braided side seams. Two of them were beating drums, and the third one played the harmonica. They were led by a drum-major dressed in a white tunic with gold-embroidered epaulettes, bright yellow trousers the same shade as the bandsmen’s knickerbockers and what looked like a colonial governor’s hat decked with white plumes. He was whirling a baton with a Negro’s head on top of it in one hand and, with the other, making various obscene gestures. Each night when we gave the drum-major his due – he was well over seventy years of age – which was not always easy at this late hour, as besides being breadless by this time, we were also running short of the kind of money we were prepared to give him, he used to hand Wanda a quantity of visiting cards, so that if she had stayed on for another week in Naples she would have had enough cards to play poker with. The print on them read:
BOTTONE SALVATORE
ORGANIZZATORE-PAZARIELLO PROPAGANDA: PER NAPOLI E PROVINCIA AFRAGOLA (NA) TEL: 8697539 DALLE ORE 2 ALLE ORE 24
Then, when he had sucked everyone in the Piazza dry of lire, Signor Salvatore marched his band of pazarielli, signifying, in the dialect, entertainers of a surrealistic, loony kind, away up the Salita Piedigrotta in the steps of the old lady, the old man and woman collecting bread, the sickly young man with the prints of Santa Lucia, the seller of musical instruments that looked like ice-cream cornets, the venditore di volanti and the torronaro, to the place where they had parked the old, beat-up van which would take them all back to dear old Afragola in the heart of the Triangolo della Morte.
The entertainment was at an end. Suddenly the tables began to empty and the waiters began stacking them and the chairs against the walls. The evening was over.
But not quite over. There was one establishment that during the hours of darkness never closed. The proprietor was called Gennaro and he lived on the first floor over what a sign over the door described as a Ferramenta e Hobbyistica, an ironmonger’s shop which also catered for those interested in hobbies, which stood next door to the shop where the grumpy old lady dispensed her vini and Nastri Azzurri.
This man Gennaro had a monopoly of contraband cigarettes in the Piazza, perhaps over an even wider area. All you had to do was to stand below the balcony and call, ‘Gennaro!’ and then more softly, ‘Un pacco!’ and shooting down on a rope came a panaro, a wicker basket, into which you put 2000 lire which was immediately whisked away aloft. Then by return of post, as it were, you received a packet of genuine Marlboros, the only thing lacking being the Italian excise stamp.
But why 2000 lire a packet when the going price, bought from an official government tabaccaio, tobacconist, was 1800 lire including duty and tax? Because all the official establishments were shut. Gennaro made a killing with his contrabbando which by day would have to sell for infinitely less than 1800 lire to compete with what was a monopoly of the state.
There was nothing extraordinary about this way of doing business, with a basket on the end of a rope. In Naples, where many of the old tenements are eight storeys high, it is commonplace. The only difference is that there the trade is generally legitimate and the buyers, often elderly ladies living alone on an upper floor, are the ones who lower the panari to the sellers of such commodities as vegetables in the street below, who have attracted their attention by shouting at the tops of their voices in the dialect, ‘Signo [Signora]! The price of whatever it is is so-and-so a kilo. Acalate ’o panaro!’ (‘Lower your basket!’)
When Wanda decided to buy the only packet of Marlboros she ever bought from Gennaro and she shouted up, ‘Gennaro, un pacco!’, the strangeness of these three words, in her north Italian, Parmigiano accent, made him sufficiently inquisitive to lean out over the railings to see who owned it, and for a moment we found ourselves being looked down on by a hard-looking character of sixty-odd with short white hair and eyes like Carrara marbles. What we were looking up at was the last link in an illicit industry, the one that actually dealt with the public. An industry which at the height of its prosperity, largely in the field of cigarette smuggling, which continued well into the seventies, supported, by its own admission, some 50,000 Napoletani and their families, out of a total population of some 1,200,000.
In the good old days up to about 1978 when the contrabbandieri used to challenge the customs officers to football matches, money would change hands in large quantities to keep them sweet – which it probably still does – and the smugglers’ equivalent to the Royal Yacht Squadron bar at Cowes was the Bar Paris in Santa Lucia. But by that time the Camorra, and therefore the contrabbandieri, were already deeply involved with drugs and the special relationship they had enjoyed with the Guardie had come to an end, and, what had been unthinkable until then, the Guardie actually took to opening fire, if not actually at the contrabbandieri themselves, then on their motoscafi, although how it was possible to discriminate between one and the other at night it is difficult to imagine.
It was at this time that the contrabbandieri did something that only Neapolitans would think of doing. They formed a union which they christened Il Colletivo Autonomo Contrabbandieri, the Autonomous Collective of Smugglers, and called a public protest meeting, advertising it with posters which read more or less as follows:
SMUGGLING AT NAPLES ALLOWS 50,000 FAMILIES TO SURVIVE ALBEIT WITH DIFFICULTY. FOR ALMOST A YEAR NOW THE GOVERNMENT AND THE CUSTOMS HAVE DECLARED WAR ON US. HANDS OFF THE CONTRABAND UNTIL YOU FIND US ANOTHER WAY OF LIFE! COME TO THE MEETING OF ALL SMUGGLERS OF NAPLES ON THURSDAY NEXT IN FRONT OF THE UNIVERSITY IN VIA MEZZOCANONE 16.
A particularly appropriate venue as large numbers of students actually worked for the Paranze a Terra (an organization for distributing contraband).
Now, five or more years later, there were still 50,000 Neapolitan families involved in smuggling at Naples and more money was involved, as would be natural to keep pace with inflation even without taking account of drug smugglers.
There had been some changes in Naples since we had last taken a fairly prolonged look at it, back in the autumn of 1963, and it would have been surprising if there had not been.
Then we had been working on a guide book to the hotels, pensioni and restaurants in southern Italy, a task that had left us, even before we left Naples and began to tackle the rest of the Italian peninsula, in a state of near collapse. At that time the pensione with the piano had not existed, although there were one or two hotels and pensioni that ran it very close.
Some of the biggest changes that had taken place, apart from whole areas in which the original buildings had either fallen down of their own accord or had been knocked down and rebuilt, were down in the docks, all along the waterfront as far as San Giovanni a Teduccio, where the pontili, the landing stages, stretch out like long fingers into the filthy waters of the Bay, always a dangerous place, if only because of the long lines of freight cars propelled by tank engines that used to come stealing up behind one on their way to or from some marshalling yard. One was only saved from death by the engine drivers letting off a tremendous blast on their whistles. Altogether the place was a madhouse, what with steam engines whistling, ships, some of them big passenger liners, blasting off on their sirens announcing that they were leaving for the Hudson River and similarly distant destinations, and the appalling din made when a crane driver skilfully dropped a whole slingful of packing cases into a ship’s holds, shattering them so that the portuali, the stevedores, could get their hands on the contents, just as crane drivers and stevedores did in every other port in the world at that time.
Now there were no more steam engines; no more transatlantici stealing out into the Bay in the golden light of early morning; no more crane drivers dropping packing cases making music in the ears of the
