Part 6 (1/2)

14. Naples, Sorrento and Capri

I checked out of my hotel and walked to Roma-Termini. It was, in the way of most public places in Italy, a madhouse. At every ticket window customers were gesturing wildly. They didn't seem so much to be buying tickets as pouring out their troubles to the monumentally indifferent and weary-looking men seated behind each window. It is amazing how much emotion the Italians invest in even the simplest transactions.

I had to wait in line for forty minutes while a series of people ahead of me tore their hair and bellowed and eventually were issued with a ticket and came away looking suddenly happy. I couldn't guess what their problems were, and in any case I was too busy fending off the many people who tried to cut in front of me, as if I were holding a door open for them. One of them tried twice. You need a pickaxe to keep your place in a Roman queue.

Finally, with only a minute to spare before my train left, my turn came. I bought a second-cla.s.s single to Naples it was easy; I don't know what all the fuss was about then raced around the corner to the platform and did something I've always longed to do: I jumped onto a moving train or, to be slightly more precise, fell into it, like a mailbag tossed from the platform.

The train was crowded, but I found a seat by a window and caught my breath and mopped up the blood trickling down my s.h.i.+ns as we lumbered slowly out through the endless tower-block suburbs of Rome, picked up speed and moved on to a dusty, hazy countryside full of half-finished houses and small apartment buildings with no sign of work in progress. It was a two-and-a-half-hour journey to Naples and everyone on the train, without apparent exception, pa.s.sed the time by sleeping, stirring to wakefulness only to note the location when we stopped at some drowsing station or to show a ticket to the conductor when he pa.s.sed through. Most of the pa.s.sengers looked poor and unshaven (even several of the women), which was a notable contrast after the worldly elegance of Rome. These, I supposed, were mostly Neapolitan labourers who had come to Rome for the work and were now heading home to see their families.

I watched the scenery a low plain leading to mountains of the palest green and dotted with occasional lifeless villages, all bearing yet more unfinished houses and pa.s.sed the time dreamily embroidering my Ornella Muti fantasy, which had now grown to include a large transparent beach ball, two unicycles, a trampoline and the ma.s.sed voices of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. The air in the carriage was warm and still and before long I fell into a doze myself, but was startled awake after a few minutes by a baleful wailing. A gypsy woman, overweight and in a headscarf, was pa.s.sing along the carriage with a filthy baby, loudly orating the tale of her troubled life and asking for money, but no one gave her any. She pushed the baby in my face he was covered in chocolaty drool and so startlingly ugly that it was all I could do to keep from going 'Aiieee!' and throwing my hands in front of my face and I gave her a thousand lire as fast as I could drag it out of my pocket before Junior loosed a string of gooey brown dribble onto me. She took the money with the indifference of a conductor checking a ticket and without thanks proceeded on through the train shouting her troubles anew. The rest of the journey pa.s.sed without incident.

At Naples, I emerged from the train and was greeted by twenty-seven taxi-drivers, all wanting to take me someplace nice and probably distant, but I waved them away and transferred myself by foot from the squalor of the central station to the squalor of the nearby Circ.u.mvesuviana station, pa.s.sing through an uninterrupted stretch of squalor en route. All along the sidewalks people sat at wobbly tables selling packets of cigarettes and cheap novelties. All the cars parked along the street were dirty and battered. All the stores looked gloomy and dusty and their windows were full of items whose packaging had faded, sometimes almost to invisibility, in the brilliant suns.h.i.+ne. My plan had been to stop in Naples for a day or two before going on to Sorrento and Capri, but this was so awful that I decided to press on at once and come back to Naples when I thought I might be able to face it better.

It was getting on for rush hour by the time I got to Circ.u.mvesuviana and bought a ticket. The train was packed with sweating people and very slow. I sat between two fat women, all wobbling flesh, who talked across me the whole time, making it all but impossible for me to follow my book or do any useful work on my Ornella Muti fantasy, but I considered myself lucky to have a place to sit, even if it was only six inches wide, and the women were marvellously soft, it must be said. I spent most of the journey with my head on one or the other of their shoulders, gazing adoringly up at their faces. They didn't seem to mind at all.

We travelled out of the slums of Naples and through the slums of the suburbs and onwards into a slummy strip of countryside between Vesuvius and the sea, stopping every few hundred feet at some suburban station where 100 people would get off and 120 would get on. Even Pompeii and Herculaneum, or Ercolano as they call it nowadays, looked shabby, all was.h.i.+ng lines and piles of crumbled concrete, and I could see no sign of the ruins from the train. But a few miles further on we climbed higher up a mountainside and into a succession of tunnels. The air was suddenly cool and the villages sometimes no more than a few houses and a church in a gap between tunnels were stunningly pretty with long views down to the blue sea.

I fell in love with Sorrento in an instant. Perhaps it was the time of day, the weather, the sense of relief at being out of Naples, but it seemed perfect: a compact town tumbling down from the station to the Bay of Naples. At its heart was a small, busy square called the Piazza Ta.s.so, lined with outdoor cafes. Leading off the square at one end was a network of echoing alleyways, cool and shadowy and richly aromatic, full of shopkeepers gossiping in doorways and children playing and the general tumult of Italian life. For the rest, the town appeared to consist of a dozen or so wandering streets lined with agreeable shops and restaurants and small, pleasant, old-fas.h.i.+oned hotels hidden away behind heavy foliage. It was lovely, perfect. I wanted to live here, starting now.

I got a room in the Hotel Eden, a medium-sized 1950s establishment on a side street, expensive but spotless, with a glimpse of sea above the rooftops and through the trees, and paced the room manically for five minutes, congratulating myself on my good fortune, before abruptly switching off the lights and returning to the streets. I had a look around, explored the maze of alleyways off the Piazza Ta.s.so and gazed admiringly in the neat and well-stocked shop windows along the Corso Italia, then repaired to an outdoor seat at Tonino's Snack Bar on the square, where I ordered a c.o.ke and watched the pa.s.sing scene, radiating contentment.

The town was full of middle-aged English tourists having an off-season holiday (i.e. one they could afford). Wisps of conversation floated to me across the tables and from couples pa.s.sing on the sidewalk. It was always the same. The wife would be in noise-making mode, that incessant, pointless, mildly fretful chatter that overtakes Englishwomen in mid-life. 'I was going to get tights today and I forgot. I asked you to remind me, Gerald. These ones have a ladder in them from here to Amalfi. I suppose I can can get tights here. I haven't a clue what size to ask for. I knew I should have packed an extra pair ...' Gerald was never listening to any of this, of course, because he was secretly ogling a braless beauty leaning languorously against a lamppost and trading quips with some local yobbos on Vespas, and appeared to be aware of his wife only as a mild, chronic irritant on the fringe of his existence. Everywhere I went in Sorrento I kept seeing these English couples, the wife looking critically at everything, as if she was working undercover for the Ministry of Sanitation, the husband dragging along behind her, worn and defeated. get tights here. I haven't a clue what size to ask for. I knew I should have packed an extra pair ...' Gerald was never listening to any of this, of course, because he was secretly ogling a braless beauty leaning languorously against a lamppost and trading quips with some local yobbos on Vespas, and appeared to be aware of his wife only as a mild, chronic irritant on the fringe of his existence. Everywhere I went in Sorrento I kept seeing these English couples, the wife looking critically at everything, as if she was working undercover for the Ministry of Sanitation, the husband dragging along behind her, worn and defeated.

I had dinner at a restaurant just off the square. It was packed, but super-friendly and efficient and the food was generous and superb ravioli in cream, a heap of scallopine alla Sorrentino, a large but simple salad and an over-ample bowl of home-made ice-cream that had tears of pleasure welling in my eye sockets.

Afterwards, as I sat bloated with a coffee and a cigarette, resting my stomach on the tabletop, an interesting thing happened. A party of eight people came in, looking rich and self-important and distinctly shady, the women in furs, the men in cashmere coats and sungla.s.ses, and within a minute a brouhaha had erupted, sufficiently noisy to make the restaurant fall silent as everyone, customers and waiters alike, looked over.

Apparently the new arrivals had a reservation, but their table wasn't ready there wasn't an empty table in the place and they were engaged in various degrees in making a stink about it. The manager, wringing his hands, soaked up the abuse and had all his waiters das.h.i.+ng around like scene s.h.i.+fters, with chairs and tablecloths and vases of flowers, trying to a.s.semble a makes.h.i.+ft table for eight in an already crowded room. The only person not actively involved in this was the head of the party, a man who looked uncannily like Adolfo Celli and stood aloof, a 500 coat draped over his shoulders. He said nothing except to make a couple of whispered observations into the ear of a pock-faced henchman, which I a.s.sumed involved concrete boots and the insertion of a dead fish in someone's mouth.

The head waiter dashed over and bowingly reported that they had so far a.s.sembled a table for six, and hoped to have the other places shortly, but if in the meantime the ladies would care to be seated ... He touched the floor with his forehead. But this was received as a further insult. Adolfo whispered again to his henchman, who departed, presumably to get a machine gun or to drive a bulldozer through the front wall.

Just then I said, 'Scusi' (for my Italian was coming on a treat), 'you can have my table. I'm just going.' I drained my coffee, gathered my change and stood up. The manager looked as if I had saved his life, which I would like to think I may have, and the head waiter clearly thought about kissing me full on the lips but instead covered me with obsequious 'Grazie's'. I've never felt so popular. The waiters beamed and many of the other diners regarded me with, if I say it myself, a certain lasting admiration. Even Adolfo inclined his head in a tiny display of grat.i.tude and respect. As my table was whipped away, I was escorted to the door by the manager and head waiter who bowed and thanked me and brushed my shoulders with a whisk broom and offered me their daughters' hand in marriage or just for some hot s.e.x. I turned at the door, hesitated for a moment, suddenly boyish and good-looking, a Hollywood smile on my face, tossed a casual wave to the room and disappeared into the evening.

Weighted down with good pasta and a sense of having brought peace to a troubled corner of Sorrento, I strolled through the warm twilight along the Corso Italia and up to the coast road to Positano, the high and twisting Via del Capo, where hotels had been hacked into the rock-face to take advantage of the commending view across the Bay of Naples. All the hotels had names that were redolent of another age the Bel Air, the Bellevue Syrene, the Admiral, the Caravel and looked as if they hadn't changed a whit in forty years. I spent an hour draped over the railings at the roadside, staring transfixed across the magical sweep of bay to Vesuvius and distant Naples and, a little to the left, floating in the still sea, the islands of Procida and Ischia. Lights began to twinkle on around the bay and were matched by early-evening stars in the grainy blue sky. The air was warm and kind and had a smell of fresh-baked bread. This was as close to perfection as anything I had ever encountered.

On the distant headland overlooking the bay was the small city of Pozzuoli, a suburb of Naples and home town of Sophia Loren. The citizens of Pozzuoli enjoy the dubious distinction of living on the most geologically unstable piece of land on the planet, the terrestrial equivalent of a Vibro-Bed. They experience up to 4,000 earth tremors a year, sometimes as many as a hundred in a day. People in Pozzuoli are so used to having pieces of plaster fall into their ragu and tumbling chimney stacks knock off their grannies that they hardly notice it any more.

This whole area is like an insurance man's worst nightmare. Earthquakes are a way of life in Calabria Naples had one in 1980 that left 120,000 people homeless, and another even fiercer one could come at any time. It's no wonder they worry about earthquakes. The towns are built on hills so steep that they look as if the tiniest rumble would send them sliding into the sea. And on top of that, quite literally, there's always Vesuvius grumbling away in the background, still dangerously alive. It last erupted in 1944, which makes this its longest period of quiescence since the Middle Ages. Doesn't sound too promising, does it?

I stared for a long time out across the water at Pozzuoli's lights and listened intently for a low boom, like scaffolding collapsing, or the sound of the earth tearing itself apart, but there was nothing, only the mosquito buzz of an aeroplane high above, a blinking red dot moving steadily across the sky, and the soothing background hum of traffic.

In the morning I walked through bright suns.h.i.+ne down to the Sorrento marina along a perilously steep and gorgeous road called the Via da Maio, in the shadow of the grand Excelsior Vittoria Hotel, and took a nearly empty hover-ferry to Capri, a mountainous outcrop of green ten miles away off the western tip of the Sorrentine peninsula.

Up close, Capri didn't look much. Around the harbour stood a dozing, unsightly collection of shops, cafes and ferry booking offices. All of them appeared to be shut, and there was not a soul about, except for a sailor with Popeye arms lazily coiling rope at the quayside. A road led steeply off up the mountain. Beside it stood a sign saying CAPRI CAPRI 6 6 KM KM.

'Six kilometres!' I squeaked.

I had with me two incredibly useless guidebooks to Italy, so useless in fact that I'm not even going to dignify them by revealing their t.i.tles here, except to say that one of them should have been called Let's Go Get Another Guidebook Let's Go Get Another Guidebook and the other was Fodor's (I was lying a moment ago) and neither of them so much as hinted that Capri town was miles away up a vertical mountainside. They both made it sound as if all you had to do was spring off the ferry and there you were. But from the quayside Capri town looked to be somewhere up in the clouds. and the other was Fodor's (I was lying a moment ago) and neither of them so much as hinted that Capri town was miles away up a vertical mountainside. They both made it sound as if all you had to do was spring off the ferry and there you were. But from the quayside Capri town looked to be somewhere up in the clouds.

The funicolare up the mountainside wasn't running. (Natch.) I looked around for a bus or a taxi or even a donkey, but there was nothing, so I turned with a practised sigh and began the long trek up. It was a taxing climb, mollified by some attractive villas and sea views. The road snaked up the mountain in a series of long, lazy S-bends, but a mile or so along some steep and twisting steps had been hewn out of the undergrowth and they appeared to offer a more direct, if rather more precipitate, route to Capri town. I ventured up them. I have never seen such endless steps. They just went on and on. They were closed in by the whitewashed walls of villas on both sides and overhung by tumbling fragrant shrubs highly fetching, but after about the three-hundredth step I was gasping and sweating so much that the beauty was entirely lost on me.

Because of the irregular geography of the hillside, it always looked as if the summit might be just ahead, but then I would round a turning to be confronted by another expanse of steps and yet another receding view of the town. I stumbled on, reeling from wall to wall, gasping and wheezing, shedding saliva, watched with solemn interest by three women in black coming down the steps with the day's shopping. The only thing sustaining me was the thought that clearly I was going to be the only person tenacious enough to make the climb to Capri. Whatever lay up there was going to be mine, all mine. Eventually the houses grew closer together until they were interconnected, like blocks of Lego, and the steps became a series of steep cobbled alleyways. I pa.s.sed beneath an arch and stepped out into one of the loveliest squares I have ever seen. It was packed with German and j.a.panese tourists. The tears streamed down my cheeks.

I got a room in the Hotel Capri. 'Great name! How long did it take you to come up with it?' I asked the manager, but he just gave me that look of studied disdain that European hotel managers reserve for American tourists and other insects. I don't know why he was so snooty because it wasn't a great hotel. It didn't even have a bellboy, so the manager had to show me to my room himself, though he left me to deal with my baggage. We went up a grand staircase, where two workmen were busy dribbling a nice shade of ochre on the marble steps and occasionally putting some of it on the wall, to a tiny room on the third floor. As he was the manager, I wasn't sure whether to give him a tip, as I would a bellboy, or whether this would be an insult to his lofty position. In the event, I settled on what I thought was an intelligent compromise. I tipped him, but I made it a very small tip. He looked at it as if I had dropped a ball of lint into his palm, leading me to conclude that perhaps I had misjudged the situation. 'Maybe you'll laugh at my jokes next time,' I remarked cheerfully, under my breath, as I shut the door on him.

Capri town was gorgeous, an infinitely charming little place of villas and tiny lemon groves and long views across the bay to Naples and Vesuvius. The heart of the town was a small square, the Piazza Umberto I, lined with cream-coloured buildings and filled with tables and wicker chairs from the cafes ranged around it. At one end, up some wide steps, stood an old church, dignified and white, and at the other was a railinged terrace with an open view to the sea far below.

I cannot recall a more beguiling place for walking. The town consisted almost entirely of a complex network of white-walled lanes and pa.s.sageways, many of them barely wider than your shoulders, and all of them interconnected in a wonderfully bewildering fas.h.i.+on, so that I would constantly find myself returning unexpectedly to a spot I had departed from in an opposing direction ten minutes before. Every few yards an iron gate would be set in the wall and through it I could glimpse a white cottage in a jungle of flowery shrubs and, usually, a quarry-tiled terrace over-looking the sea. Every few yards a cross-pa.s.sageway would plunge off down the hillside or a set of steps would climb half-way to the clouds to a scattering of villas high above. I wanted every house I saw.

There were no roads at all, apart from the one leading from the harbour to the town and onward to Anacapri, on the far side of the island. Everywhere else had to be got to on foot, often after an arduous trek. Capri must be the worst place in the world to be a was.h.i.+ng-machine delivery man.

Most of the shops lay beyond the church, up the steps from the central piazza, in yet another series of lanes and little squares of unutterable charm. They all had names like Gucci and Yves St Laurent, which suggested that the summertime habitues must be rich and insufferable, but mercifully most of the shops were still not open for the season, and there was no sign of the yachting-capped a.s.sholes and bejewelled crinkly women who must make them prosper in the summer. in yet another series of lanes and little squares of unutterable charm. They all had names like Gucci and Yves St Laurent, which suggested that the summertime habitues must be rich and insufferable, but mercifully most of the shops were still not open for the season, and there was no sign of the yachting-capped a.s.sholes and bejewelled crinkly women who must make them prosper in the summer.

A few of the lanes were enclosed, like catacombs, with the upper storeys of the houses completely covering the pa.s.sageways. I followed one of these lanes now as it wandered upward through the town and finally opened again to the sky in a neighbourhood where the villas began to grow larger and enjoy more s.p.a.cious grounds. The path meandered and climbed, so much so that I grew breathless again and propelled myself onwards by pus.h.i.+ng my hands against my knees, but the scenery and setting were so fabulous that I was dragged on, as if by magnets. Near the top of the hillside the path levelled out and ran through a grove of pine trees, heavy with the smell of rising sap. On one side of the path were grand villas I couldn't imagine by what method they got the furniture there when people moved in or out and on the other was a giddying view of the island: white villas strewn across the hillsides, half buried in hibiscus and bougainvillaea and a hundred other types of shrub.

It was nearly dusk. A couple of hundred yards further on the path rounded a bend through the trees and ended suddenly, breathtakingly, in a viewing platform hanging out over a precipice of rock a little patio in the sky. It was a look-out built for the public, but I had the feeling that no one had been there for years, certainly no tourist. It was the sheerest stroke of luck that I had stumbled on it. I have never seen anything half as beautiful: on one side the town of Capri spilling down the hillside, on the other the twinkling lights of the cove at Anacapri and the houses gathered around it, and in front of me a sheer drop of what? 200 feet, 300 feet, to a sea of the lushest aquamarine was.h.i.+ng against outcrops of jagged rock. The sea was so far below that the sound of breaking waves reached me as the faintest of whispers. A sliver of moon, brilliantly white, hung in a pale blue evening sky, a warm breeze teased my hair and everywhere there was the scent of lemon, honeysuckle and pine. It was like being in the household-products section of Sainsbury's. Ahead of me there was nothing but open sea, calm and seductive, for 150 miles to Sicily. I would do anything to own that view, anything. I would sell my mother to Robert Maxwell for it. I would renounce my citizens.h.i.+p and walk across fire. I would swap hair yes! with Andrew Neil.

Just above me, I realized after a moment, overlooking this secret place was the patio of a villa set back just out of sight. Somebody did did own that view, could sit there every morning with his muesli and orange juice, in his Yves St Laurent bathrobe and Gucci slippers, and look out on this sweep of Mediterranean heaven. It occurred to me that it probably was owned by Donald Trump, or the Italian equivalent, some guy who only uses it for about two minutes a decade and then is too busy making deals and s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g people by telephone to notice the view. Isn't it strange how wealth is always wasted on the rich? And with this discouraging thought I returned to the town. own that view, could sit there every morning with his muesli and orange juice, in his Yves St Laurent bathrobe and Gucci slippers, and look out on this sweep of Mediterranean heaven. It occurred to me that it probably was owned by Donald Trump, or the Italian equivalent, some guy who only uses it for about two minutes a decade and then is too busy making deals and s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g people by telephone to notice the view. Isn't it strange how wealth is always wasted on the rich? And with this discouraging thought I returned to the town.

I had dinner in a splendid, friendly, almost empty restaurant on a back street, sitting in a window seat with a view over the sea, and had the chilling thought that I was becoming stupefied with all this ease and perfection. I began to feel that sort of queasy guilt that you can only know if you have lived among the English a terrible sense that any pleasure involving anything more than a cup of milky tea and a chocolate digestive biscuit is somehow irreligiously excessive. I knew with a profound sense of doom that I would pay for this when I got home I would have to sit for whole evenings in an icy draught and go for long tramps over wild, spongy moors and eat at a Wimpy at least twice before I began to feel even the tiniest sense of expiation. Still, at least I was feeling guilty for enjoying myself so much, and that made me feel slightly better.

It was after eight when I emerged from the restaurant, but the neighbouring businesses were still open people were buying wine and cheese, picking up a loaf of bread, even having their hair cut. The Italians sure know how to arrange things. I had a couple of beers in the Caffe Funicolare, then wandered idly into the main square. The German and j.a.panese tourists were nowhere to be seen, presumably tucked up in bed or more probably hustled back to the mainland on the last afternoon ferry. Now it was just locals, standing around in groups of five or six, chatting in the warm evening air, beneath the stars, with the black sea and far-off lights of Naples as a backdrop. It seemed to be the practice of the townspeople to congregate here after supper for a half-hour's conversation. The teenagers all lounged on the church steps, while the smaller children raced among the grown-ups' legs. Everyone seemed incredibly happy. I longed to be part of it, to live on this green island with its wonderful views and friendly people and excellent food and to stroll nightly here to this handsome square with its incomparable terrace and chat to my neighbours.

I stood off to one side and studied the dynamics of it. People drifted about from cl.u.s.ter to cl.u.s.ter, as they would at a c.o.c.ktail party. Eventually they would gather up their children and wander off home, but then others would come along. No one seemed to stay for more than half an hour, but the gathering itself went on all evening. A young man, who was obviously a newcomer to Capri, stood shyly on the fringe of a group of men, smiling at their jokes. But after a few moments he was brought into the conversation, literally pulled in with an arm, and soon he was talking away with the rest of them.

I stood there for ages, perhaps for an hour and a half, then turned and walked back towards my hotel and realized that I had fallen spectacularly, hopelessly and permanently in love with Italy.

I awoke to a gloomy day. The hillsides behind the town were obscured by a wispy haze and Naples across the bay appeared to have been taken away in the night. There was nothing but a plain of dead sea and beyond it the sort of tumbling fog that creatures from beyond the grave stumble out of in B-movies. I had intended to walk to the hilltop ruins of Tiberius's villa, where the old rascal used to have guests who displeased him hurled over the ramparts onto the rocks hundreds of feet below, but when I emerged from the hotel a cold, slicing rain was falling, and I spent the morning wandering from cafe to cafe, drinking cappuccinos and scanning the sky. Late in the morning, out of time to see the villa unless I stayed another day, which I could scarce afford to do, I checked reluctantly out of the Hotel Capri and walked down the steep and slippery steps to the quay where I purchased a ticket on a slow ferry to Naples.

Naples looked even worse after Sorrento and Capri than it had before. I walked for half a mile along the waterfront, but there was no sign of happy fishermen mending their nets and singing 'Santa Lucia', as I had fervently hoped there might be. Instead there were just menacing-looking derelicts and mountains and I mean mountains of rubbish on every corner and yet more people selling lottery tickets and trinkets from cardboard boxes.

I had no map and only the vaguest sense of the geography of the city, but I turned inland hoping that I would blunder onto some shady square lined with small but decent hotels. Surely even Naples must have its finer corners. Instead I found precisely the sort of streets that you automatically a.s.sociate with Naples mean, cavernous, semi-paved alleyways, with plaster peeling off walls and was.h.i.+ng hung like banners between balconies that never saw sunlight. The streets were full of overplump women and unattended children, often naked from the waist down, in filthy T-s.h.i.+rts.

I felt as if I had wandered onto another continent. In the centre of Naples some 70,000 families live even now in cramped ba.s.si tenements without baths or running water, sometimes without even a window, with up to fifteen members of an extended family living together in a single room. The worst of these districts, the Vicaria, where I was now, is said to have the highest population density in Europe, possibly in the world now that the Forbidden City in Hong Kong is being demolished. And it has crime to match especially the pettier crimes like car theft (29,000 in one year) and muggings. Yet I felt safe enough. No one paid any attention to me, except occasionally to give me a stray smile or, among the younger people, to shout some smart-a.s.s but not especially hostile wisecrack. I was clearly a tourist with my rucksack, and I confess I clutched the straps tightly, but there was no sign of the scippatori, the famous bag s.n.a.t.c.hers on Vespas, who doubtless sensed that all they would get was some dirty underpants, half a bar of chocolate and a tattered copy of H. V. Morton's A A Traveller in Southern Italy. Traveller in Southern Italy.

They are used to having a hard time of it in Naples. After the war, people were so hungry that they ate everything alive in the city, including all the fish in the aquarium, and an estimated third of the women took up prost.i.tution, at least part-time, just to survive. Even now the average worker in Naples earns less than half of what he would receive in Milan. But it has also brought a lot of problems on itself, largely through corruption and incompetence.

As of 1986, according to The Economist, The Economist, the city had not paid its own street-lighting bill for three years and had run up a debt of $1.1 billion. Every service in the city is constantly on the brink of collapse. It has twice as many dustmen as Milan, a bigger city, but the streets are filthy and the service is appalling. The city has become effectively ungovernable. the city had not paid its own street-lighting bill for three years and had run up a debt of $1.1 billion. Every service in the city is constantly on the brink of collapse. It has twice as many dustmen as Milan, a bigger city, but the streets are filthy and the service is appalling. The city has become effectively ungovernable.

I pa.s.sed the Ist.i.tuto Tecnico Commerciale, where a riot seemed to be in progress both inside and outside the building. Students inside were hanging out of the upstairs windows, tossing down books and papers, and holding shouted exchanges with their colleagues on the ground. Whether this was some sort of protest or merely part of the daily routine I couldn't tell. All I know is that everywhere I went there was rubbish and pandemonium people shouting, horns honking, ambulances bleating.

After Capri the din and filth were hard to take. I walked and walked and it never got any better. I found the main shopping street, the Via Roma, and though the shops were generally smart, it was thronged with people and litter and all but impossible to walk along without stepping down off the pavement and into the edge of the lunatic traffic. Not once did I see a hotel that looked as if its beds were occupied for more than twenty minutes at a time.