Читать книгу On the Shores of the Mediterranean - Eric Newby - Страница 10

The train trundled into Naples through the happy hunting grounds of the Camorra in the suburbs of Grumo, Frattamaggiore and Casoria, past the Cimitero Monumentale up on the hill at Poggioreale and the Cimitero Nuovo, past a forgotten section of the city called the Rione Luzzatti, past the Mercato Agricola and the Prison, the Carcere Giudiziario, and past the Pasconello marshalling yards in which long lines of carriages stood shimmering in the sun like so many red-hot ingots. It was so hot that I wondered if the place might literally explode.

‘There are no hotels in Pozzuoli,’ a sollecitatore, a tout for one of the hotels, said as, carrying our luggage, we entered the foyer of the Stazione Centrale, which although built almost entirely of stainless steel and plate glass was, after the train in which we had been immured for about eight hours, a haven of coolness if not of quiet. We wanted to stay in Pozzuoli, outside the city to the west, partly because we knew it would be quieter than Naples and partly because it is on the shores of the fascinating region known as the Campi Flegrei, the Phlegraean Fields.

‘Non fare lo stupido!’ Wanda said. The very rude equivalent in Italian of ‘Don’t be bloody daft!’ ‘There were dozens of hotels and pensions when we last stayed there.’

‘Well, there aren’t any now,’ he said. ‘They’re all kaput. There are terremoti, earthquakes.’

‘Of course there are hotels and pensioni at Pozzuoli,’ the man at the official Tourist Information desk in the station said when we appealed to him. ‘This man is lying – va via!’ he said to the sollecitatore, and when he had gone off, grumbling to himself, ‘There are altogether nineteen hotels and pensioni at Pozzuoli; but unfortunately they are all full.’

We asked him how he knew they were all full.

‘Because other visitors who arrived earlier today have also asked to stay in Pozzuoli and I have telephoned every one of them. All are full.’

And with that, because we were hot and done in, we allowed him to consign us, telling us how much we would enjoy staying in it, to a pensione in Mergellina that might have won a prize, if the owner had wanted to enter for it, for the noisiest and worst pensione in its class anywhere on the Italian shores of the Mediterranean.

He, too, the man at the information desk, was lying. In fact all the hotels and pensioni in Pozzuoli were completely empty, which was not surprising considering that the town was being shaken by up to sixty earthquake shocks a day of an intensity between three and four on the Mercalli scale.

‘The only thing the hotels at Pozzuoli are full of is paura [fear],’ said an elderly gentleman who we found sitting on a bench at the railway station at Pozzuoli watching the trains go by, when we went there a few days later.

‘And what are you doing here, then,’ Wanda asked him, ‘if it’s so dangerous?’

‘Io?’ he said. ‘Io sono di Baia. Vengo ogni giorno in treno. Sono in pensione. Mi piace un po’ di stimolo.’ (‘Me? I’m from Baia. I come in here every day on the train. I’m an old-age pensioner. I like a bit of excitement.’)

Loaded with inaccurate information we went out through the swing doors of the station into Piazza Garibaldi which was filled with orange-coloured buses, where yet more of the local inhabitants were waiting to practise their skills on us: vendors of hard and soft drugs, contraband cigarettes and lighters, souvenirs, imitation coral necklaces; male prostitutes; juvenile and not so juvenile pimps, pickpockets and bag-snatchers, as well as large numbers of inoffensive, if not positively kindly Napoletani. In fact it was just like any other open space outside a main station anywhere.

Somewhere near the middle of the Piazza someone, presumably someone unused to Naples, had tethered a motorcycle to a lamp standard with the equivalent of a small anchor chain that would have been difficult to cut even with bolt cutters, threading it through and round the front wheel instead of through the frame, a serious error. Now, all that remained of the motorcycle was the front wheel, still chained to the lamp standard.

It was obvious that whatever had happened elsewhere in the Mediterranean in the twenty years since we had last visited it, basically Naples was one of the places that had not changed.

Six nights later we were sitting at a table in the open air in Piazza Sannazzaro, at the west end of Naples, midway between the Mergellina railway station and Porto Sannazzaro where yachts, fishing boats and the big, grey, fast patrol boats of the Guardia di Finanza, the Italian equivalent of the British and American customs, lie moored practically alongside the fast, perhaps faster, smaller boats used by the smugglers, the Contrabbandieri.

One of the entrances to this Piazza is by way of a long, fume-filled tunnel, the Galleria della Laziale, which runs down into it under Monte Posillipo from what was, until recently, the village of Fuorigrotta (Outside the Grotto), now a huge, modern suburb out towards the Phlegraean Fields to the west.

At the point where this tunnel enters the Piazza there is a set of traffic lights which are set in such a fashion that they only operate in favour of pedestrians at intervals of anything up to five minutes, and then only for something like thirty seconds, before the drivers of vehicles once again get the green, which in Naples is interpreted as a licence to kill.

But because this is Naples, when the light turns green it is still not safe for pedestrians to cross here (or anywhere else in the city for that matter), even with the lights in their favour, as motorcyclists and drivers of motor vehicles still continue to roar into the Piazza whatever colour the lights are.

This is because for Neapolitan drivers the red light has a unique significance. Here, in Naples, it is regarded as a suggestion that perhaps they might consider stopping. If however they do stop, then it is practically certain that those behind will not have considered the possibility of them doing so and there will be a multiple collision, with everybody running into the vehicle in front. Because of this possibility it is equally dangerous for Neapolitans, whether drivers or pedestrians, to proceed when the green light announces that they can do so.

At this particular set of lights there is yet another danger for pedestrians waiting on the pavement. When the lights are against the traffic emerging from the tunnel, any motorcyclist worth his salt mounts the pavement and drives through the ranks of those pedestrians who are still poised on it trying to make up their minds whether or not it is safe to step into the road and cross.

And what about the orange light? It is a reasonable question to ask.

‘And what about the orange light?’ Luccano de Crescenza, a Neapolitan photographer and writer, the author of a very amusing book on the habits of his fellow citizens, La Napoli di Bellavista, once asked an elderly inhabitant who passed the time of day at various traffic lights, presumably waiting for accidents to occur. To which he replied, ‘l’Arancio? Quello non dice niente. Lo teniamo per allegria.’ (‘The Orange? That doesn’t mean anything. We keep it to brighten the place up.’)

This tunnel, and another which also runs under Monte Posillipo, more or less parallel to it, the Galleria Quattro Giornate, replace the tunnel, a wonder of ancient engineering more than 2200 feet long, 20 feet wide and in some places 70 feet high, that linked Roman Napolis with the Phlegraean Fields.

Above the eastern portal of this tunnel, now closed, which emerged at Piedigrotta (Foot of the Grotto) next door to the Mergellina railway station, there is what is said to be a Roman columbarium, a dovecote. It stands on what is supposed to be the site of the tomb of Virgil, who was buried on Monte Posillipo after his death in Brundusium, the modern Brindisi, on his way back from Greece, in September, 19 BC and which was visited by John Evelyn on his way to the Phlegraean Fields in 1645.

Previously Virgil had lived in a villa on the hill where he composed the Georgics and the Aeneid but was so dissatisfied with the Aeneid, which he had written for the glorification of Rome, that he gave orders that after his death it should be destroyed, a fate which, mercifully for posterity, was avoided by the intervention of the Emperor Augustus, who forbade it.

Although it was by now after eleven o’clock in the evening and a weekday, it was August, holiday time, and the tables in Piazza Sannazzaro were as crowded as they had been two or three hours previously. In fact the tables were so closely packed together that the only way in which it was possible to be sure which establishment one was patronizing was by the different colours of the tablecloths.

These were very cheap places in which to eat, that is to say you could have a meal, the principal plate of which might be risotto or spaghetti con vongole, clams, which we hoped had been dredged from some part of the Mediterranean that was not rich in mercury and other by-products of industry, and almost unlimited wine (at least two litres) at a cost of about 12,000 lire for two. (At this time, August 1983, the exchange was around L2395 for £1, L1605 for $1.) Here, you could eat an entire meal, which few of the sort of Napoletani who brought what appeared to be their entire families with them could afford to do, or a single dish. Or you could eat nothing at all and simply drink Nastro Azzurro, the local beer which, strangely enough, is better in bottles than on draught when it is usually too gassy, or wine, or Coca Cola. Here, in the Piazza, beer drinkers outnumbered wine drinkers.

One of the sources of drink in Piazza Sannazzaro was a dark little hole in the wall with VINI inscribed over it on a stone slab, from which this and the various other beverages were dispensed by a rather grumpy-looking old woman in the black weeds of age or widowhood or both, who spoke nothing but the Neapolitan dialect. This dispensary formed in part an eating place called the Antica Pizzeria da Pasqualino which offered four different varieties – gusti specialità – of pizza: polpo (with octopus) al sugo, capricciosa, frutta di mare and capponato, presumably filled with capon. These pizzas are good. They make anything bought outside Italy, and some pizzas made in Italy and even in Naples by those who are not interested in making them properly – a bit of underbaked dough smeared with salsa di pomodoro, tomato sauce, and adorned with a few olives and fragments of anchovy – seem like an old tobacco pouch with these items inside it. The sort of pizza that the English traveller Augustus Hare was offered when in Naples in 1883, the one he described as ‘a horrible condiment made of dough baked with garlic, rancid bacon and strong cheese … esteemed a feast’.

What he should have been eating is something of which the foundation is a round of light, leavened dough which has been endlessly and expertly kneaded, on to which have been spread, in its simplest form, olive oil, the cheese called mozzarella, anchovies, marjoram and salsa di pomodoro, and baked in a wood-fuelled oven.

Amongst all the Napoletani there were very few foreigners to be seen. This was because there is relatively little accommodation in Mergellina – a couple of small hotels and three pensioni – and very few visitors to Naples, once they find out what can happen to them in the city, unless they are young and active and travelling together in a band, are at night prepared to go far from the area where they are actually sleeping.

Our evening in Piazza Sannazzaro had been almost too full of incident. Just after nine o’clock, a boy had ridden up on a Vespa and stopped outside the Trattoria Agostino, a place very similar to the one we were in and about fifty yards away on the corner of Via Mergellina, at its junction with the Salita Piedigrotta. There, at point-blank range, without dismounting, he had fired five shots in rapid succession, from what sounded to me more like a peashooter than a pistol, at a man sitting at a table outside the establishment, apparently trying to gambizzare, blow his kneecaps off, all of which missed, except one which grazed his bottom.

The man at the table was Mario dello Russo, aged thirty-four. He had a criminal record as a member of the Camorra, a fully fledged member of the Nuova Famiglia, the principal rivals of the now-ascendant Nuova Camorra Organizzata (NCO) with whom they were currently engaged in a fight to the death, or until some other satisfactory arrangement could be arrived at.

This battle, which was taking place under our eyes, was for the ultimate control of almost everything criminal: robbery, kidnapping, intimidation of shopkeepers, all sorts of smuggling including drugs, male and female prostitution and illegal property development not only in Naples and the offshore islands of Ischia and Capri but in the whole of Italy from Apulia and Calabria in the deep south as far north as Milan.

After five minutes, three cars loaded with members of the Squadra Mobile arrived, together with an ambulance, and dello Russo was carted off. The boy who actually fired the shots was, in fact, a person of no consequence, what is known in the Camorra, an organization with unchanging, traditional ways of doing things, rather like Pop at Eton, as a Picciotto di Onore, a Lad of Honour, an unpaid apprentice to the Camorra, anxious to prove his worth and loyalty to the cause. The next step up the ladder was to become what used to be called a Picciotto di Sgarroe. This needed a far greater degree of self-sacrifice and abnegation, the postulant often being required to take the responsibility for crimes committed by fully fledged Camorristi and to accept whatever sentence was meted out to him by law, even if it meant spending years in prison.

Altogether, on that day alone, in the last week of August, those arrested in and around Naples included the uncle of Luigi Giugliano of Forcella, a high-ranking member of the Nuova Famiglia who had been instantly deported to Frosinone; three traffickers in hard drugs; two pairs of brothers, all between twelve and seventeen years of age, who between them had broken into twenty different apartments in the districts of Vomero and Colli Aminei, two of them being armed; a man who had assaulted the police while they were chasing two thieves; Vicenzo Scognamiglo, aged forty-nine, who had stolen a wallet from an Iranian; Bruno and Gennaro Pastore, for snatching a handbag from an American tourist; and Salvatore Imparata, aged fifty-six, and Giovanni Lazzaro, twenty, both of whom were found to be carrying guns.

That same night, Francesco Iannucci, otherwise known as Ciccio 800 (Ciccio being a diminutive of Francesco), a thirty-seven-year-old Camorrista of the Nuova Famiglia, succeeded in jumping from a prison train and getting away, although the following day he was sighted from a Carabinieri helicopter and recaptured, after having been shot in the knee. In 1975 he had been condemned to twenty-four years’ imprisonment for the murder of Andrea Gargiulo, otherwise known as ’O Curto (the Short One), head of a rival band of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata who specialized in extortion in Iannucci’s native suburb of Torre Annunziata, on the shores of the Bay below the southern flanks of Vesuvius, not far from Pompeii.

But by far the biggest coup of the day had been the arrest, by Carabinieri of the Special Operations Group, Napoli I, of Carmela Provenzano, aged thirty-three, at her home in Secondigliano, on the northern outskirts of the city. She had been committed to the earthquake-ridden women’s prison at Pozzuoli in which the occupants were now refusing, with some reason, to be locked in their cells. Carmela was the wife of Pasquale d’Amico, better known as ’O Cartunaro (literally the gatherer of cardboard boxes, for reconditioning), who besides being a scavenger was also one of the strategic planning staff in the upper echelons of the NCO.

Carmela had acted as principal courier for the NCO, maintaining a regular communication service between those of its members who were outside with those who were inside. One of her most important calls had been at the Supercarcere, the maximum security prison, at Nuoro in Sardinia, itself a town in a region that is one of the great epicentres of violent, organized crime on the island. There, in August 1981, she delivered the death sentence, pronounced by Raffaele Cutolo, otherwise known as Il Professore, head of the NCO, on Francis Turatello, otherwise known as Faccia d’Angelo (Angel Face). Turatello was one of the inmates, and, if not commander-in-chief of the Nuova Famiglia, was certainly boss of all illicit activity in the Po Valley, as far north as Milan, as well as being a protégé of the Mafia.

Turatello died on 17 August, during the open-air exercise period, having been stabbed sixty times. That same day, the Carabinieri of Napoli I also arrested Maria Auletta, aged eighteen, wife of the Mafioso Salvatori Imperatrici, one of the sicari (cutthroats) who had stabbed Turatello to death. She was what is known as a fiancheggiatrice, a helper or flanker of the NCO.

Carmela Provenzano was arrested in Secondigliano, Maria Auletta in Arzano. Both are small places adjacent to one another in what is known as Il Triangolo della Morte, or Il Triangolo della Camorra, both of which have the same significance for those who have the misfortune to live in them and are not themselves members of either the Camorra or the Mafia. Inside Il Triangolo, which is made up of three main areas, Afragola-Casoria, Caivano-Fratta and Acerra, live more than half a million people, a large proportion of whom are unemployed and without any apparent hope of finding employment. Everything within Il Triangolo is inadequate: schools, water supply, housing and recreational facilities, which are practically non-existent.

Of the eight comuni, municipalities, that make up Caivano-Fratta, five do not even have a single police or Carabinieri post which might afford some protection to the inhabitants. Afragola-Casoria, with 200,000 people living in it, does not even have a hospital. In Acerra, which has the largest concentration of industry – Aeritalia, Alfasud, Montefibre – the three comuni of Acerra, Pomigliano and Casalnuovo, which together have a population of 100,000, have more than 20,000 unemployed, of whom 8000 are what is known as cassa integrati, that is paid not to work.¹ At Acerra large numbers of earthquake victims are accommodated in metal containers of the sort carried on lorries. In the last week of this August, because of the heat, a four-year-old child died of asphyxiation inside one, the third child to die in this fashion in four months. Of the eight communes that make up Caivano-Fratta, which has about 200,000 inhabitants, the one with the largest number of unemployed is the one which has been industrialized. In fact, the setting up of industrial complexes in the Triangle has obliterated enormous tracts of agricultural land without providing alternative employment for the inhabitants.

It is not surprising that the Triangle is used as a battlefield by the warring clans of the Camorra; there were fifty murders there in the first eight months of 1983. The most dangerous area is Acerra, where, by the time we arrived in Naples, there had been twenty-two murders in eighteen months. Everywhere robbers, many of them no more than children, had organized themselves in bands anything up to twenty strong. Banks were constantly under attack. The only faint ray of hope in what was otherwise a prospect of unrelieved gloom and horror was that students and working men living in the Triangle had joined together to set up an organization of vigilantes, headed by a bishop. We decided to give Afragola-Casoria, Caivano-Fratta and Acerra a miss.

In view of all this general unpleasantness, it was therefore with a certain trepidation that we set off, as we did each night, to walk back to our macabre bedroom in the Pensione Canada on the waterfront facing Porto Sannazzaro, through streets that were now rapidly emptying of people, but not traffic, which continued to circulate until the early hours of the morning unabated. This room was twelve feet high, twelve feet square, lit by a very old circular fluorescent tube that when it was warming up resembled a crimson worm and was furnished with a bidet hidden by a tall bamboo screen, like a bidet in a jungle. It was also furnished, which was unusual for a bedroom, with an upright piano belonging to the brother of the proprietor. The only picture on the walls was a colour photograph of the Mobilificio Petti, a furniture warehouse at Nocera Sopra Camerelle (SA), with the telephone numbers – there were two lines, 723730 and 723751–printed underneath it, in case one wanted to order up more furniture during one’s stay.

Fortunately there were other things besides shootings, of which one soon tires, going on in Piazza Sannazzaro. Night after night we had sat in it watching a succession of events unfold themselves, always with the same protagonists, until we had come to realize that what we were looking at was an unvarying ritual. Even the order in which they took place and the participants appeared and disappeared was governed by immutable laws. It was only on this particular evening, when the Camorra had demonstrated its existence, coming up from the depths and showing a small part of itself, like some immense fish of which only the smallest part breaks the surface, that there had been any interruption.

First to open up, and the only one who remained on site throughout the entire evening, was a young man who sold raw tripe and pigs’ trotters from a shiny, brand new, stainless steel stall with the owner’s name and what he dealt in painted around the top of it – TRIPPE OPERE E’O MUSSO – in black letters, illuminated on a pink background.

The grey pieces of tripe were displayed on a sort of miniature stainless steel staircase which was decorated with vine leaves and lemons stuck on metal spikes, with a centrepiece which consisted of what looked like an urn made entirely of rolled tripe, with the pinkish pigs’ trotters laid out attractively at the foot of it. Down this staircase tumbled an endless cascade of water, making the whole thing a sort of hanging garden of tripe and pigs’ trotters; it was surprising how attractive looking it was, considering how unpromising were the basic materials.

Next to appear on the scene, after E’O MUSSO, was a very poor, very fragile, faintly genteel old lady, who looked as if a puff of wind might whisk her away to eternity. She moved among the tables never asking for money but nevertheless receiving it, for the Neapolitans recognize and respect true poverty. A surprising amount of what she received was in the form of 500 and even 1000 lire notes. This old lady rarely, if ever, made the circuit of all the tables. When she had collected what she presumably considered enough for her immediate needs, after taking into account whatever payments she might have to make to the Camorra in a way of dovuti, dues, or what she considered the market could stand each night without spoiling it, she would give up and totter off round the corner and up the hill called the Salita Piedigrotta which leads to the Mergellina railway station and the church of Santa Maria Piedigrotta. There, by day, during opening hours, she used to sit outside the main door, at the receipt of alms. Santa Maria Piedigrotta is the church which is the scene of one of the great Neapolitan religious festivals, that of the Virgin of Piedigrotta, which takes place, to the accompaniment of scenes of wild and pagan enthusiasm, on the night of 7–8 September.

The old lady was followed by an even older, even more decrepit couple, presumably husband and wife, each of whom carried a couple of very large plastic bags. They moved from table to table asking for bread, and because they didn’t miss any out, they got a lot of it.

What did they do with all this bread?

One night, feeling mean about doing so, I followed them out of the Piazza, round the corner and up the Rampa Sant’Antonio a Posillipo, built in 1743 by Charles of Bourbon’s Spanish Viceroy in Naples, Don Ramiro de Guzman, Duque Medina de Las Torres, which is one of the ways of reaching Virgil’s tomb and a pillar indicating the whereabouts of the remains of the poet Leopardi. There, from a distance, I saw them eating bread as hard as they could. It was a harrowing sight. But what happened to the bread they couldn’t eat? There was so much of it, and more arriving every evening. Did they sell it to other old people too infirm or too proud to go into the streets and beg? Or did they sell it to a pig farmer for swill? It was yet another Neapolitan mystery.

The old man and the old woman were followed by a venditore di volanti, literally a seller of flyings, in this case balloons, who always did good business with the owners of children who had long since got tired of sitting at the tables with their parents and were now zooming about all over the place.

Next came a poor, sickly, probably tubercular, humble-looking young man like someone out of a Victorian novel, who handed out colour prints, as pallid as he was, of Santa Lucia, the Virgin martyred by the Emperor Diocletian, shown holding a palm frond and, as patroness of the blind, a dish with a pair of eyes apparently swimming in it, all against a Neapolitan background of umbrella pines.

He was followed by a more vigorous-looking man carrying a sort of wooden framework, a bit like those that were once used to carry hawks into the hunting field, supported by straps from his shoulders but loaded with toy musical instruments, selling at 1000 lire a time, that looked like ice-cream cornets and which, when he blew into a demonstration model, produced a hideous noise. Soon the air was filled with the sounds of dozens of these instruments being blown by children and adults which mingled with the terrible howlings emitted by the sirens of the police cars and ambulances tearing through the streets, just as they do in every other city in the civilized world.

Then came another, older man, pushing an old-fashioned perambulator with a piece of board on top of it which he used as a mobile stand. He was a torronaro, selling torronne, nougat. On both sides of the pram he had painted the words QUESTO ESERCIZIO RIMANE CHIUSO IL LUNEDI (THIS ESTABLISHMENT REMAINS CLOSED ON MONDAYS), which was why we hadn’t seen him on the evening we arrived. Below that he had added his telephone number, just like the owner of the furniture warehouse at Nocera Sopra Camerelle (SA) in case someone had a sudden, overwhelming desire to eat nougat.

Last of all, a four-man band came marching into the Piazza. Three of them were middle-aged with little black moustaches, wearing the sort of red caps with gold-embroidered peaks worn by Italian station masters when seeing a train off from their stations, bright green shirts and yellow knickerbockers with silver braided side seams. Two of them were beating drums, and the third one played the harmonica. They were led by a drum-major dressed in a white tunic with gold-embroidered epaulettes, bright yellow trousers the same shade as the bandsmen’s knickerbockers and what looked like a colonial governor’s hat decked with white plumes. He was whirling a baton with a Negro’s head on top of it in one hand and, with the other, making various obscene gestures. Each night when we gave the drum-major his due – he was well over seventy years of age – which was not always easy at this late hour, as besides being breadless by this time, we were also running short of the kind of money we were prepared to give him, he used to hand Wanda a quantity of visiting cards, so that if she had stayed on for another week in Naples she would have had enough cards to play poker with. The print on them read:

BOTTONE SALVATORE

ORGANIZZATORE-PAZARIELLO

PROPAGANDA: PER NAPOLI E PROVINCIA

AFRAGOLA (NA) TEL: 8697539

DALLE ORE 2 ALLE ORE 24

Then, when he had sucked everyone in the Piazza dry of lire, Signor Salvatore marched his band of pazarielli, signifying, in the dialect, entertainers of a surrealistic, loony kind, away up the Salita Piedigrotta in the steps of the old lady, the old man and woman collecting bread, the sickly young man with the prints of Santa Lucia, the seller of musical instruments that looked like ice-cream cornets, the venditore di volanti and the torronaro, to the place where they had parked the old, beat-up van which would take them all back to dear old Afragola in the heart of the Triangolo della Morte.

The entertainment was at an end. Suddenly the tables began to empty and the waiters began stacking them and the chairs against the walls. The evening was over.

But not quite over. There was one establishment that during the hours of darkness never closed. The proprietor was called Gennaro and he lived on the first floor over what a sign over the door described as a Ferramenta e Hobbyistica, an ironmonger’s shop which also catered for those interested in hobbies, which stood next door to the shop where the grumpy old lady dispensed her vini and Nastri Azzurri.

This man Gennaro had a monopoly of contraband cigarettes in the Piazza, perhaps over an even wider area. All you had to do was to stand below the balcony and call, ‘Gennaro!’ and then more softly, ‘Un pacco!’ and shooting down on a rope came a panaro, a wicker basket, into which you put 2000 lire which was immediately whisked away aloft. Then by return of post, as it were, you received a packet of genuine Marlboros, the only thing lacking being the Italian excise stamp.

But why 2000 lire a packet when the going price, bought from an official government tabaccaio, tobacconist, was 1800 lire including duty and tax? Because all the official establishments were shut. Gennaro made a killing with his contrabbando which by day would have to sell for infinitely less than 1800 lire to compete with what was a monopoly of the state.

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.

In the good old days up to about 1978 when the contrabbandieri used to challenge the customs officers to football matches, money would change hands in large quantities to keep them sweet – which it probably still does – and the smugglers’ equivalent to the Royal Yacht Squadron bar at Cowes was the Bar Paris in Santa Lucia. But by that time the Camorra, and therefore the contrabbandieri, were already deeply involved with drugs and the special relationship they had enjoyed with the Guardie had come to an end, and, what had been unthinkable until then, the Guardie actually took to opening fire, if not actually at the contrabbandieri themselves, then on their motoscafi, although how it was possible to discriminate between one and the other at night it is difficult to imagine.

It was at this time that the contrabbandieri did something that only Neapolitans would think of doing. They formed a union which they christened Il Colletivo Autonomo Contrabbandieri, the Autonomous Collective of Smugglers, and called a public protest meeting, advertising it with posters which read more or less as follows:

SMUGGLING AT NAPLES ALLOWS 50,000 FAMILIES TO SURVIVE ALBEIT WITH DIFFICULTY. FOR ALMOST A YEAR NOW THE GOVERNMENT AND THE CUSTOMS HAVE DECLARED WAR ON US. HANDS OFF THE CONTRABAND UNTIL YOU FIND US ANOTHER WAY OF LIFE! COME TO THE MEETING OF ALL SMUGGLERS OF NAPLES ON THURSDAY NEXT IN FRONT OF THE UNIVERSITY IN VIA MEZZOCANONE 16.

A particularly appropriate venue as large numbers of students actually worked for the Paranze a Terra (an organization for distributing contraband).

Now, five or more years later, there were still 50,000 Neapolitan families involved in smuggling at Naples and more money was involved, as would be natural to keep pace with inflation even without taking account of drug smugglers.

There had been some changes in Naples since we had last taken a fairly prolonged look at it, back in the autumn of 1963, and it would have been surprising if there had not been.

Then we had been working on a guide book to the hotels, pensioni and restaurants in southern Italy, a task that had left us, even before we left Naples and began to tackle the rest of the Italian peninsula, in a state of near collapse. At that time the pensione with the piano had not existed, although there were one or two hotels and pensioni that ran it very close.

Some of the biggest changes that had taken place, apart from whole areas in which the original buildings had either fallen down of their own accord or had been knocked down and rebuilt, were down in the docks, all along the waterfront as far as San Giovanni a Teduccio, where the pontili, the landing stages, stretch out like long fingers into the filthy waters of the Bay, always a dangerous place, if only because of the long lines of freight cars propelled by tank engines that used to come stealing up behind one on their way to or from some marshalling yard. One was only saved from death by the engine drivers letting off a tremendous blast on their whistles. Altogether the place was a madhouse, what with steam engines whistling, ships, some of them big passenger liners, blasting off on their sirens announcing that they were leaving for the Hudson River and similarly distant destinations, and the appalling din made when a crane driver skilfully dropped a whole slingful of packing cases into a ship’s holds, shattering them so that the portuali, the stevedores, could get their hands on the contents, just as crane drivers and stevedores did in every other port in the world at that time.

Now there were no more steam engines; no more transatlantici stealing out into the Bay in the golden light of early morning; no more crane drivers dropping packing cases making music in the ears of the portuali. These noises had been replaced by the ghostly whirrings of the special lifting machines, each of them worked by one man in what had become an automated wilderness, as they picked up the pilfer-proof containers and either loaded them on to a container ship with the minimum of human interference, or else on to an articulated truck.

Now, denied what for centuries they had regarded as their legitimate perquisites of office, the heart had gone out of the portuali, and providing that the money could be found, and it almost certainly would be, by 1985, 750 out of a total workforce of 1700 portuali would have voluntarily taken the sack. What to do with the remaining 950 was a problem that no one in the government or in the port authority had yet had the courage to face. What was obvious was that as far as being a place of interest to travellers such as ourselves, or to anyone but the technically minded, Naples, as a port, like Barcelona, Marseilles, Trieste, the Piraeus, Iskenderun, Beirut, Haifa, Alexandria, Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers and Tangier, was finished.

What had gone, too, from many parts of the city in which previously it had operated at full blast, was what can only be described as the roaring street life. The change was particularly noticeable in the heart of Montecalvario, the large grid-iron of streets, alleys and flights of steps to the west of Via Toledo, that immensely long, straight street which under five different names (the others are Via Roma, Via Enrico Pessina, Via Santa Teresa degli Scalzi and Corso Amedeo di Savoia Duca d’Aosta), rather like Broadway, bisects the city from south to north, from the Royal Palace where it looks out on Piazza Trieste e Trento at the seaward southern end to the foot of Capodimonte at the top, north end where the other royal palace of Naples looks out over the city and the Bay.

These changes were not noticeable at first. It is only when you reach La Speranzella, the Street of Some Hope, which runs across Montecalvario parallel to the Toledo, and you see that many of the tall tenements are only prevented from collapsing by forests of wooden beams and metal scaffolding and that they have been abandoned by all except the most stubborn or desperate for accommodation, that you realize that the heart of Montecalvario is gone and that one single, fairly powerful earth tremor would bring the whole place crashing down in a vast mountain of rubble.

Here every different flight of steps from one level to another, every one of the sixty or more streets, every alley, has its own shrine, to Santa Lucia, San Gennaro, the patron saint of Naples, to Our Lady of Piedigrotta and so on, tended by old ladies who charge the lamps with oil, change the candles, collect any offerings, while meanwhile, in a sort of grotto beneath the shrine, the terracotta figures of men and women, which often include a priest among them, fry in purgatory.

Now what was perhaps the most vigorous street life in Naples was to be found in and on either side of Spaccanapoli, literally the Street that splits Naples, in the same way as Via Toledo does from north to south but from west to east. A long, long street with eight different names which begins as Via Santa Lucia al Monte high up in Montecalvario below the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, coming to an end in a vicolo cieco, a cul-de-sac, called Borgo Tupputi, half a mile from the Stazione Centrale in Piazza Garibaldi. An astonishing, fascinating street full of medieval, Renaissance, baroque and rococo churches, palaces and monuments; bookshops; repairers and vendors of second-hand dolls; and with long, narrow dangerous alleys running uphill from it in an area infested with robbers, one of which is full of makers and sellers of presepi (cribs) and the painted terracotta figures of the infant Christ, the Virgin, the Shepherds and the Kings and the animals which every Neapolitan family brings out in Christmas week; artificial flowers for cemeteries and religious images. The streets running down from it towards Corso Umberto, such as those around the Forcella, the home of Luigi Giugliano, whose uncle had been deported to Frosinone, were still the abode of puttane, tarts, some of them enormous.

Twenty years previously, sent off by Wanda to conduct this particular piece of fieldwork by myself, awe had overcome lust as I looked for the first time at these mountainous women somehow inserted into skirts so tight that it seemed that they must burst, bigger even than many of their biggest customers, who were themselves gigantic. Now, fat or thin, they were fighting an uphill battle against the thousands of male prostitutes and transvestites who, as long ago as the seventies, as everywhere else in Italy, were already beginning to outnumber them, if they had not already done so. Some, seeing their livelihood threatened by the indifference of a seemingly increasingly myopic clientele and not receiving much support from the Nuova Famiglia or the NCO, who would take a percentage of any earnings, whether they were male, female or transvestite, pinned cards on the doors of their places of business announcing that whoever was inside was a PUTTANA VERA – a Genuine Prostitute.

The beggars of Naples were now less numerous, less ragged than they had been twenty years previously. The poor, in fact, although they might be relatively poorer than they had been, now looked slightly more prosperous, more bourgeois. Some of the raggedest beggars were still to be found lying on the steps leading up into the enormous Galleria Umberto Primo, which has a nave 160 yards long and is 125 feet high with a dome towering 60 feet above that, a place that for at least a couple of decades after 1943 was the centre of every imaginable and unimaginable clandestine activity. It was now more difficult to see in Naples what had appeared in a photograph taken in the seventies, and used by de Crescenza to illustrate his book, of a man lying on a flight of steps apparently in the depths of winter with an empty begging bowl beside him and a notice which read, ‘Ridotto in questo condizione di mio cognato’ (‘Reduced to this condition by my brother-in-law’).

But although there were now more bag-snatchers, more pickpockets, more people ready to beat you up if for no better reason than to give you something to remember them by, as there were almost everywhere else in the Mediterranean lands, or Europe, or the entire world for that matter, there seemed to be slightly less trufferia, petty swindling. It was now less certain that, having made some purchase in the Mercato della Duchesca, or in the street, in the Forcella, for instance, and having had it parcelled up, you would find on opening it up later that something of the same size and weight had been substituted for it, although I was sold a guide book to Pompeii, sealed in plastic, which turned out to be nothing more than the cover with blank pages inside.

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 Branca² 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 Gennaro³ was at one time preserved after his martyrdom in AD 305 at Pozzuoli.

We set off for the Bellomunno horse-drawn branch on the Rampe del Campo in rain that became progressively heavier while we waited for a bus to take us there.

Travelling up Via Don Bosco, having passed Charles’s enormous workhouse, was more like being in the Mile End Road on a wet December afternoon than twelve o’clock in Naples, in August. It was not therefore surprising that we missed the whistle stop for the Rampe del Campo and found ourselves at the beginning of the long haul up to the cemetery plateau, and by the time I realized the mistake and had managed to struggle forward through the bus shouting the equivalent in Italian of ‘Here, I say …’ to the driver and had persuaded him to make an unscheduled stop, we were just coming up to the concrete fly-over.

He did stop, under the fly-over, making it abundantly clear that he thought we must be a couple of tomb robbers, wanting to get down in a place that has very little else to offer in the way of diversion, even in fine weather, except a visit to the Cimitero Vecchio.

But there, underneath the fly-over, with ten horses, and everyone else involved taking a breather before attacking the long salita, was one of Bellomunno’s huge, jet black, baroque hearses with a jet black coffin inside behind expanses of glittering plate glass, a top-hatted, long-black-coated coachman on the box, and a pair of uniformed mutes doubling as grooms holding the two lead horses’ heads with, behind them, four pairs of magnificent, jet black Dutch horses, like the leaders all tossing their heads and all steaming like mad. And behind the hearse a long line of black motor cars, containing the supporters.

‘What happened to the old cocchiero?’ Wanda asked the coachman on the box high overhead who was about twenty-five and as wet as we were. ‘He was a very kind man. The last time we came to the Rampe del Campo was in a taxi and he sent us back to Naples in one of your motor hearses to save us the fare.’

‘He died in 1973,’ he said. ‘They gave him a fine funeral. And you, too, will soon be dead if you don’t change your clothes,’ looking down on us where we stood in a pair of puddles. ‘At the top of the salita,’ he went on pointing up the hill, ‘in Largo Santa Maria, beyond the Cemetery of Santa Maria, there is a pizzeria called the Loggia del Paradiso [Verandah of Paradise] which overlooks it. That is the cemetery we are bound for. Go to the Loggia and tell them I sent you. They will dry your clothes by the oven and lend you some while you’re eating. The hearse which will take this coffin down into the cemetery from the gates is a motor one. I can’t get into it with ten horses. After the funeral the driver and his men will go to the Loggia to have their lunch, and when they go back to the city, which will be about two o’clock, I will ask them to take you with them and drop you off in Piazza Garibaldi.’

From the automobiles, which were as black as the hearse itself and crammed with mourners, the women heavily veiled, came the sounds of groans and sobbing. The cocchiero winked and waved his whip with a graceful gesture, comprehending everything in and out of sight: the pouring rain, the appalling, thundering traffic, the fearful landscape, the keening women and the corpse high overhead behind him.

‘Com’è bella Napoli!’ he said.

Then he shouted to the men holding the heads of the leaders; they let them go and they were off, their hooves skidding a bit on the cobbles, eventually breaking into a trot with the grooms hanging on behind the hearse, out into the pouring rain up towards the Cemetery of Santa Maria del Pianto.

Warm and dry and full of lunch on the way back to Piazza Garibaldi in the Bellomunno motor hearse, we caught up on what had been happening to the old firm in the course of our twenty years’ absence.

They no longer had the white horse-drawn hearse used for children, or the small, black, two-horse one in their stables at the Rampe del Campo; but they still had two of the big ones, one of which – the twin of the one we had seen that morning – was undergoing extensive repairs and redecoration which would take many months to complete. This work of reconstruction was being carried out, part time, by a skilled body-worker from Alfa-Romeo, called Vincenzo di Luca, a man known in the horse-drawn carriage trade as ‘a builder and varnisher’. His family had carried on these trades for generations, and he was one of the last, if not the last, to practise them in Naples – it was fortunate for Bellomunno that he was still a youngish man. His son, who was about eighteen or nineteen, although capable of doing this work and at present assisting his father, preferred to look after the horses in the stables at the Rampe del Campo and this was what he was now doing. To build a new hearse of this kind would take three and a half years, and it was probable that Bellomunno would eventually decide to do so. The cost of building such a vehicle would be prodigious. It would involve the use of various sorts of wood, all of which would have to be properly seasoned, iron, steel, brass, leather, cloth, glass etc., and the services of one or two craftsmen such as di Luca who would now have to carry out a wide variety of works which would previously have been carried out by a number of specialized craftsmen: body-makers who built the upper parts, carriage-makers who constructed and put together all the underparts, wheelwrights, joiners, fitters, trimmers, blacksmiths, painters and polishers. Such a hearse might be given up to twenty separate coats of paint and varnish. One of the great difficulties in the 1980s was to find suitable rubber to make the solid tyres.

In 1983 a horse-drawn funeral employing ten horses cost between 2,000,000 and 3,500,000 lire. The last twelve-horse funeral Bellomunno had organized had been that of Achille Laura, a shipowner who had also been mayor of Naples, earlier that year. He was what is known as a pezzo grosso, literally a big piece, an important man with various far-reaching affiliations; everyone who was anyone and almost everyone who was no one turned out for his funeral, for fear that his absence might be noted. A funeral of this sort could well have cost 7,000,000 lire.

Such funerals are particularly popular with senior members of the Camorra, just as Camorra weddings – at which diamond-studded shirts are often worn by male guests – are notable for conspicuous consumption. Whether horse-drawn or motorized, they are not very popular with those Neapolitan undertakers who are called on to organize them. The last time Bellomunno put in a bill to the family of a deceased Camorrista for a horse-drawn funeral – whose funeral they didn’t say – instead of receiving a cheque through the post, they got a bomb through the counting-house window.

¹ Under the cassa integrazione 70–80 per cent of what a worker would normally earn is paid by agreement between the employer, employee and the state.

² It is said that in one year, 1978, 500,000 bottles of imitation Fernet Branca were seized by the customs at Naples alone.

³ San Gennaro’s blood is first said to have liquefied in the hands of the sainted Bishop Severus on the occasion when the body was first translated from Pozzuoli to Naples at the time of Constantine. The first documented liquefaction took place in the Abbey of Montevergine on 17 August 1389.

The miracle repeats itself three times a year: on the first Saturday in May, when the two phials are taken in procession to the great, bare convent church of Santa Chiara in Spaccanapoli, and on 19 September and 16 December in the Cappella del Tesoro of the Cathedral, on all three occasions before enormous audiences.