SOMETHING ABOUT NAPLES just seems made for comedy. The name alone conjures up pizza, and lovable, incorrigible innocents warbling “O Sole Mio”; a nutty little corner of the world where the id runs wild and the only answer to the question “Why?” appears to be “Why not?”
Naples: the butter-side-down of Italian cities, where even the truth has a strangely fictitious tinge. One day a car rear-ended one of the city’s minibuses. The bus driver got out to investigate. While he stood there talking, his only passenger took the wheel and drove off. Neither passenger nor bus was ever seen again.
Then there was that busy lunch hour in the central post office when a crack in the ceiling opened and postal workers were overwhelmed by an avalanche of stale croissants. As the cleaners hauled away garbage bags of moldy breakfast rolls, the questions remained: Who? Why? And what else could still be up there?
But Naples actually isn’t so funny. Italy’s third largest city, with 1.1 million people, has a much darker side, where chaos reigns: bag snatching and mugging, clogged streets of stupefying confusion, where traffic moves to mysterious laws of its own through multiple intersections whose traffic lights haven’t functioned for months, maybe years—if they have lights at all. Packs of wild dogs roam the city’s main park. Nineteen policemen on the anti-narcotics squad are arrested for accepting payoffs from the Camorra, the local Mafia.
To many Italians, particularly those in the wealthy, industrialized north, none of this is surprising. To them Naples means political corruption, wasted federal subsidies, rampant organized crime, appallingly large families, and cunning, lazy people who prefer to do something shady rather than honest work.
Neapolitans know their reputation. “People think nothing ever gets done here,” said a young professional woman. Sometimes they say, “Surely you come from Milan. You come from Naples?”
Giovanni del Forno, an insurance executive, told me about his flight home from a northern Italian city, the plane waited on the tarmac for half an hour for a gate to become available. “And I began to hear the comments around me: “Well, here we are in Naples,” he said with a wince. “These comments make me suffer.”
Neapolitans may complain, but most can’t conceive of living anywhere else. The city has the intimacy, tension, and craziness of a large but intensely devoted family. The people have the same perverse pride as New Yorkers. They love even the things that don’t work, and they love being Neapolitans. They know outsiders don’t get it, and they don’t care. “Even if you go away”, one woman said, “you remain a prisoner of this city. My city has many problems, but away from it I feel bad.”
This is a city in which living on the brink of collapse is normal. Naples has survived wars, revolutions, floods, earthquakes, and eruptions of nearby Vesuvius. First a wealthy colony founded by the Greeks (who called it Neapolis, or “new city”), then a flourishing Roman resort, it lived through various incarnations under dynasties of Normans, Swabians, Austrians, Spanish, and French, not to mention a glorious period as the resplendent capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
It was a brilliant, cultivated city that once ranked with London and Paris. The Nunziatella, the oldest military school in Italy, still basks in its two centuries of historic glory; the Teatro San Carlo remains one of the greatest opera houses in the world. The treasures of Pompeii grace the National Museum. Stretched luxuriantly between mountains and sea along the curving coast of the Bay of Naples, full of ornate palaces, gardens, churches, and works of art, with its mild climate and rich folklore, Naples in the last century was beloved by artists and writers. The most famous response to this magnificence was the comment by an unknown admirer, “See Naples and die.”
Today that remark carries less poetic connotations. The bombardments of World War II were followed by the depredations of profiteers and politicians-for-rent who reduced the city to a demoralized shadow of itself, surviving on government handouts. Until five years ago city governments were cobbled together by warring political factions; some mayors lasted only a few months. A cholera outbreak in 1973 was followed in 1980 by a major earthquake. Its famous port has withered (though the U.S. Sixth Fleet command is still based just up the coast), industries have failed, tourists have fled, natives have moved out—it seems that only drug trafficking is booming. “Unlivable,” the Neapolitans say, “Incomprehensible”, “Martyred”.
1. The two examples in the second and third paragraphs intend to show that ______.
2. It can be concluded from the passage that the Northerners ______.
3. The author implies that Neapolitans’ affection for the city ______.
4. When the author says “Today that remark carries less poetic connotations,” he actually means that ______.
