Travel Reference
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children raced among the grown-ups' legs. Everyone seemed incredibly happy. I longed to be part of it, to
live on this green island with its wonderful views and friendly people and excellent food and to stroll nightly
here to this handsome square with its incomparable terrace and chat to my neighbours.
I stood off to one side and studied the dynamics of it. People drifted about from cluster to cluster, as
they would at a cocktail party. Eventually they would gather up their children and wander off home, but then
others would come along. No one seemed to stay for more than half an hour, but the gathering itself went on
all evening. A young man, who was obviously a newcomer to Capri, stood shyly on the fringe of a group of
men, smiling at their jokes. But after a few moments he was brought into the conversation, literally pulled in
with an arm, and soon he was talking away with the rest of them.
I stood there for ages, perhaps for an hour and a half, then turned and walked back towards my hotel
and realized that I had fallen spectacularly, hopelessly and permanently in love with Italy.
I awoke to a gloomy day. The hillsides behind the town were obscured by a wispy haze and Naples
across the bay appeared to have been taken away in the night. There was nothing but a plain of dead sea
and beyond it the sort of tumbling fog that creatures from beyond the grave stumble out of in B-movies. I had
intended to walk to the hilltop ruins of Tiberius's villa, where the old rascal used to have guests who
displeased him hurled over the ramparts onto the rocks hundreds of feet below, but when I emerged from
the hotel a cold, slicing rain was falling, and I spent the morning wandering from caf￩ to caf￩, drinking
cappuccinos and scanning the sky. Late in the morning, out of time to see the villa unless I stayed another
day, which I could scarce afford to do, I checked reluctantly out of the Hotel Capri and walked down the
steep and slippery steps to the quay where I purchased a ticket on a slow ferry to Naples.
Naples looked even worse after Sorrento and Capri than it had before. I walked for half a mile along the
waterfront, but there was no sign of happy fishermen mending their nets and singing 'Santa Lucia', as I had
fervently hoped there might be. Instead there were just menacing-looking derelicts and mountains - and I
mean mountains - of rubbish on every corner and yet more people selling lottery tickets and trinkets from
cardboard boxes.
I had no map and only the vaguest sense of the geography of the city, but I turned inland hoping that I
would blunder onto some shady square lined with small but decent hotels. Surely even Naples must have its
finer corners. Instead I found precisely the sort of streets that you automatically associate with Naples -
mean, cavernous, semi-paved alleyways, with plaster peeling off walls and washing hung like banners
between balconies that never saw sunlight. The streets were full of overplump women and unattended
children, often naked from the waist down, in filthy T-shirts.
I felt as if I had wandered onto another continent. In the centre of Naples some 70,000 families live even
now in cramped bassi - tenements without baths or running water, sometimes without even a window, with
up to fifteen members of an extended family living together in a single room. The worst of these districts, the
Vicaria, where I was now, is said to have the highest population density in Europe, possibly in the world now
that the Forbidden City in Hong Kong is being demolished. And it has crime to match - especially the
pettier crimes like car theft (29,000 in one year) and muggings. Yet I felt safe enough. No one paid any
attention to me, except occasionally to give me a stray smile or, among the younger people, to shout some
smart-ass but not especially hostile wisecrack. I was clearly a tourist with my rucksack, and I confess I
clutched the straps tightly, but there was no sign of the scippatori, the famous bag snatchers on Vespas,
who doubtless sensed that all they would get was some dirty underpants, half a bar of chocolate and a
tattered copy of H. V. Morton's
A
Traveller in Southern Italy.
They are used to having a hard time of it in Naples. After the war, people were so hungry that they ate
everything alive in the city, including all the fish in the aquarium, and an estimated third of the women took up
prostitution, at least part-time, just to survive. Even now the average worker in Naples earns less than half of
what he would receive in Milan. But it has also brought a lot of problems on itself, largely through corruption
and incompetence.
As of 1986, according to
The Economist,
the city had not paid its own street-lighting bill for three years
and had run up a debt of $1.1 billion. Every service in the city is constantly on the brink of collapse. It has
twice as many dustmen as Milan, a bigger city, but the streets are filthy and the service is appalling. The city
has become effectively ungovernable.
