On the Shores of the Mediterranean

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Eric Newby. On the Shores of the Mediterranean

On the Shores of the Mediterranean

Dedication

Contents

Map

PART ONE ITALY

A Tuscan Vineyard

In the Streets of Naples

An Evening in Venice

PART TWO THE ADRIATIC

On the Way to the Balkans

A Night in Montenegro

Albania Stern and Wild

PART THREE GREECE

Grecian Shores

In the Steps of Ali Pasha

Monasteries of the Air

The Ascent of Mount Olympus

PART FOUR TURKEY

A View of the Hellespont

Baths and Bazaars

The Harem at Topkapi

The Plain of Troy

An Encounter with Nomads

PART FIVE THE LEVANT

Jerusalem

PART SIX NORTH AFRICA

In and Out of a Pyramid

Return to Tobruk

Into a Minefield

Not Quite Leptis Magna

On the Edge of the Sahara

View from a Hill

PART SEVEN RETURN TO EUROPE

Imperial Rock

Holy Week in Seville

Dinner at the Negresco

The Last Vintage

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Отрывок из книги

ERIC NEWBY

Title Page

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There was nothing extraordinary about this way of doing business, with a basket on the end of a rope. In Naples, where many of the old tenements are eight storeys high, it is commonplace. The only difference is that there the trade is generally legitimate and the buyers, often elderly ladies living alone on an upper floor, are the ones who lower the panari to the sellers of such commodities as vegetables in the street below, who have attracted their attention by shouting at the tops of their voices in the dialect, ‘Signo [Signora]! The price of whatever it is is so-and-so a kilo. Acalate ’o panaro!’ (‘Lower your basket!’)

When Wanda decided to buy the only packet of Marlboros she ever bought from Gennaro and she shouted up, ‘Gennaro, un pacco!’, the strangeness of these three words, in her north Italian, Parmigiano accent, made him sufficiently inquisitive to lean out over the railings to see who owned it, and for a moment we found ourselves being looked down on by a hard-looking character of sixty-odd with short white hair and eyes like Carrara marbles. What we were looking up at was the last link in an illicit industry, the one that actually dealt with the public. An industry which at the height of its prosperity, largely in the field of cigarette smuggling, which continued well into the seventies, supported, by its own admission, some 50,000 Napoletani and their families, out of a total population of some 1,200,000.

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