Wild and crazy as Naples is, the city is working hard at urban renewal. They’ve torn up drab squares that for decades have greeted arriving visitors: On Piazza Municipio, facing the cruise port, they’re excavating the ruins of an ancient Greek settlement, which will be viewable inside a futuristic new Metro station. And on Piazza Garibaldi, the football-field-sized expanse in front of Napoli Centrale train station, they’ve excavated a totally different space: a sunken shopping mall, covered by a slick new canopy to shield shoppers from sun and rain.
Both of these are part of an ambitious e
xpansion of the city’s Metro system. Several new “art stations” on the subway have been designed by prominent architects — a point of pride for Neapolitans who are weary of the conventional wisdom that they live in a backwards, broken-down city.
But, to be honest, I’m not buying it. Don’t get me wrong: Cities can get better. Especially in Eastern Europe, I’ve personally observed big, grimy cities — Budapest, Warsaw, Zagreb — reinvent themselves and flourish into thriving 21st-century communities. It can be done. But not in Naples. Because you have to want it. And my sense is that most Neapolitans are content with the chaos they swaddle themselves in. Why “fix” it? It’s the essence of Naples. It’s by design.
At the corners of big intersections, I kept noticing walled-off stairwells to nowhere. Years ago, some ambitious civic leader proposed underpasses to make pedestrians’ lives easier. But I imagine these passages turned out to be magnets for crime and grime, so now they’re all sealed off and forgotten. I wonder if today’s glitzy new subway stations are tomorrow’s deserted underpasses.
Struggling to wrap my brain around this, I asked my Neapolitan friend Virgilio, who thoughtfully psychoanalyzed his hometown.
“You must understand, people in Napoli are the same way they have been for thousands of years,” he explained. “The Bay of Naples has always been a big crossroads for trade, and that means lots of foreign invaders. Spanish, French, Austrian, Sicilian, everyone took their turn ruling Naples. This has given us a clear picture that we are never in control of our own destiny.
“And to top it off,” he said, waving his arm toward Mount Vesuvius on the horizon, “we live in the shadow of an angry volcano. We always remember that it destroyed life here two thousand years ago. Maybe it can happen again.
“That’s why Neapolitans don’t plan. We aren’t organized. We don’t live for tomorrow. We live for today. Because today is the only thing we can be sure of.
“When you have no power and nothing is certain, you have to hold on close to your family, ’cause that’s all you have. This is why in Napoli, family is so important. And maybe that’s why the mafia has been so powerful here. Those ties are stronger here than anywhere.”
He paused to point out a little shrine embedded into a grimy wall by someone’s front door. “This little altar, it’s so important. You see these everywhere. It honors our ancestors — a grandparent or great-grandparent who died. If you go to the ruins of Pompeii, you will see even thousands of years ago, people would have altars to their family members in their homes. We are still doing this today.”
Suddenly, the chaos of Naples began to make sense. Understanding the worldview behind wild traffic, hot tempers, and living life with abandon doesn’t necessarily make Naples easier to take. But it helps.