100,000, have more than 20,000 unemployed, of whom 8000 are what is known as cassa integrati, that is paid not to work.1 At Acerra large numbers of earthquake victims are accommodated in metal containers of the sort carried on lorries. In the last week of this August, because of the heat, a four-year-old child died of asphyxiation inside one, the third child to die in this fashion in four months. Of the eight communes that make up Caivano-Fratta, which has about 200,000 inhabitants, the one with the largest number of unemployed is the one which has been industrialized. In fact, the setting up of industrial complexes in the Triangle has obliterated enormous tracts of agricultural land without providing alternative employment for the inhabitants.
It is not surprising that the Triangle is used as a battlefield by the warring clans of the Camorra; there were fifty murders there in the first eight months of 1983. The most dangerous area is Acerra, where, by the time we arrived in Naples, there had been twenty-two murders in eighteen months. Everywhere robbers, many of them no more than children, had organized themselves in bands anything up to twenty strong. Banks were constantly under attack. The only faint ray of hope in what was otherwise a prospect of unrelieved gloom and horror was that students and working men living in the Triangle had joined together to set up an organization of vigilantes, headed by a bishop. We decided to give Afragola-Casoria, Caivano-Fratta and Acerra a miss.
In view of all this general unpleasantness, it was therefore with a certain trepidation that we set off, as we did each night, to walk back to our macabre bedroom in the Pensione Canada on the waterfront facing Porto Sannazzaro, through streets that were now rapidly emptying of people, but not traffic, which continued to circulate until the early hours of the morning unabated. This room was twelve feet high, twelve feet square, lit by a very old circular fluorescent tube that when it was warming up resembled a crimson worm and was furnished with a bidet hidden by a tall bamboo screen, like a bidet in a jungle. It was also furnished, which was unusual for a bedroom, with an upright piano belonging to the brother of the proprietor. The only picture on the walls was a colour photograph of the Mobilificio Petti, a furniture warehouse at Nocera Sopra Camerelle (SA), with the telephone numbers – there were two lines, 723730 and 723751–printed underneath it, in case one wanted to order up more furniture during one’s stay.
Fortunately there were other things besides shootings, of which one soon tires, going on in Piazza Sannazzaro. Night after night we had sat in it watching a succession of events unfold themselves, always with the same protagonists, until we had come to realize that what we were looking at was an unvarying ritual. Even the order in which they took place and the participants appeared and disappeared was governed by immutable laws. It was only on this particular evening, when the Camorra had demonstrated its existence, coming up from the depths and showing a small part of itself, like some immense fish of which only the smallest part breaks the surface, that there had been any interruption.
First to open up, and the only one who remained on site throughout the entire evening, was a young man who sold raw tripe and pigs’ trotters from a shiny, brand new, stainless steel stall with the owner’s name and what he dealt in painted around the top of it – TRIPPE OPERE E’O MUSSO – in black letters, illuminated on a pink background.
The grey pieces of tripe were displayed on a sort of miniature stainless steel staircase which was decorated with vine leaves and lemons stuck on metal spikes, with a centrepiece which consisted of what looked like an urn made entirely of rolled tripe, with the pinkish pigs’ trotters laid out attractively at the foot of it. Down this staircase tumbled an endless cascade of water, making the whole thing a sort of hanging garden of tripe and pigs’ trotters; it was surprising how attractive looking it was, considering how unpromising were the basic materials.
Next to appear on the scene, after E’O MUSSO, was a very poor, very fragile, faintly genteel old lady, who looked as if a puff of wind might whisk her away to eternity. She moved among the tables never asking for money but nevertheless receiving it, for the Neapolitans recognize and respect true poverty. A surprising amount of what she received was in the form of 500 and even 1000 lire notes. This old lady rarely, if ever, made the circuit of all the tables. When she had collected what she presumably considered enough for her immediate needs, after taking into account whatever payments she might have to make to the Camorra in a way of dovuti, dues, or what she considered the market could stand each night without spoiling it, she would give up and totter off round the corner and up the hill called the Salita Piedigrotta which leads to the Mergellina railway station and the church of Santa Maria Piedigrotta. There, by day, during opening hours, she used to sit outside the main door, at the receipt of alms. Santa Maria Piedigrotta is the church which is the scene of one of the great Neapolitan religious festivals, that of the Virgin of Piedigrotta, which takes place, to the accompaniment of scenes of wild and pagan enthusiasm, on the night of 7–8 September.
The old lady was followed by an even older, even more decrepit couple, presumably husband and wife, each of whom carried a couple of very large plastic bags. They moved from table to table asking for bread, and because they didn’t miss any out, they got a lot of it.
What did they do with all this bread?
One night, feeling mean about doing so, I followed them out of the Piazza, round the corner and up the Rampa Sant’Antonio a Posillipo, built in 1743 by Charles of Bourbon’s Spanish Viceroy in Naples, Don Ramiro de Guzman, Duque Medina de Las Torres, which is one of the ways of reaching Virgil’s tomb and a pillar indicating the whereabouts of the remains of the poet Leopardi. There, from a distance, I saw them eating bread as hard as they could. It was a harrowing sight. But what happened to the bread they couldn’t eat? There was so much of it, and more arriving every evening. Did they sell it to other old people too infirm or too proud to go into the streets and beg? Or did they sell it to a pig farmer for swill? It was yet another Neapolitan mystery.
The old man and the old woman were followed by a venditore di volanti, literally a seller of flyings, in this case balloons, who always did good business with the owners of children who had long since got tired of sitting at the tables with their parents and were now zooming about all over the place.
Next came a poor, sickly, probably tubercular, humble-looking young man like someone out of a Victorian novel, who handed out colour prints, as pallid as he was, of Santa Lucia, the Virgin martyred by the Emperor Diocletian, shown holding a palm frond and, as patroness of the blind, a dish with a pair of eyes apparently swimming in it, all against a Neapolitan background of umbrella pines.
He was followed by a more vigorous-looking man carrying a sort of wooden framework, a bit like those that were once used to carry hawks into the hunting field, supported by straps from his shoulders but loaded with toy musical instruments, selling at 1000 lire a time, that looked like ice-cream cornets and which, when he blew into a demonstration model, produced a hideous noise. Soon the air was filled with the sounds of dozens of these instruments being blown by children and adults which mingled with the terrible howlings emitted by the sirens of the police cars and ambulances tearing through the streets, just as they do in every other city in the civilized world.
Then came another, older man, pushing an old-fashioned perambulator with a piece of board on top of it which he used as a mobile stand. He was a torronaro, selling torronne, nougat. On both sides of the pram he had painted the words QUESTO ESERCIZIO RIMANE CHIUSO IL LUNEDI (THIS ESTABLISHMENT REMAINS CLOSED ON MONDAYS), which was why we hadn’t seen him on the evening we arrived. Below that he had added his telephone number, just like the owner of the furniture warehouse at Nocera Sopra Camerelle (SA) in case someone had a sudden, overwhelming desire to eat nougat.
Last of all, a four-man band came marching into the Piazza. Three of them were middle-aged with little black moustaches, wearing the sort of red caps with gold-embroidered peaks worn by Italian station masters when seeing a train off from their stations, bright green
