had been replaced by the ghostly whirrings of the special lifting machines, each of them worked by one man in what had become an automated wilderness, as they picked up the pilfer-proof containers and either loaded them on to a container ship with the minimum of human interference, or else on to an articulated truck.
Now, denied what for centuries they had regarded as their legitimate perquisites of office, the heart had gone out of the portuali, and providing that the money could be found, and it almost certainly would be, by 1985, 750 out of a total workforce of 1700 portuali would have voluntarily taken the sack. What to do with the remaining 950 was a problem that no one in the government or in the port authority had yet had the courage to face. What was obvious was that as far as being a place of interest to travellers such as ourselves, or to anyone but the technically minded, Naples, as a port, like Barcelona, Marseilles, Trieste, the Piraeus, Iskenderun, Beirut, Haifa, Alexandria, Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers and Tangier, was finished.
What had gone, too, from many parts of the city in which previously it had operated at full blast, was what can only be described as the roaring street life. The change was particularly noticeable in the heart of Montecalvario, the large grid-iron of streets, alleys and flights of steps to the west of Via Toledo, that immensely long, straight street which under five different names (the others are Via Roma, Via Enrico Pessina, Via Santa Teresa degli Scalzi and Corso Amedeo di Savoia Duca d’Aosta), rather like Broadway, bisects the city from south to north, from the Royal Palace where it looks out on Piazza Trieste e Trento at the seaward southern end to the foot of Capodimonte at the top, north end where the other royal palace of Naples looks out over the city and the Bay.
These changes were not noticeable at first. It is only when you reach La Speranzella, the Street of Some Hope, which runs across Montecalvario parallel to the Toledo, and you see that many of the tall tenements are only prevented from collapsing by forests of wooden beams and metal scaffolding and that they have been abandoned by all except the most stubborn or desperate for accommodation, that you realize that the heart of Montecalvario is gone and that one single, fairly powerful earth tremor would bring the whole place crashing down in a vast mountain of rubble.
Here every different flight of steps from one level to another, every one of the sixty or more streets, every alley, has its own shrine, to Santa Lucia, San Gennaro, the patron saint of Naples, to Our Lady of Piedigrotta and so on, tended by old ladies who charge the lamps with oil, change the candles, collect any offerings, while meanwhile, in a sort of grotto beneath the shrine, the terracotta figures of men and women, which often include a priest among them, fry in purgatory.
Now what was perhaps the most vigorous street life in Naples was to be found in and on either side of Spaccanapoli, literally the Street that splits Naples, in the same way as Via Toledo does from north to south but from west to east. A long, long street with eight different names which begins as Via Santa Lucia al Monte high up in Montecalvario below the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, coming to an end in a vicolo cieco, a cul-de-sac, called Borgo Tupputi, half a mile from the Stazione Centrale in Piazza Garibaldi. An astonishing, fascinating street full of medieval, Renaissance, baroque and rococo churches, palaces and monuments; bookshops; repairers and vendors of second-hand dolls; and with long, narrow dangerous alleys running uphill from it in an area infested with robbers, one of which is full of makers and sellers of presepi (cribs) and the painted terracotta figures of the infant Christ, the Virgin, the Shepherds and the Kings and the animals which every Neapolitan family brings out in Christmas week; artificial flowers for cemeteries and religious images. The streets running down from it towards Corso Umberto, such as those around the Forcella, the home of Luigi Giugliano, whose uncle had been deported to Frosinone, were still the abode of puttane, tarts, some of them enormous.
Twenty years previously, sent off by Wanda to conduct this particular piece of fieldwork by myself, awe had overcome lust as I looked for the first time at these mountainous women somehow inserted into skirts so tight that it seemed that they must burst, bigger even than many of their biggest customers, who were themselves gigantic. Now, fat or thin, they were fighting an uphill battle against the thousands of male prostitutes and transvestites who, as long ago as the seventies, as everywhere else in Italy, were already beginning to outnumber them, if they had not already done so. Some, seeing their livelihood threatened by the indifference of a seemingly increasingly myopic clientele and not receiving much support from the Nuova Famiglia or the NCO, who would take a percentage of any earnings, whether they were male, female or transvestite, pinned cards on the doors of their places of business announcing that whoever was inside was a PUTTANA VERA – a Genuine Prostitute.
The beggars of Naples were now less numerous, less ragged than they had been twenty years previously. The poor, in fact, although they might be relatively poorer than they had been, now looked slightly more prosperous, more bourgeois. Some of the raggedest beggars were still to be found lying on the steps leading up into the enormous Galleria Umberto Primo, which has a nave 160 yards long and is 125 feet high with a dome towering 60 feet above that, a place that for at least a couple of decades after 1943 was the centre of every imaginable and unimaginable clandestine activity. It was now more difficult to see in Naples what had appeared in a photograph taken in the seventies, and used by de Crescenza to illustrate his book, of a man lying on a flight of steps apparently in the depths of winter with an empty begging bowl beside him and a notice which read, ‘Ridotto in questo condizione di mio cognato’ (‘Reduced to this condition by my brother-in-law’).
But although there were now more bag-snatchers, more pickpockets, more people ready to beat you up if for no better reason than to give you something to remember them by, as there were almost everywhere else in the Mediterranean lands, or Europe, or the entire world for that matter, there seemed to be slightly less trufferia, petty swindling. It was now less certain that, having made some purchase in the Mercato della Duchesca, or in the street, in the Forcella, for instance, and having had it parcelled up, you would find on opening it up later that something of the same size and weight had been substituted for it, although I was sold a guide book to Pompeii, sealed in plastic, which turned out to be nothing more than the cover with blank pages inside.
On the other hand, to be more or less sure of keeping what money you had about you, it was now doubly necessary either to wear a money belt or carry it inside one’s shoes and, even then, you could not be absolutely sure that someone might not knock you down and take them from you, or even cut off your feet if necessary in order to get at it. The city, too, seemed to have lost some of the skills that for so long after the war had made it one of the great world centres of the imitative arts. Perhaps whatever skill we had possessed in searching out these artefacts had deserted us, but we now experienced difficulty in locating facsimiles of Vuitton trunks, or bottles purporting to contain ten-year-old Glen Grant, Fernet Branca2 that back in 1963 had existed in almost too great abundance, considering how slow anyone’s individual intake is of this particular product, Hermès’ Calèche or Chanel Number 5.
Nothing was ever wasted among the Neapolitan poor and to some extent this is still true today. There used to be and perhaps still are whole families devoted to the reanimation of second-hand clothes. These rianimatori used to hang the garments in closed rooms in which bowls of boiling water were placed which gave off a dense steam which raised the nap of the material. If the garment had a moth hole or a cigarette burn in it, fluff was scraped from the inside of the seams with a razor blade and stuck over the hole with transparent glue.
Until recently there were solchanelli, mobile shoe repairers. A solchanello carried the tools of his trade in a basket with a board on top which he used as a seat on which he could squat down anywhere and begin work. Uttering a strange cry, ‘Chià-è! Chià-è!’, to attract attention he would sometimes latch on to some unfortunate person with a hole in one of his shoes or a sole coming off and follow him, sometimes for miles, all the while reminding the victim of the defect in an insistent monotone until whoever it was, unable to stand it any more, sank down in despair on the nearest doorstep and
