for generations, and he was one of the last, if not the last, to practise them in Naples – it was fortunate for Bellomunno that he was still a youngish man. His son, who was about eighteen or nineteen, although capable of doing this work and at present assisting his father, preferred to look after the horses in the stables at the Rampe del Campo and this was what he was now doing. To build a new hearse of this kind would take three and a half years, and it was probable that Bellomunno would eventually decide to do so. The cost of building such a vehicle would be prodigious. It would involve the use of various sorts of wood, all of which would have to be properly seasoned, iron, steel, brass, leather, cloth, glass etc., and the services of one or two craftsmen such as di Luca who would now have to carry out a wide variety of works which would previously have been carried out by a number of specialized craftsmen: body-makers who built the upper parts, carriage-makers who constructed and put together all the underparts, wheelwrights, joiners, fitters, trimmers, blacksmiths, painters and polishers. Such a hearse might be given up to twenty separate coats of paint and varnish. One of the great difficulties in the 1980s was to find suitable rubber to make the solid tyres.
In 1983 a horse-drawn funeral employing ten horses cost between 2,000,000 and 3,500,000 lire. The last twelve-horse funeral Bellomunno had organized had been that of Achille Laura, a shipowner who had also been mayor of Naples, earlier that year. He was what is known as a pezzo grosso, literally a big piece, an important man with various far-reaching affiliations; everyone who was anyone and almost everyone who was no one turned out for his funeral, for fear that his absence might be noted. A funeral of this sort could well have cost 7,000,000 lire.
Such funerals are particularly popular with senior members of the Camorra, just as Camorra weddings – at which diamond-studded shirts are often worn by male guests – are notable for conspicuous consumption. Whether horse-drawn or motorized, they are not very popular with those Neapolitan undertakers who are called on to organize them. The last time Bellomunno put in a bill to the family of a deceased Camorrista for a horse-drawn funeral – whose funeral they didn’t say – instead of receiving a cheque through the post, they got a bomb through the counting-house window.
1 Under the cassa integrazione 70–80 per cent of what a worker would normally earn is paid by agreement between the employer, employee and the state.
2 It is said that in one year, 1978, 500,000 bottles of imitation Fernet Branca were seized by the customs at Naples alone.
3 San Gennaro’s blood is first said to have liquefied in the hands of the sainted Bishop Severus on the occasion when the body was first translated from Pozzuoli to Naples at the time of Constantine. The first documented liquefaction took place in the Abbey of Montevergine on 17 August 1389.
The miracle repeats itself three times a year: on the first Saturday in May, when the two phials are taken in procession to the great, bare convent church of Santa Chiara in Spaccanapoli, and on 19 September and 16 December in the Cappella del Tesoro of the Cathedral, on all three occasions before enormous audiences.
During the autumn following our Neapolitan excursion we laid what plans we could for our clockwise journey round the Mediterranean, which, thanks to Wanda telling me to get on with it and plunging me into Naples instead of going off and sitting on top of the Rock of Gibraltar and feeling imperial, had started before it was intended to.
That winter we set off for Chioggia, a fishing port at the southern end of the Venetian Lagoon, about twenty miles south of Venice, a place that is picturesque enough in summer but in winter can look a bit pinched and poverty-stricken and has extremely draughty side-streets. It is also noted for having inhabitants who are extremely difficult for an outsider ever to get to know. Here, worn down by the efforts of trying to hire a boat for a private trip to Venice at a price we could afford from monoglot Chioggiotti who see quite enough of polyglot visitors such as ourselves for eight months of the year without being pestered by them during the other four, we decided to leave their austere but strangely attractive city – in which by far the jolliest place is the fish market – by public transport. In summer we could have gone the whole way by steamer, but because this was the dead season there was no direct service and we would have to travel first by boat across the Porto di Chioggia, the southernmost of the entrances to the Lagoon, to the Litorale di Pellestrina, one of the three elongated, offshore dunes which together form the Venetian Lagoon and at the same time protect it from the fury of the Adriatic, and from there take a No. 11 bus along the Litorale to Porto di Malamocco, the entrance to the Lagoon which now takes all the biggest ships, where it is driven on to a ferry and taken across to the Litorale di Lido to continue its journey to Piazzale Santa Maria Elisabetta, where one can take a No. 11 vaporetto across the Lagoon to Venice. Nothing to it, really.
Although we had failed in our dealings with the Chioggiotti, it would have been easier, if we had been really pushed, to do a deal with them than with the Veneziani, who have a tariff for everything and with whom there is no possibility of bargaining, something a lot of other representatives of Christendom discovered back at the time of the Fourth Crusade on their way to the Holy Land.
At the last moment before the Venetian fleet, which the Crusaders had booked in 1202 to take them to the scene of the action, was due to sail with them on board, from their assembly point on the Litorale di Lido, some of their commanders found themselves unable to meet their commitments to the Veneziani who, although there were fewer Crusaders than had been originally contracted for, still insisted on being paid, according to the tariff, the full passage money for those who had not turned up.
This deadlock was only resolved when the Doge Enrico Dandolo, who in spite of being nearly ninety and almost blind was leading the expedition in person, made a deal with their leaders whereby the Venetians would forgo part of the payment in exchange for help while en route in re-taking Zara, one of their ports on the Adriatic, which had gone over to the Hungarians.
But even this was not enough for the Venetians. Once they had reduced this Christian city with the aid of the Crusaders, a campaign that was punished by the Pope excommunicating all the Venetians and all the Crusaders taking part, the Doge then imposed a further condition: that the Crusaders should help the Venetians to storm yet another stronghold of Christendom, the Greek Byzantine city of Constantinople, in order, ostensibly, to restore the Emperor, who had been deposed, but in fact to revenge the death of thousands of Venetians who had been slaughtered there by the Greeks ten years previously, and to make Venice the most influential power in the eastern Mediterranean. The Doge himself led the combined forces against the city in April 1204, breaching the seaward walls and taking it by storm, virtually destroying it and gathering loot of a magnificence that was to make Venice the envy of the world. It also made her – personified by the Doge, who stayed on and eventually died and was buried there – mistress of three-eighths of what was now to become a Latinized city, as well as of Durazzo, on what are now the Albanian shores of the Adriatic, Lacedaemon, otherwise Sparta, the Greek islands of the Cyclades and Sporades, and Crete. The other five-eighths of the city became the property of Count Baldwin, who was crowned as Latin Emperor of the East in what had now become, as Santa Sofia, a Roman Catholic cathedral, as did half the Byzantine territory which lay outside the walls. The other half was given to various Crusader knights, who held it as vassals. Altogether, for the Venetians, it had been a famous victory.
By the time we sailed from Chioggia, the Lagoon, the Litorali, and the Adriatic out beyond
