On the Shores of the Mediterranean. Eric Newby
with long, narrow dangerous alleys running uphill from it in an area infested with robbers, one of which is full of makers and sellers of presepi (cribs) and the painted terracotta figures of the infant Christ, the Virgin, the Shepherds and the Kings and the animals which every Neapolitan family brings out in Christmas week; artificial flowers for cemeteries and religious images. The streets running down from it towards Corso Umberto, such as those around the Forcella, the home of Luigi Giugliano, whose uncle had been deported to Frosinone, were still the abode of puttane, tarts, some of them enormous.
Twenty years previously, sent off by Wanda to conduct this particular piece of fieldwork by myself, awe had overcome lust as I looked for the first time at these mountainous women somehow inserted into skirts so tight that it seemed that they must burst, bigger even than many of their biggest customers, who were themselves gigantic. Now, fat or thin, they were fighting an uphill battle against the thousands of male prostitutes and transvestites who, as long ago as the seventies, as everywhere else in Italy, were already beginning to outnumber them, if they had not already done so. Some, seeing their livelihood threatened by the indifference of a seemingly increasingly myopic clientele and not receiving much support from the Nuova Famiglia or the NCO, who would take a percentage of any earnings, whether they were male, female or transvestite, pinned cards on the doors of their places of business announcing that whoever was inside was a PUTTANA VERA – a Genuine Prostitute.
The beggars of Naples were now less numerous, less ragged than they had been twenty years previously. The poor, in fact, although they might be relatively poorer than they had been, now looked slightly more prosperous, more bourgeois. Some of the raggedest beggars were still to be found lying on the steps leading up into the enormous Galleria Umberto Primo, which has a nave 160 yards long and is 125 feet high with a dome towering 60 feet above that, a place that for at least a couple of decades after 1943 was the centre of every imaginable and unimaginable clandestine activity. It was now more difficult to see in Naples what had appeared in a photograph taken in the seventies, and used by de Crescenza to illustrate his book, of a man lying on a flight of steps apparently in the depths of winter with an empty begging bowl beside him and a notice which read, ‘Ridotto in questo condizione di mio cognato’ (‘Reduced to this condition by my brother-in-law’).
But although there were now more bag-snatchers, more pickpockets, more people ready to beat you up if for no better reason than to give you something to remember them by, as there were almost everywhere else in the Mediterranean lands, or Europe, or the entire world for that matter, there seemed to be slightly less trufferia, petty swindling. It was now less certain that, having made some purchase in the Mercato della Duchesca, or in the street, in the Forcella, for instance, and having had it parcelled up, you would find on opening it up later that something of the same size and weight had been substituted for it, although I was sold a guide book to Pompeii, sealed in plastic, which turned out to be nothing more than the cover with blank pages inside.
On the other hand, to be more or less sure of keeping what money you had about you, it was now doubly necessary either to wear a money belt or carry it inside one’s shoes and, even then, you could not be absolutely sure that someone might not knock you down and take them from you, or even cut off your feet if necessary in order to get at it. The city, too, seemed to have lost some of the skills that for so long after the war had made it one of the great world centres of the imitative arts. Perhaps whatever skill we had possessed in searching out these artefacts had deserted us, but we now experienced difficulty in locating facsimiles of Vuitton trunks, or bottles purporting to contain ten-year-old Glen Grant, Fernet Branca2 that back in 1963 had existed in almost too great abundance, considering how slow anyone’s individual intake is of this particular product, Hermès’ Calèche or Chanel Number 5.
Nothing was ever wasted among the Neapolitan poor and to some extent this is still true today. There used to be and perhaps still are whole families devoted to the reanimation of second-hand clothes. These rianimatori used to hang the garments in closed rooms in which bowls of boiling water were placed which gave off a dense steam which raised the nap of the material. If the garment had a moth hole or a cigarette burn in it, fluff was scraped from the inside of the seams with a razor blade and stuck over the hole with transparent glue.
Until recently there were solchanelli, mobile shoe repairers. A solchanello carried the tools of his trade in a basket with a board on top which he used as a seat on which he could squat down anywhere and begin work. Uttering a strange cry, ‘Chià-è! Chià-è!’, to attract attention he would sometimes latch on to some unfortunate person with a hole in one of his shoes or a sole coming off and follow him, sometimes for miles, all the while reminding the victim of the defect in an insistent monotone until whoever it was, unable to stand it any more, sank down in despair on the nearest doorstep and allowed the solchanello to carry out the repair.
In Naples the loss of one of a pair of shoes does not necessarily mean that the other will not have a long and useful life ahead of it, even if it is not sold to some unfortunate person with only one leg. It is still possible to find what are known as scarpe scompagnate, unaccompanied shoes, in the great market for new and secondhand shoes which, weather permitting, takes place every Monday and Friday in Corso Malta, an interminable, dead-straight street that runs northwards from the Carcere Giudizario on Via Nuova Poggioreale to Doganella, at the foot of the hill where the cemeteries begin.
Few people, even Napoletani, buy one shoe. Some, however, can be persuaded to buy two shoes which do not match. Luccano de Crescenza recorded a conversation in dialect between a potential buyer of two odd shoes and a vendor of scarpe scompagnate which went more or less as follows:
‘But these shoes are different, one from the other!’
‘Nosignuri, so tale e quale – they are exactly alike!’
‘Well, they look different to me.’
‘And what does it matter if they look different? That’s only when you’re standing still. Once you start walking they will look exactly the same – tale e quale. Let me tell you about shoes. What do they do, shoes? They walk. And when they walk one goes in front and the other goes behind, like this. In this way no one can know that they are not tale e quale.’
‘But that means I can never stop walking.’
‘How does it mean you can’t ever stop walking? All you have to do when you stop is to rest one shoe on top of the other.’
Sometimes in Naples one felt that one was in a city on the Near Eastern or North African shores of the Mediterranean, with Castel Sant’Angelo its kasbah or Capodimonte its seraglio, because in it the makers and vendors of particular kinds of merchandise tend to come together and occupy whole reaches of streets and alleys as they do in bazaars and souks in Muslim countries, so that Via Duomo becomes the street of the wedding dresses and the appropriately named Via dell’Annunziata the one in which newly arrived Neapolitans are fitted out with cribs and baby carriages.
Uphill from Spaccanapoli there is a narrow alley which runs up alongside the church of San Gregorio Armeno, which was once a convent of Benedictine nuns and has a famous cloister which was given the rococo treatment at a time in the first part of the eighteenth century when the viceroys of Naples were no longer Spanish but Austrian – Austria having been given Naples and Sardinia in 1713 by the Treaty of Utrecht which had brought to an end the War of the Spanish Succession – viceroys who would themselves soon cease to exist, the last one being ejected by the young Charles of Bourbon in 1734.
In this alley are to be found some of the men and women who model and bake and paint and dress the miniature terracotta figures, sometimes finding and using ancient materials to do so, and painting the back-cloths, the fondali, for the presepi. At Christmas the whole of this little alley is illuminated and decorated with hundreds of these figures.
Amongst the most remarkable of the presepi that have survived wars and earthquakes and all the other evils to which Naples and the Neapolitans have been subjected, are those in the Certosa di San Martino, the former Carthusian Monastery