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,