Snapshots of Naples

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The past in Naples seems more vivid than the present. But what is the present like? In spite of chaotic crowded streets, the air is soft. Our apartment faced a beautifully finished Empire building on a street of international shops, but the entrance was on a dark, sinister warren of passageways. Every wall that is not a monumental Baroque church built on top of Greek and Roman ruins is a pitted monstrosity of grafitti and forgotten posters. Garbage piles high next to immaculately restored monasteries.

Piazza Dante, across the street from our apartment

During our stay, the rain covered the heavy flagstones with dark water that the children of our home exchange family loved to jump in, while motorcycles inched through every opening, fanning us with spray. We were exchanging with a wonderful young family, gracious even while their five-year old was recovering from cranial surgery. It was her old family apartment that they had renovated, with lofts, to create rental property for tourists visiting Naples.

Creche figure

The nearby market, as in Palermo, is folded among forgotten derelict palazzos, fresh fruits and vegetables and gleaming wide-eyed fish for a pittance. Inside the bright enormous churches at evening time Neapolitans sing round harmonies. The great gothic church (San Lorenzo Maggiore) built by Charles I of Anjou over the Greek and Roman temples to Diana has a flat wooden ceiling, dark and simple, while beneath our feet were exotic marble inlays.

On that first rainy night we walked through the centro historico toward the creche market (it was the season of Precepe, the creche displays that Neapolitans have raised to a national art). We were waylaid by a modern day Pulcinello troupe--free (Saturday and Sunday, 6pm)! With vivid mime makeup and broad gestures, an actor in a top hat enticed us into a beautifully painted barrel vaulted church (Sant Angelo a Segno), covered over with a clothesline, filled with bouncing Neapolitan beauties. A super charged actor delivered an hour straight of physical comedy, shtick and broad satire of, for example, French and German accents, that led into a song filled mime of Pulcinello's life and death, filled with much interaction with the audience, in particular with Jacques & me. He asked me where I was from--New York--and the church filled with Sinatra's old song. He got me to beat the tambourine and then both of us to dance, maneuvered by the strong arms of the bouncing beauties. O Sole Mio came back again and again with all kinds of words. And he fully welcomed us to Naples.

Creche display, Carthusian monastery

Then we continued along. We walked among the creches, with their settings and tiny pieces of Neapolitan life for sale. Big burly men sat in their workshops, their rough faces and corpulent bodies doing the delicate work for the creche market. It wound around innumerable grand baroque churches, lit with Christmas neon, creating a Carravagiesque setting under the black niches of the ponderous architecture. As alluring as Venice but as decaying as Palermo, the haunted stone streets and half-gutted buildings promised fascinating stories. Behind the market stalls of hundreds--thousands-- of tiny elf worlds, carved owls, tiny elf food and mandolins. The height of the season began December 8. Those evenings you can get crushed in the crowds of Spaccanapoli the east/west axis through the old city. It is more crowded than Beijing during the national holiday. We were immobilized in a veritable jam of winter coats, among kind people who apologized to each other.

Via Tribunali, once a Roman road

Every so often we would enter a mighty church where worshipper sang in broad harmonies among the 14th c stone carved sarcophagi and elaborate marble inlay, the Roman mosaic floors, the fragments of Renaissance fresco, the deep sparkling smiles of the people of Naples.

The Via Toledo, a shopping street, is another microcosm of the universe, packed with moving crowds and street vendors. But there is a lightness, almost musicality in the air, so that the human traffic feels like a river sweeping you along with gentle force. In the brightly lit evening it is in full swing - a black Santa, fully costumed including a fluffy white beard, beats an African drum next to a building being repaired, down which slide loads of debris in rhythmic crashes. Little dogs wear identical fur trimmed coats even in the warm sun. Day and night, there are markets for every need: coats, underwear, makeup, Xmas decorations. A pudgy young boy emits an impossibly shrill whistling sound. Ladies in 4-inch heels whisk through churches, their shopping bags flapping, quickly crossing themselves. Reading glasses for 2 euros, o why o why didn't I buy more? Dresses for 10, winter coats for 20. At a market by the railroad station we got perfectly good smoked salmon for 1 euro a package, ditto the wonderful Neapolitan coffee.

But for a more remote perspective, one can climb up to the Vomero district, up hundreds of grand steps strewn with garbage and clothes, but enough grandeur to relish frequent pauses over Naples, wreathed in haze that grows yellow to the east. The snowy mountains of Campania, the great Renaissance domes among the dense buildings. Majestic walls support grand villas, interspersed with makeshift car parks, doors in walls, tenements with laundry hanging. On the Via Umberto I a district starts to take shape, with beautiful mansions and at the stairs' end stands the sumptuous Carthusian monstery whose complex surveys the panorama of Naples.

Carthusian Monastery

The church, with its splendid mosaic of marble floor and lavishly frescoed vault, leads into a series of rooms of ecclesiastical luxury. Choir stalls lead on one side to a cabinet of Renaissance inlaid wood of Biblical and Renaissance scenes, on the ceiling a flurry of fantastical angels celebrating a plump Judith holding the head of Holofernes. The Prior's quarters would have pleased Marie Antoinette immensely, rococo frescoes on vaulted ceilings with delicate decor. School children were everywhere, yelling, having accidents on the floor. The toilet was packed with them, and teachers were announcing "pee pee, ca ca!" You see, said Jacques, they have a choice!

Prior's quarters, Carthusian monastery

So we waited our turn, out among the cypresses, eucalyptus fragrance and juniper, three levels of monastic walkways over the Bay of Naples. Clouds began to gather and by the time we reached the Castel Sant Elmo dark thunderheads approached from the west leaving a few blinding glints of sunlight on the waters. We made it down just in time to duck into a restaurant out of the rain. The waiter was a hunched bald but highly loquacious guy, clever with a rhythmic sonorous voice, while a pretty young woman with a stern face emerged periodically from the kitchen to take care of the essentials. A table of 9 filled with loud kids sat beneath a TV with news of the world in Italian, including the Obama family and the White House Christmas tree.

Carthusian gardens

Creche displayed in La Pietrasanta

Another slice of life: We had lunch in a local café in Herculaneum, eating in the warmer back room, where an older woman lay in a chaise lounge right up against the TV next to a bucket of ashes. My minestrone was filled with frozen veggie's, while J's calzone was actually a huge pizza bent in half. The TV programs were a dubbed American show about weddings, with fat hostesses, then a real Italian (passionate and flamboyant) game show with the sinister looking face of the President of Sicily lurking behind them as in a conference call. And then there was yet another episode of Who Killed Sarah, more on that later.

Western Naples, from above

In the unheated train station in Herculaneum, which is furnished with a few wooden benches, young matrons sat in their quilted coats embroidering and knitting. Perhaps for the sunlight? An old newspaper in cyrilic lay near them and Jacques as usual picked it up and flipped through it. The women exchanged meaningful glances. Later Jacques put it down next to me and a frowning woman came over and snatched it up in indignation. We had invaded their private knitting circle, waiting for the train.

Doorway of apartment built into a wall

On the boat back from Capri, the saga of Who Killed Sarah continued on the TV screens above us. I googled the story. The Larry David look-alike on the TV screen, apparently calm, was Sarah's necrophiliac uncle who had strangled her and enjoyed her dead body which he then threw down a well in August, till December when he led police to it. (This was in the Puglia region, at the boot heel of Italy.) Her mother received half the news via live Italian talk shows. Italy is horrified and fascinated. RAI 1, the major state run channel, was devoting prime time to similar tales of infanticide.

Then we arrived in cold Naples and rushed home along the beautiful via Toledo, its night markets glowing.

Pompeii and Herculaneum

 Pompeii is among the most significant finds of antiquity. Not only is it a relic of 79 AD, when Mt. Vesuvius covered it in ash, but it is a far better example of the Roman Empire than Rome, the capital. Most of the Empire was in such towns as this, prosperous, well-connected, yet far from the center. In those sunny days Romans had summer villas on the Bay of Naples, and luminaries such as Virgil were fond of the region--what may be his tomb is in the western reaches of Naples.

A victim, plaster cast in skull

On 24 August in 79 AD Pliny the Elder was the senior military officer on the Bay of Naples. The eruption of Mt. Vesuvius first struck his interest, as a prolific naturalist, when it appeared as a huge "umbrella pine." As he began to get frantic appeals from across the Bay, he sailed to Pompeii. There, beneath the volcano, sheets of flame were terrifying residents of that lovely stretch of coast. But in order to inspire composure, Pliny the Elder decided to take a bath. Meanwhile courtyards filled with pumice and ashes, ever hotter and heavier. As Pliny the Elder investigated the water's edge to see if escape for the citizens would be possible, he suddenly died from the toxic sulfur fumes and heat that was fast approaching from the volcano. We have these details from his nephew, Pliny the Younger.

Temple of Venus

Two thousand years later we arrived at the frosty quiet station (ticket = 2,8 euros from Naples but the turnstiles are open anyway) and climbed the broad Roman streets, numbers on either side indicating rows of stone ruins. Excavations began in the 18th c., when Charles of Bourbon ruled Naples. His workers plundered what had not already been plundered, with orders to destroy paintings unworthy of the king's collection--lest they fall into less illustrious hands. The most beautiful mosaics and paintings are now in the Archeological Museum in Naples. Centuries later we see the bare city without the tops of most buildings. To navigate you need a map, because it is a dense urban area with addresses on either side. We were visiting off season, in December, and didn't realize that the necessary maps are available right at the train station, but there is also a bookstore just at the entrance.

Forum

Ascending the hilltop city through suburban thermes, the Roman Baths, we entered Pompeii through Marina Gate. Immediately on the right is the Temple of Venus--now a wispy romantic vista toward snowy sleeping mountains. The Temple of Venus had probably already been destroyed by an earthquake in 62 AD, and is now a bare memory.

Basilica

But just ahead is the evocative Forum, with double-leveled Corinthian columns as it radiates outward into a full city of clearly formed buildings, the most complete ruin we'd ever visited. In the cold misty morning, as rain water lay in reflective pools beneath mighty Roman columns, my heart surged with a prayer of gratitude to whatever gods protect our travels.

Eumachia traded in wool

Along the forum are religious and administrative buildings. Full sets of columns surround Apollo's temple. The Basilica's columns stand next to administrative buildings.

Across the Forum a huge stone doorway carved with acanthus leaves leads to the house of Eumachia, opening now to a grassy space enclosed with brick walls with niches. Beyond, the ghostly snowy mountains of Campania filtered through dark silhouettes of Mediterranean cypresses. Eumachia was a wealthy woman who traded in wool. In her home, as across the Forum in weighing and storage stalls, are a few of the plaster casts of Vesuvius' victims, sprawling, one with a skull intact, his mouth open in horror. A little detour south along the via dei Scholari turns up black and white mosaic floors.

Beware of the Dog!

Alexander Mosaic

Momento Mori mosaic

A set of thermes off the forum preserves delicate stucco reliefs and mythical bearded trolls in the niches, with an inlaid precious stone inscription on the rinsing urn. Traces of color are still on the walls. To the north are grand villas, like the Villa of the Dancing Faun, arranged around central pools with elaborate rooms for living an ideal life, half-sheltered, half exposed to the Mediterranean sky. A replica of the Alexander mosaic has replaced the original, now in the museum. This copy of a Greek painting in Roman era mosaics shows the fierce young Alexander defeating what is probably a composite of his enemies. Interior gardens are now filled with grass around marble fountains, peristyles and summer dining rooms.

Theatrical Mosaic

An inn still bore wall paintings of the clients gambling and carousing. Many of the mosaics that were extracted in Pompeii, and are now in the Archeological Museum, refer to a full life of leisure: theatre, acting troupes and musicians.

Good luck phalluses

Mosaic

Pygmies were a favorite subject of painting

We had lunch in the local cafeteria (a pleasant surprise: "salade di Sorrento") and found our way, despite many streets closed off, to the lupanare or brothel, where paintings of avid sex workers described various positions with their swarthy clients, probably gladiators. The erotic paintings found in Pompeii fill a "Secret Collection" with its own peculiar history. The rulers of Naples were shocked by the high volume of erotic art found in this respectable town. Rome had been the ideal of stoic virtue. They kept the growing collection under lock and key which naturally sharpened the appetite of visitors, young aristocrats on the "Grand Tour" of Italy, and wits. Now Il Cabinet Segreti in the museum, which ranges from simple mosaics of the naked "Three Graces" to explicit sexual positions including with animals, and an ample collection of good luck phalluses, is a glance into a far less prudish era.

Theatre of Isis

But back on the streets of Pompeii, a bakery still has its oven and many storage urns. In an older and more elaborate baths, Thermae Stabiane, stray dogs lay motionless in the sudden radiant sun, and colorful wall frescoes decorate rooms that meander around the central peristyle.

Down the largest street, Via dell'Abundonza, with its stone boulders so pedestrians could cross over the customary muck, we entered many shops and homes with wall paintings of Pompeiian red. Everywhere signs invited us not to interact with the stray dogs, who seemed very connected to the guardians, who in turn pretended indifference. But later I saw a mealtime being prepared.

The oldest section is a triangular forum with the beautifully complete Temple of Isis in fine marble friezes in a courtyard haunted with gentle mystery. It is an amphitheatre complex , still in use, with an Odeon, or concert hall, some of the marble facing still there.

Gorgon's Head mosaic

Out along Via dell'Abbondanza, past many courtyards now planted with russet colored vineyards and signs about the painstaking rediscovery of the plant species of Pompeii, there is a villa with more rustic grandeur, a perfect idyll of Italian landscape. The amphitheatre there is the largest complete one ever discovered. Barracks for gladiators surround a huge grassy open rectangle bordered by columns. Abundant space fills the open buildings.

A witch and two young women mosaic

Past a large affectionate female German shepherd we walked thru the idyllic necropolis in groves of cypresses and junipers, out to the Villa dei Misterii, a remote labyrinthine mansion where paintings of elaborate feminine rites have been found.

Necropolis of Pompeii

The works of art that have been extracted from Pompeii are at the Archeological Museum of Naples, that comprises the largest antiquity collection in the world. The mosaics and paintings retrieved from lava are snapshots of that world--a witch sitting at a table with two young women, a cat biting into a pheasant, Alexander defeating Darius, Gorgon heads everywhere.

The upper floor houses paintings, exquisite in their faded mystery, tantalizing colors, character work, mythological themes and expression of a people living in luxury. They were the wall paper of an elegant lifestyle.

Household gods and household serpents

In every house the household gods, Lararae, are pictured, often pouring libations, the propitious household serpents coming to eat the offerings. The Lares, sons of Mercury and the nymph Lara, were synonymous with hearth and home. They are young boys, in short tunics and high shoes, pictured in the act of dancing and pouring wine from an upheld drinking horn. Today one still reigns in the household, now called monacello. I dreamt of him often, even before I knew what he was--dressed in white is good fortune, dressed in red, not so good. Another recurring element is the snake, bringer of abundance, to whom were given offerings of fruit, pinecones and eggs.

Athena, Villa dei Papyrii

The excavation of another, more elegant town, Herculaneum, is ongoing--it was covered in a denser more resistant form of lava. There the Villa of the Papyrii has yielded mighty works, found in the dark, encrusted in the stone. Now we can visualize the airy elegance of that world, before the volcano. The workmen of that world--those who sculpted, and those who have excavated, seem to have achieved feats now almost impossible for the human hand.

Homer, Villa dei Papyrii

The Villa des Papyrii, overlooking the sea  but still largely buried in lava, is so named because many Greek texts had been painstakingly recovered from rolls of papyrus found there, encrusted with lava. Some of these are the only sources of these writings from the Greek civilization. There are also magnificent busts of philosophers, athletes and warriors and larger than life statues of gods that had bountifully decorated the villa.

We visited Herculaneum on a cold windy day. It is a denser, more elaborate city, nowadays somewhat claustrophobic, facing a wall of lava instead of the sea. You visit this city within a city, only 1/5 excavated, under housewives hanging their laundry.

Herculaneum, beneath hanging laundry

These once beautiful houses still bear marble linings for central pools and stairways but in most cases only a bottom floor. Where the upper levels have been restored, the houses are imposing, mingled with full cypresses against the azure sky.

Frescoes left behind

Fragments of fresco were left behind by the workers of Charles of Boubon. They damaged the whole in their rush to get the most beautiful artworks. The little that remains adds an impish spirit, with wispy pastoral scenes of satyrs. It is an interesting annex to Pompeii's sprawling mystery.

Triton Mosaic, women's baths

In one house has been found a marble table base with each leg formed as a lion's head descending into a paw. It belonged to Casca Longus, the first man to strike Julius Caesar in the Senate in 44 BC. Afterwards he became tribune of the people, but later died in the east, in 42 BC, together with Brutus after the Battle of Philippi in Macedonia. His properties had been confiscated and the table had ended up with this rich home owner.

A photograph of skeletons of the horrified, screaming inhabitants as they were unearthed. 

Layers of Time in Naples

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Walls of ancient Greeks

Naples' greatness is still seen in the layers of history that lie in cross-section, her "stratification" as our guide to the Catacombs, Enzo, called it. The obvious example is Pompeii, buried in a snapshot of time by Vesuvius in 79 AD, and now after centuries of painstaking labor a city eternally set in the 1st c. Roman Empire. Near our apartment, walls of the ancient Greeks lay bared to the sky, alongside Roman roads still in use that border the site of the Roman forum now covered by gothic and Baroque churches.

Catacombs of San Gennaro

But one can also descend into the Catacombs to feel the air of pagan Naples, perhaps the Naples that the mythical siren Parthenope found when she was washed ashore after being rejected by Ulysses. The volcanic stone tuff (tufo) has been quarried from beneath Naples ever since, to build the ancient city. Some of the underground caverns became catacombs.

Wealthy family buried 4-5th c.

We walked there under esplanades of sooty, once wealthy villas, avoiding garbage mingled with rainwater underfoot as Italian drivers splashing by narrowly avoided us. Next to a grandiose pastiche of St. Peter's in Rome, above the poorer neighborhood of Sanita, we found the 5th c San Gennaro Extramoenia church, built on the Catacombs of San Gennaro. Today they are prominently advertised with a well-presented guided tour area, courtesy the fund-raising and efforts of the local association. Enzo, our guide, urged us on with almost religious intensity in his passion for the mission of preserving Napoli's stratification, and for his association which recruits locally and has obtained permission from the Vatican to preserve and present these most important catacombs of southern Italy.

Catacomb's Three Naves correspond to Naples' Greco-Roman streets

Beneath the terrace of the church one descends to the clearly designed "negative architecture"--that is, the quarried tuff left caverns carved into arches, vaults and divided naves. Chambers have shelves to receive the corpses of the moderately well off (in fetal position--as we arrive, so we leave the earth) 2 or 3 to a shelf. On the ground were cavities for the poor. For the rich the arcasoleum, an arch before a wall mosaic or fresco over the trough which received each member of the family in turn.

5th c. altar, 9th c. side chapels

It was a place of celebration--an actual 5th c church with frescoes, a very public and beloved place to connect between the worlds, this liminal space before eternal life. Golden lights traced the well defined space, but in ages past, openings to the sky provided light. The porous tuff drew away smells.

Once a Greco-Roman road, Via Tribunali today

Further in was the holy of holies--once the grave of San Gennaro. Surrounding it is a clearly defined cathedral, for the arrival of the martyr's body had made this a place of pilgrimage. Even today it is a place of worship and, sometimes, weddings. We were moving underground to the other end of the hill. Under this end were the original chambers of the prominent pagan family said to have donated, or shared, the catacombs in the 2nd-3rd c. BC. Further south was a true church, contiguous with the complex, its front columns from 3-4th c, its side columns from the 9th c. Exiting the building you see it has a beautiful Renaissance facade. A little further south is a hospital, which had moved its patients into the catacombs during WWII. Women gave birth where the dead had departed, crossing paths.

Roman shops below San Lorenzo

San Lorenzo Maggiore is another church where layers are peeled away. We walked there on one of the Greco-Roman roads, Via Tribunali, in the discouraging rain. Below was the Greek Agora, but it is the later Roman Forum where you can walk along the still visible shops with their Roman arches in brick, and along the covered market where shop counters remain, while further there are mosaics and painted walls of another building. The Romans, we learned later, used a diamond shaped placement for their bricks, because they learned that earthquakes sheer away on the diagonal.

Sisto V Hall in San Lorenzo

Above the Roman forum is a hall from the reign of the Swabian kings (13th c) with columns and gothic arches, leading into an elegant Renaissance hall with frescoed vaults used by Naples' Parliament from 1442. The Sisto V hall was also the friars' refectory, its frescoes dating to the beginning of 17th c.

The upper stories house a museum, with a model of the Roman and Greek buildings as they lie beneath several churches here, one of which is San Paolo Maggiore whose opulent marble inlay stands over the Greek Temple to Castor and Pollux--the original Greco-Roman columns ensconced in the Baroque facade. Like so much Baroque imagery, filled with violence--the conversion of St. Paul entailed the deaths of two horses, while elsewhere a bull implores a man not to be sacrificed.

San Paolo today

Also in the museum are pottery and stone columns from antiquity, a carved crucifix, altar painting and statuary such as St. Michael tenderly slaying a dragon, himself covered in lion parts.

The Duomohttp://www.duomodinapoli.it/en/main.htm, Cathedral to San Gennaro, is many-layered. The enormous originally gothic church is now swathed in Baroque marble, but one gothic chapel dates back to the 14th c, exuberantly painted like a medieval tapestry come alive.

Gothic chapel in Duomo

But most striking is another side chapel which was the original 4th c. church with its baptistery--the oldest in the Western world--a rough stone basin in its brick floor. Above the font the newly baptised can raise his or her eyes to glittering 4th c. Byzantine mosaics, rare examples of classical naturalism.

4th c. baptistery, oldest in the West

Byzantine mosaics, 4th c.

Cloister of Santa Chiara

Santa Chiara, Angevin burial place for kings, is another example of stratification. Now she is nearly empty of decor, except for the scarred gothic sarcophagi of the Anjou kings, guarded by monks sipping coffee from plastic cups, and a more lavish chapel for Philip, idiot Bourbon prince, and his powerful father. We dropped centimes into the electric candle box for our prayers. Outside a noseless Sri Lankan mother sat day after day on the street, beseeching with trembling eyes. Pole thin black Africans beat drums. An ancient German shepherd stared with an imploring smile from the yard, otherwise filled with teenagers smooching and playing soccer (from the school facing). That is present day Naples.

Details of tiles

But below Santa Chiara are the archeological remains of Roman baths. And above the baths is the most sublime aspect of this old church: her fresh sunlit cloister of the Clarissan convent. The vaults are frescoed with colorful Biblical stories, half worn away, but the main delight is the majolica tiles covering the all surfaces throughout the garden, bright yellow, with paintings of old Naples.

WWII remnants beneath Naples

To come full circle, visit Napoli Sotterranea. It is another journey down into the tuff quarries, this time at the site of the Roman forum. You descend 100 ft or so below ground to tunnels first carved out by the Greeks for building materials and hypogeae (burial sites), then used by the Romans for aqueducts that served Naples from the 4th c BC to the 1880's, when an engineer improved upon them.

Forgotten in the 20th c, much of the 200km of tunnel became a huge garbage dump till WWII when they were paved over for bomb shelters. Artifacts from WWII remain--child's toys, beds. A few steps away are the remains of the Roman amphitheatre. For Naples was the Romans' first encounter with the Greek civilization. Layer upon layer.