Naples has changed
And Naples has remained the same.
Naples has changed since I was first there as an adult some thirty years ago. Then, as a youngish seminarian, I was the guest of the kind Franciscans at Santa Chiara. This time I was staying in the via Santa Chiara next door, in a flat with two friends. Santa Chiara, the massive Gothic church with spectacular majolica cloister, stands on one of the two main roads of the old city of Naples, whose street pattern has not changed in two thousand years. Once these narrow alleys, the via dei Tribunali and the via San Biagio dei Librai, always deeply picturesque, ran through a slum district, the sort of place people from the North of Italy told you to avoid. Illegal activities – chiefly small boys selling contraband cigarettes – were carried out quite openly, as I have mentioned before. Now the illegal activities have gone, and tourism, even over tourism, has replaced it. The two narrow streets are packed with visitors and numerous bars, shops and restaurants designed to cater for them. One can hardly move for people. The old Naples is no more, and as always, I mourn what has passed.
Quite a lot of people have tried to drive the Camorra out of Spaccanapoli: the police, the Carabinieri, the government, various local campaigners, but in the end it was the tourists that did it. Spaccanapoli is booming, and where there are economic opportunities everywhere, organised crime withers. For Camorra dominated districts one would have to look further afield to places like Scampia, and other places in the urban sprawl, la cintura di Napoli. For people who live there, economic opportunity comes rarely.
If the via Tribunali represent tourist hell – boilerplate Italian food, and pumping rap music - the good news is that traditional Naples is still to be found a short distance away. Well worth visiting is the district of Sanità. This was the setting of the film Piranhas, of which I have already written.
Incidentally, some tourist attractions are now booked out, such as the cappella San Severo. When I first visited I was the only person in the chapel; now it is timed tickets and long queues; this has something to do with Tripadvisor (quite rightly) rating it among the top attractions of the city. But go up the hill either to the Certosa di San Martino or the magnificent picture gallery of Capodimonte, and thing are pretty much as they always have been. Just as amazing as the San Severo chapel, for example, is the Compianto (The Lament over the Dead Christ) at Sant Anna dei Lombardi. And quite by chance I came across the superb complex of Donnaregina in the street of the same name, which is breath-taking and deserted.
Capodimonte is instructive, in that it is full of portraits of people who have tried and failed to govern this magnificent city with its unruly, in the best sense, people: the Bourbon monarchs, Joachim Murat and his wife Caroline Bonaparte, the Savoyards who drove out the Bourbons: all tried, some were well meaning, and all failed. They are not here any more, but Naples carries on. There is a lesson here, but possibly only one about the vanity of human wishes.
Nothing has changed. Naples now has an underground system which should make all the difference to a city choked by traffic. It won prizes when opened. At the Vanvitelli station I was struck by the sight of a plucky third ager on crutches walking down the stairs to the train, because the escalators were out of action. There’s great artwork in the serpentine corridors, if you can see it under the graffiti, if you can stagger down unaided; and the litter must be a health as well as a fire hazard. But hey, that is Italy for you. We construct something, but do we maintain it?
I do not want to sound sour, but the story of Naples is rather a tragic one: the success of tourism comes at a price, and most of the people do not benefit. The scandalous state of the nearly new underground, not to mention the advanced decay of lots of historic buildings, reflects the constant failure of government. There may be money set aside for maintenance, but does it end up where it should? We know the answer. One despairs, and one realises that our only hope remains in God alone.