On the Shores of the Mediterranean. Eric Newby
duty and tax? Because all the official establishments were shut. Gennaro made a killing with his contrabbando which by day would have to sell for infinitely less than 1800 lire to compete with what was a monopoly of the state.
There was nothing extraordinary about this way of doing business, with a basket on the end of a rope. In Naples, where many of the old tenements are eight storeys high, it is commonplace. The only difference is that there the trade is generally legitimate and the buyers, often elderly ladies living alone on an upper floor, are the ones who lower the panari to the sellers of such commodities as vegetables in the street below, who have attracted their attention by shouting at the tops of their voices in the dialect, ‘Signo [Signora]! The price of whatever it is is so-and-so a kilo. Acalate ’o panaro!’ (‘Lower your basket!’)
When Wanda decided to buy the only packet of Marlboros she ever bought from Gennaro and she shouted up, ‘Gennaro, un pacco!’, the strangeness of these three words, in her north Italian, Parmigiano accent, made him sufficiently inquisitive to lean out over the railings to see who owned it, and for a moment we found ourselves being looked down on by a hard-looking character of sixty-odd with short white hair and eyes like Carrara marbles. What we were looking up at was the last link in an illicit industry, the one that actually dealt with the public. An industry which at the height of its prosperity, largely in the field of cigarette smuggling, which continued well into the seventies, supported, by its own admission, some 50,000 Napoletani and their families, out of a total population of some 1,200,000.
In the good old days up to about 1978 when the contrabbandieri used to challenge the customs officers to football matches, money would change hands in large quantities to keep them sweet – which it probably still does – and the smugglers’ equivalent to the Royal Yacht Squadron bar at Cowes was the Bar Paris in Santa Lucia. But by that time the Camorra, and therefore the contrabbandieri, were already deeply involved with drugs and the special relationship they had enjoyed with the Guardie had come to an end, and, what had been unthinkable until then, the Guardie actually took to opening fire, if not actually at the contrabbandieri themselves, then on their motoscafi, although how it was possible to discriminate between one and the other at night it is difficult to imagine.
It was at this time that the contrabbandieri did something that only Neapolitans would think of doing. They formed a union which they christened Il Colletivo Autonomo Contrabbandieri, the Autonomous Collective of Smugglers, and called a public protest meeting, advertising it with posters which read more or less as follows:
SMUGGLING AT NAPLES ALLOWS 50,000 FAMILIES TO SURVIVE ALBEIT WITH DIFFICULTY. FOR ALMOST A YEAR NOW THE GOVERNMENT AND THE CUSTOMS HAVE DECLARED WAR ON US. HANDS OFF THE CONTRABAND UNTIL YOU FIND US ANOTHER WAY OF LIFE! COME TO THE MEETING OF ALL SMUGGLERS OF NAPLES ON THURSDAY NEXT IN FRONT OF THE UNIVERSITY IN VIA MEZZOCANONE 16.
A particularly appropriate venue as large numbers of students actually worked for the Paranze a Terra (an organization for distributing contraband).
Now, five or more years later, there were still 50,000 Neapolitan families involved in smuggling at Naples and more money was involved, as would be natural to keep pace with inflation even without taking account of drug smugglers.
There had been some changes in Naples since we had last taken a fairly prolonged look at it, back in the autumn of 1963, and it would have been surprising if there had not been.
Then we had been working on a guide book to the hotels, pensioni and restaurants in southern Italy, a task that had left us, even before we left Naples and began to tackle the rest of the Italian peninsula, in a state of near collapse. At that time the pensione with the piano had not existed, although there were one or two hotels and pensioni that ran it very close.
Some of the biggest changes that had taken place, apart from whole areas in which the original buildings had either fallen down of their own accord or had been knocked down and rebuilt, were down in the docks, all along the waterfront as far as San Giovanni a Teduccio, where the pontili, the landing stages, stretch out like long fingers into the filthy waters of the Bay, always a dangerous place, if only because of the long lines of freight cars propelled by tank engines that used to come stealing up behind one on their way to or from some marshalling yard. One was only saved from death by the engine drivers letting off a tremendous blast on their whistles. Altogether the place was a madhouse, what with steam engines whistling, ships, some of them big passenger liners, blasting off on their sirens announcing that they were leaving for the Hudson River and similarly distant destinations, and the appalling din made when a crane driver skilfully dropped a whole slingful of packing cases into a ship’s holds, shattering them so that the portuali, the stevedores, could get their hands on the contents, just as crane drivers and stevedores did in every other port in the world at that time.
Now there were no more steam engines; no more transatlantici stealing out into the Bay in the golden light of early morning; no more crane drivers dropping packing cases making music in the ears of the portuali. These noises had been replaced by the ghostly whirrings of the special lifting machines, each of them worked by one man in what had become an automated wilderness, as they picked up the pilfer-proof containers and either loaded them on to a container ship with the minimum of human interference, or else on to an articulated truck.
Now, denied what for centuries they had regarded as their legitimate perquisites of office, the heart had gone out of the portuali, and providing that the money could be found, and it almost certainly would be, by 1985, 750 out of a total workforce of 1700 portuali would have voluntarily taken the sack. What to do with the remaining 950 was a problem that no one in the government or in the port authority had yet had the courage to face. What was obvious was that as far as being a place of interest to travellers such as ourselves, or to anyone but the technically minded, Naples, as a port, like Barcelona, Marseilles, Trieste, the Piraeus, Iskenderun, Beirut, Haifa, Alexandria, Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers and Tangier, was finished.
What had gone, too, from many parts of the city in which previously it had operated at full blast, was what can only be described as the roaring street life. The change was particularly noticeable in the heart of Montecalvario, the large grid-iron of streets, alleys and flights of steps to the west of Via Toledo, that immensely long, straight street which under five different names (the others are Via Roma, Via Enrico Pessina, Via Santa Teresa degli Scalzi and Corso Amedeo di Savoia Duca d’Aosta), rather like Broadway, bisects the city from south to north, from the Royal Palace where it looks out on Piazza Trieste e Trento at the seaward southern end to the foot of Capodimonte at the top, north end where the other royal palace of Naples looks out over the city and the Bay.
These changes were not noticeable at first. It is only when you reach La Speranzella, the Street of Some Hope, which runs across Montecalvario parallel to the Toledo, and you see that many of the tall tenements are only prevented from collapsing by forests of wooden beams and metal scaffolding and that they have been abandoned by all except the most stubborn or desperate for accommodation, that you realize that the heart of Montecalvario is gone and that one single, fairly powerful earth tremor would bring the whole place crashing down in a vast mountain of rubble.
Here every different flight of steps from one level to another, every one of the sixty or more streets, every alley, has its own shrine, to Santa Lucia, San Gennaro, the patron saint of Naples, to Our Lady of Piedigrotta and so on, tended by old ladies who charge the lamps with oil, change the candles, collect any offerings, while meanwhile, in a sort of grotto beneath the shrine, the terracotta figures of men and women, which often include a priest among them, fry in purgatory.
Now what was perhaps the most vigorous street life in Naples was to be found in and on either side of Spaccanapoli, literally the Street that splits Naples, in the same way as Via Toledo does from north to south but from west to east. A long, long street with eight different names which begins as Via Santa Lucia al Monte high up in Montecalvario below the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, coming to an end in a vicolo cieco, a cul-de-sac, called Borgo Tupputi, half a mile from the Stazione Centrale in Piazza Garibaldi. An astonishing, fascinating street full of medieval, Renaissance, baroque and rococo churches, palaces and