On the Shores of the Mediterranean (5 page)

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 Branca
²
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 allowed the
solchanello
to carry out the repair.

In Naples the loss of one of a pair of shoes does not necessarily mean that the other will not have a long and useful life ahead of it, even if it is not sold to some unfortunate person with only one
leg. It is still possible to find what are known as
scarpe scompagnate
, unaccompanied shoes, in the great market for new and secondhand shoes which, weather permitting, takes place every Monday and Friday in Corso Malta, an interminable, dead-straight street that runs northwards from the Carcere Giudizario on Via Nuova Poggioreale to Doganella, at the foot of the hill where the cemeteries begin.

Few people, even Napoletani, buy one shoe. Some, however, can be persuaded to buy two shoes which do not match. Luccano de Crescenza recorded a conversation in dialect between a potential buyer of two odd shoes and a vendor of
scarpe scompagnate
which went more or less as follows:

‘But these shoes are different, one from the other!’

‘Nosignuri, so tale e quale
– they are exactly alike!’

‘Well, they look different to me.’

‘And what does it matter if they look different? That’s only when you’re standing still. Once you start walking they will look exactly the same –
tale e quale
. Let me tell you about shoes. What do they do, shoes? They walk. And when they walk one goes in front and the other goes behind, like this. In this way no one can know that they are not
tale e quale.’

‘But that means I can never stop walking.’

‘How does it mean you can’t ever stop walking? All you have to do when you stop is to rest one shoe on top of the other.’

Sometimes in Naples one felt that one was in a city on the Near Eastern or North African shores of the Mediterranean, with Castel Sant’Angelo its kasbah or Capodimonte its seraglio, because in it the makers and vendors of particular kinds of merchandise tend to come together and occupy whole reaches of streets and alleys as they do in bazaars and
souks
in Muslim countries, so that Via Duomo becomes the street of the wedding dresses and the appropriately named Via dell’Annunziata the one in which
newly arrived Neapolitans are fitted out with cribs and baby carriages.

Uphill from Spaccanapoli there is a narrow alley which runs up alongside the church of San Gregorio Armeno, which was once a convent of Benedictine nuns and has a famous cloister which was given the rococo treatment at a time in the first part of the eighteenth century when the viceroys of Naples were no longer Spanish but Austrian – Austria having been given Naples and Sardinia in 1713 by the Treaty of Utrecht which had brought to an end the War of the Spanish Succession – viceroys who would themselves soon cease to exist, the last one being ejected by the young Charles of Bourbon in 1734.

In this alley are to be found some of the men and women who model and bake and paint and dress the miniature terracotta figures, sometimes finding and using ancient materials to do so, and painting the back-cloths, the
fondali
, for the
presepi
. At Christmas the whole of this little alley is illuminated and decorated with hundreds of these figures.

Amongst the most remarkable of the
presepi
that have survived wars and earthquakes and all the other evils to which Naples and the Neapolitans have been subjected, are those in the Certosa di San Martino, the former Carthusian Monastery on the hill below the Castel Sant’Elmo, now a museum.

Among the first to inspire the construction of these great eighteenth-century set pieces was a Dominican, Father Rocco, the famous preacher and missionary to the poor of Naples, who was afraid of no one, rich or poor, and saw this as a way to bring the mystery of the nativity to the people of the city. He was also responsible for the setting up of shrines at street corners in the city. This was in the 1750s, and until 1806 the lamps and candles lit at these shrines were the sole source of illumination in the streets of the city.

It was Father Rocco who inspired Charles to order the building of the enormous Albergo dei Poveri – it has a facade nearly 400 yards long – for the poor to live in, and it was he, too, having set up a
presepio
in a grotto in the park at Capodimonte, who imbued the King with enthusiasm for what was to become a life-long passion. From that time onwards, Charles and his family reserved a part of each afternoon when he was in residence to working on one of his great
presepi
, designing and modelling the settings, while his wife and daughters chose materials and sewed and embroidered the costumes. In doing this he set a fashion. One of these
presepi
in the Certosa, which depicts the arrival of the Magi, is made up of 180 lay figures, 42 angels, 29 animals and 330
finimenti
– the jewellery, the musical and agricultural instruments, the ruins, the grottoes, the trees and the temples, the fruit and vegetables, the strings of sausages. The Three Kings, their gold-embroidered turbans encrusted with pearls, wearing silk pelisses lined with fur, have arrived at the scene of the Nativity with a great concourse of followers, Asiatic and African, and are looking down at the Child who is lying on a bed of straw at the foot of what remains of a temple with Corinthian columns and a ruined archway. A band of blackamoors and Turks, ringing bells, blowing into strange wind instruments, playing harps and cymbals and beating drums and blowing on trumpets, is still winding down the hill to the scene of the Nativity through a pass in the mountains, together with the pack animals. The camels which have carried the caskets containing the gifts of gold and myrrh and frankincense on their long journey have already arrived, while others are waiting to be unloaded; and there is a dwarf leading two monkeys on chains dressed in a miniature version of what the other noblemen are wearing, a coat of wild silk embroidered with precious stones and lined with fur and with a turban, like theirs, swathed in pearls, but without the
chibouques
, the tobacco
pipes, some of them carry in their belts, and the
yataghans
, the curved Turkish swords.

To the right the scene is more mundane. There is a market place full of miniature facsimiles of fruit and vegetables and meat that are so lifelike that one instinctively reaches out to touch them. The modelling and painting of these fruits and vegetables was a specialized art, the work perhaps of Giuseppe di Luca, one of the great masters of it, but we shall never know.

And there is
la Taverna
, the inn with a band of musicians playing outside it, men of a sort you can see today in the streets of Forcella and Spaccanapoli or among the
contrabbandieri
of Mergellina, apparently oblivious to the great events taking place only a few yards away, above which a band of angels in swirling draperies with attendant
putti
are suspended by almost invisible cords in a pale blue heaven.

But we, with our noses pressed against the glass which separates us from these scenes, like children in a museum, can hear in the imagination as well as see everything that is going on because of the genius of those mostly unremembered men and women who constructed these scenes two hundred or more years ago: the clashing of the cymbals, the beating of the drums, the squeaking of the violin outside the tavern, the roaring of the camels, the neighing of the horses, one of which is frightened and is rearing on its hind legs, the sound of the women gossiping in the market place, the beating of the angels’ wings.

Nothing much had changed either in the realms of death. It was still just as easy to lay on a horse-drawn funeral in Naples as it had been back in the early sixties. Hearses drawn by eight, ten or even twelve horses running in pairs and driven by a single
cocchiero
, coachman, were still available to convey the Neapolitans, or anyone else who fancied it, on their last journey to one of the vast cities
of the dead on the eastern outskirts. In fact the same firm, Bellomunno, still had a monopoly of this sort of funeral. There are large numbers of Bellomunnos in the Naples telephone book, all devoted to what are called
Pompe Funebri
, Funeral Pomps, otherwise the undertaking business, all of them belonging to the same clan, some of them having splintered off to form their own set-ups. The only branch of Bellomunno not listed is the horse-drawn section, and its stables off the Via Don Bosco, in a not-easy-to-be-found street called the Rampe del Campo, the Ramps of the Fields, are ex-directory.

Via Don Bosco is a long, long street, straight at first, then winding and partly cobbled in its later, mountain sections, which begins in Piazza Carlo III opposite the Albergo dei Poveri, begun by Charles’s architect Ferdinando Fuga in 1751 but never completed. It then runs up through Doganella under an enormous concrete fly-over which joins Via Malta, on which the shoe market is held, to the Tangenziale, the Naples Ring Road. Via Don Bosco passes on its way the Cimitero Vecchio, the Old Cemetery, at the foot of the hill, the Cimitero Santa Maria del Pianto (of the Crying), and the sad-looking Protestant Cemetery, eventually reaching the square called Largo Santa Maria del Pianto. From here one road leads to Capodichino Airport; another, the Via del Riposo, to the Cimitero della Pietà, in which the poor are buried; and a third, Via Santa Maria del Riposo, to one of the principal entrances to the two biggest cemeteries, the Cimitero Monumentale and the Cimitero Nuovo, in both of which the dead are dried out in the tufa soil for eighteen months before being filed away in niches on an upper floor.

It is a lugubrious part of Naples at any time and certainly not one in which to linger unaccompanied (you can get knocked on the nut just as easily in a Neapolitan cemetery as anywhere else in Naples), but one in which on almost any day in working hours,
providing that business is normal, anyone interested in horses and/or horse-drawn funerals can see at least one horse-drawn hearse making its way up the long ascent to one or other of these resting places. Those ghouls who enjoy any sort of funeral or are simply interested in horseless carriages can see an almost endless procession of motor hearses of various degrees of melancholy splendour all on the same course.

There are few places in the world, now that the Ancient Egyptian and the Imperial Chinese dynasties are no more, apart from Bali, where death is celebrated in such a memorably conspicuous fashion.

Until long after the last war (and even now Bellomunno employees are not prepared to take an oath that such an operation could not still be organized out in the sticks) it was possible to assemble a cast of hundreds, even thousands, of professional mourners to follow the hearse, provided that those who were left alive had inherited sufficient financial clout to pay them: squads of orphans, or if not real orphans simulated ones whose parents were only too happy for them to appear as orphans for the occasion, all of them, real or simulated, dressed in deepest black. Provided there was sufficient inducement, whole bevies of nuns, as well as hosts of professional wailing women, could be made instantly available.

Up to 1914, and possibly even later, the corpse was accompanied by strangely dressed hooded members of the deceased’s
Fratria
, the Brotherhood to which so many Neapolitans then belonged. At a yet earlier date, the hearse was also accompanied by a body of poor men wearing black stove-pipe hats, grey uniforms over their rags and carrying black banners with the initials of the deceased person embroidered on them, all chanting a doleful litany which began:

Noi sarem come voi sete
…

We shall be as you are …

This grey company of death, as one Neapolitan described them, were the
Poveri
, the Poor of the Hospice of San Gennaro, all of them penniless, many of them ex-soldiers who had fought as mercenaries in various parts of the world. They lived, when not accompanying funerals, in the Ospizio di San Gennaro dei Poveri, now a psychiatric hospital, which was founded in the seventeenth century among the Christian catacombs, which they used to show to visitors along with the church next door, which was built on the site of a chapel in which the head of San Gennaro
³
was at one time preserved after his martyrdom in AD 305 at Pozzuoli.