walls. Imagine living in Rome in the year 1150, a poor peasant surrounded by decaying architectural glories the likes of which cannot be replicated, the products of a lost know-how it took centuries of political organization to develop, but which is now hopelessly gone. For these folks, everything in the past was better, the future will only get worse. 

Where we live, by contrast, we’re accustomed to thinking of the future. The new technology, the new store coming to town, the new school being built. It’s only in the last few years that, faced with environmental collapse, the uncertainty of AI, and the devolution of democracy around the world, we’ve begun to entertain backwards-facing thoughts (it’s no coincidence that dystopian fiction is now all the rage.) Maybe Naples has something to teach us about getting by in the new world?

Also, this blog entry is long because I’m stuck in the apartment with a sick kid (spoiler alert), so I’m killing time.

Later in the afternoon, James and I beat the heat in the splendiferous Sansevero Chapel, built by one of those dilettante philosopher-alchemist aristocrat type-guys during the Enlightenment glory days of Naples. It has some rad sculptures, including this little number. We then visited the Duomo, the city’s cathedral. It’s a delightfully unbesmerched-by-the-Baroques gothic church which houses the bones of the city’s patron, St. Januarius (St. Genaro, in Italian). They also have the mysterious relic of a vile of the saint’s blood, which liquified at certain times of the year. It’s a big deal to see this happen, though evidence suggests it’s just a medieval forgery containing a type of ferrous solution that had been developed by local chemists around the same time, funnily enough, that the vile is fist mentioned in cathedral records. Huh! Relic authenticity score: 1.5 - Sure, Jan.

The bones of St. Genaro

On the way back, we scored some excellent street pizza (served folded into quadrants and handed to you on the spot wrapped in wax paper). Erica was napping and Juju was watching Big City Greens on the iPad.  After enjoying the AC for a bit, Erica and James headed out to explore a bit more and return with some pizzas for dinner. The plan was to eat and then play some cards as a family, but we were all pretty tuckered out by then, so we just hit the hay, fingers crossed the girl would feel better by morning.

The real McCoy

WILL JULIET BE UP FOR A BOAT TRIP TO CAPRI TOMORROW? WILL MORE PIZZA BE EATEN? Find out in the next edition of Gholson Family Vacations Dot Blogspot Dot Com!