Naples is dirty, noisy, haphazard, and full of kamikaze scooter drivers. It is also sensual, liberating, and jolly. But that doesn’t seem to appeal to many people today, who prefer everything to be ordered, measured; all uncertainty removed. In city form, it’s known as Singapore: unlike Naples, everything there is clean, tidy, and works. It’s also a sterile, soulless, mini dictatorship.
Everyone looks a little sticky, ruffled; no one cares about a sweat patch breaking out – shock horror
J.G. Farrell’s wonderful book The Singapore Grip describes the fall of Singapore during the second world war. There are many parallels between the city back then and Naples now: the elegant decay and human vitality. The title of the book refers to an infamous practice the local prostitutes employed.
But today, Singapore has cleaned itself up. It is held aloft as a shining example of how an efficient city should be. The vice-like grip has gone macro. Now it stands for the state having you in its palm, setting very clear parameters about the choices you can make, and what you can’t do. It’s a bit like the Catholic Church, but without the astonishing art, and is far less forgiving. Get it right first time or else: a fine, social censure, cancellation, or worse.
Not so Naples. In its San Ferdinando district, a maze of tight cobbled alleys thread between tiny apartments piled on top of each other. It all throbs with sweaty humans living cheek by jowl, alongside an absurd number of pizzerias churning out fantastic options for about €8.
The apartments at street level have their windows and doors thrown open. Walking along, you can’t help but observe people napping on beds, sitting around in a vest watching TV, a young woman doing her makeup, texting her lover.
There is also a strong sense of the matriarchy of old, the one that kept things ticking along; not the new one that avoids all risk and is determined to set the world to rights according to its rules.
At the corner of the street I was on, every evening about six grandmothers in billowy summer dresses gathered on fold-out chairs to chew the fat. I put aside any concern about crime. Those ladies didn’t interfere, but they had an eye on things. You didn’t need, nor was there, CCTV. Instead, set in walls were endless Marian shrines looking out over the community. Young mothers balanced a baby on a hip as they chatted to acquaintances and went about their days, as opposed to carrying placards protesting the latest grand cause.
The clammy proximity acts as a great leveller. Everyone looks a little sticky, ruffled; no one cares about a sweat patch breaking out – shock horror. Elsewhere in the world of air con, automation, and roller suitcases, everyone looks so manicured.
I got to like how on a muggy Naples night my body responded to the heat, to know that it was working; that I was alive and kinetic; not just a machine that eats and types on a keyboard. There’s a vital interdependence between mind and body that we undervalue these days. What must it be doing to our consciousnesses as we glide through life with increasing effortlessness: our bodies rarely straining, moving, overheating, getting groovy, as they used to say.
Before Naples, I walked a pilgrimage to the holy sanctuary of La Verna in Italy’s Umbrian hills. It’s where Saint Francis took his body to such a state of physical endurance and his consciousness to such a state of grace that he received the stigmata. A six-winged angel appeared and ‘lasered’ him – as depicted in paintings – leaving him with the wounds of Christ’s Passion on his body (including the nails protruding out).
Just as Francis set out to challenge the new materialist economic order emerging in 12th-century Italy, his example serves as a rebuke to the comfortable, shallow, routine life that so many of us are ensnared by and the corresponding narrow-mindedness that goes with it. More of our cities look and act like Singapore, especially London, which also manages to include the grubbiness of Naples with none of the charm (our pizzas are soggy and outrageously expensive). All we do is go along with it. No wonder no one smiles. Try sweating Naples-style, it helps.
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