In Vesuvius’s Shadow
Traffic screams by you with inches to spare, phalanxes of tourists crowd through the gates of a city once buried and in a hospital with modern equipment, cigarette smoke and dirty floors, patients wait for treatment; no, it is not the third world, it is southern Italy — Naples actually. Around Naples, amongst the stunning landscapes, sweet lemons, and Neapolitan pizza; you discover the city is crazy! It is a city that was once the Las Vegas of the Roman day, where anything could happen; where the military now stands in the public squares offering a semblance of order; and where ancient streets provide order to a Roman inspired scheme.
Chaos reigns supreme and it works. Traffic rules carry an advisory function and the stoplight is just decoration. On the streets of the center city, cars, mopeds and pedestrians share a space barely wider than one and half meters. But the spatial chaos is not just confined to urbania. Drive along the curvaceous route from Sorrento to Ravello, through the Amalfi coast and watch cars blast through spaces so close that you could stick your head out your car window and lick the passing traffic. For the locals it is paradise, for the tourists, a fascinating detail.
So escape, but where to go? How about Pompeii? In TV documentaries, bespectacled titled academics walk peacefully along deserted streets wandering through an excavated graveyard of a dead city once filled with buried people trying to flee the madness of an inferno. But relax your expectations, the eruption may be over but under your feet are still the tremors of the footsteps of thousands of tourists arriving with you at this theme park of death. Madness has triumphed and it is time to flee again.
And what of those television documentaries, you think? What the hell happened?! Those men in the fish market heaved their fish to each other singing in front of the cameras. You, however, can dodge a flying anchovy. Apparently your camera was not big enough to impress them. And what of the hosts, staring at their key grips remarking admirably of lives lived on the streets of Naples? They are staying in five star hotels along the coast paid for by television studios with massive budgets. Street life is just remarkable when seen through prism of a gilded carriage.
By now you’re tired of running and have built up quite an appetite. It is time to eat. But where to go? Go back to Napoli. Ask the locals they will tell you. They will know where the food is cheap and delicious. But if not, there are thousands of restaurants serving pizzas, fried vegetables, fried crustaceans, spaghetti with red sauce, and fried pizza and hardly a fresh vegetable like the ones you saw in the markets. So order that fried pizza. God it must be good. It is dough and scalding hot fat! The basil is as large as a fist and tastes of licorice. The cheese is melted and it smells of evaporated oil. Finish it and be awarded with an artery encrusted in stone. Alas, it’s too much. You wipe your face with a napkin that glistens from the fat dripping from your lips. So order the clams. They taste amazing. But be careful, that 100th clam might just be poisonousness. But God help me, they taste so good! But oh damn the devil to hell, that 100th clam myth turns out to be true.
So get sick, go to the hospital, maybe there will be peace and relief from the pregnancy simulating contractions in your bowel and the maddening twitches in your legs. But no, chaos shall not be tamed! In the best hospital in the city, for seven hours in a room with fifty other people; nurses and doctors will call out last names for tests and treatments and family members and friends will bring water to the bed- and chair- ridden needy. All around you, people chat on their mobiles phones, text their friends reporting on the grisly details of their conditions, speak with each other and sleep; all while waiting for treatment and a room. After seven hours and no real diagnosis, the experience is too much to bear. Enough is enough: Find that inspiration deep inside of you and get the hell out! Take your medical report written in the finest medical Italian and go.
And was it that awful? Was it a descent into Dante’s Inferno? No! It was just a mad walk through Purgatorium. There was redemption! The coffee was amazing — all of it — even the stuff served to you in plastic espresso cups. And there was the Sfolgliatella Riccia that flaky shell shaped pastry filled with citrus scented sweet ricotta, which never failed to joyfully elevate your sense of taste into pleasure born ecstasy. Or maybe you took the simpler Sfolgliatella frolla. The pastry is warm and so is its filling. In biting into it, you note a lessening of the chaos on the street beside you and a slowing of time as your sense of smell and taste loose their individual distinctions and ascend together into state of nirvana.
And those people around you, they smiled the second time they saw you and looked genuinely pleased to make your acquaintance. They looked on compassionately when you tried to speak a few words of Italian — laughing silently to themselves because they speak Neapolitan. And as you sat outside at the one of the restaurants the night before you would dry heave in your hotel and weep from the pain of digesting a rancid mollusk, you noticed the children playing under the statute of Dante Alligheri and you heard them singing and showing a respectful indifference at the passers-by and you thought of the barbarian Helvetti in your neighborhood who screamed and kicked their soccer balls against your windows, and the thought passed through your mind and on to your lips; perhaps they could benefit from an iron handed Neapolitan Nonna — God those clams are good!