Via Don Bosco is a long, long street, straight at first, then winding and partly cobbled in its later, mountain sections, which begins in Piazza Carlo III opposite the Albergo dei Poveri, begun by Charles’s architect Ferdinando Fuga in 1751 but never completed. It then runs up through Doganella under an enormous concrete fly-over which joins Via Malta, on which the shoe market is held, to the Tangenziale, the Naples Ring Road. Via Don Bosco passes on its way the Cimitero Vecchio, the Old Cemetery, at the foot of the hill, the Cimitero Santa Maria del Pianto (of the Crying), and the sad-looking Protestant Cemetery, eventually reaching the square called Largo Santa Maria del Pianto. From here one road leads to Capodichino Airport; another, the Via del Riposo, to the Cimitero della Pietà, in which the poor are buried; and a third, Via Santa Maria del Riposo, to one of the principal entrances to the two biggest cemeteries, the Cimitero Monumentale and the Cimitero Nuovo, in both of which the dead are dried out in the tufa soil for eighteen months before being filed away in niches on an upper floor.
It is a lugubrious part of Naples at any time and certainly not one in which to linger unaccompanied (you can get knocked on the nut just as easily in a Neapolitan cemetery as anywhere else in Naples), but one in which on almost any day in working hours, providing that business is normal, anyone interested in horses and/or horse-drawn funerals can see at least one horse-drawn hearse making its way up the long ascent to one or other of these resting places. Those ghouls who enjoy any sort of funeral or are simply interested in horseless carriages can see an almost endless procession of motor hearses of various degrees of melancholy splendour all on the same course.
There are few places in the world, now that the Ancient Egyptian and the Imperial Chinese dynasties are no more, apart from Bali, where death is celebrated in such a memorably conspicuous fashion.
Until long after the last war (and even now Bellomunno employees are not prepared to take an oath that such an operation could not still be organized out in the sticks) it was possible to assemble a cast of hundreds, even thousands, of professional mourners to follow the hearse, provided that those who were left alive had inherited sufficient financial clout to pay them: squads of orphans, or if not real orphans simulated ones whose parents were only too happy for them to appear as orphans for the occasion, all of them, real or simulated, dressed in deepest black. Provided there was sufficient inducement, whole bevies of nuns, as well as hosts of professional wailing women, could be made instantly available.
Up to 1914, and possibly even later, the corpse was accompanied by strangely dressed hooded members of the deceased’s Fratria, the Brotherhood to which so many Neapolitans then belonged. At a yet earlier date, the hearse was also accompanied by a body of poor men wearing black stove-pipe hats, grey uniforms over their rags and carrying black banners with the initials of the deceased person embroidered on them, all chanting a doleful litany which began:
Noi sarem come voi sete …
We shall be as you are …
This grey company of death, as one Neapolitan described them, were the Poveri, the Poor of the Hospice of San Gennaro, all of them penniless, many of them ex-soldiers who had fought as mercenaries in various parts of the world. They lived, when not accompanying funerals, in the Ospizio di San Gennaro dei Poveri, now a psychiatric hospital, which was founded in the seventeenth century among the Christian catacombs, which they used to show to visitors along with the church next door, which was built on the site of a chapel in which the head of San Gennaro3 was at one time preserved after his martyrdom in AD 305 at Pozzuoli.
We set off for the Bellomunno horse-drawn branch on the Rampe del Campo in rain that became progressively heavier while we waited for a bus to take us there.
Travelling up Via Don Bosco, having passed Charles’s enormous workhouse, was more like being in the Mile End Road on a wet December afternoon than twelve o’clock in Naples, in August. It was not therefore surprising that we missed the whistle stop for the Rampe del Campo and found ourselves at the beginning of the long haul up to the cemetery plateau, and by the time I realized the mistake and had managed to struggle forward through the bus shouting the equivalent in Italian of ‘Here, I say …’ to the driver and had persuaded him to make an unscheduled stop, we were just coming up to the concrete fly-over.
He did stop, under the fly-over, making it abundantly clear that he thought we must be a couple of tomb robbers, wanting to get down in a place that has very little else to offer in the way of diversion, even in fine weather, except a visit to the Cimitero Vecchio.
But there, underneath the fly-over, with ten horses, and everyone else involved taking a breather before attacking the long salita, was one of Bellomunno’s huge, jet black, baroque hearses with a jet black coffin inside behind expanses of glittering plate glass, a top-hatted, long-black-coated coachman on the box, and a pair of uniformed mutes doubling as grooms holding the two lead horses’ heads with, behind them, four pairs of magnificent, jet black Dutch horses, like the leaders all tossing their heads and all steaming like mad. And behind the hearse a long line of black motor cars, containing the supporters.
‘What happened to the old cocchiero?’ Wanda asked the coachman on the box high overhead who was about twenty-five and as wet as we were. ‘He was a very kind man. The last time we came to the Rampe del Campo was in a taxi and he sent us back to Naples in one of your motor hearses to save us the fare.’
‘He died in 1973,’ he said. ‘They gave him a fine funeral. And you, too, will soon be dead if you don’t change your clothes,’ looking down on us where we stood in a pair of puddles. ‘At the top of the salita,’ he went on pointing up the hill, ‘in Largo Santa Maria, beyond the Cemetery of Santa Maria, there is a pizzeria called the Loggia del Paradiso [Verandah of Paradise] which overlooks it. That is the cemetery we are bound for. Go to the Loggia and tell them I sent you. They will dry your clothes by the oven and lend you some while you’re eating. The hearse which will take this coffin down into the cemetery from the gates is a motor one. I can’t get into it with ten horses. After the funeral the driver and his men will go to the Loggia to have their lunch, and when they go back to the city, which will be about two o’clock, I will ask them to take you with them and drop you off in Piazza Garibaldi.’
From the automobiles, which were as black as the hearse itself and crammed with mourners, the women heavily veiled, came the sounds of groans and sobbing. The cocchiero winked and waved his whip with a graceful gesture, comprehending everything in and out of sight: the pouring rain, the appalling, thundering traffic, the fearful landscape, the keening women and the corpse high overhead behind him.
‘Com’è bella Napoli!’ he said.
Then he shouted to the men holding the heads of the leaders; they let them go and they were off, their hooves skidding a bit on the cobbles, eventually breaking into a trot with the grooms hanging on behind the hearse, out into the pouring rain up towards the Cemetery of Santa Maria del Pianto.
Warm and dry and full of lunch on the way back to Piazza Garibaldi in the Bellomunno motor hearse, we caught up on what had been happening to the old firm in the course of our twenty years’ absence.
They no longer had the white horse-drawn hearse used for children, or the small, black, two-horse one in their stables at the Rampe del Campo; but they still had two of the big ones, one of which – the twin of the one we had seen that morning – was undergoing extensive repairs and redecoration which would take many months to complete. This work of reconstruction was being carried out, part time, by a skilled body-worker from Alfa-Romeo, called Vincenzo di Luca, a man known in the horse-drawn carriage trade as ‘a builder and varnisher’. His family had
