The moon’s reflection glistened on the inky bay as the midnight blue Lancia sat at a lonely red light. The night was quiet, the air thick with the scent of bougainvillea. A buzzing Vespa punctured the silence and pulled alongside, its teenage rider inching forward on his toes to get a closer look at the car’s UK plates. At this point my father noticed the pistol strapped to the boy’s waist, and with his right hand immediately rolled up the driver’s side window. This was my parents’ inauspicious introduction to Naples, on a sweltering and sultry night forty-five years ago. It was their last summer without children, but they recalled details from the trip so frequently over the years that it sometimes feels as though I was there. In a way I was: my mother was four months pregnant at the time.
They had driven down from England with another couple, the brother of one half of whom was engaged to a young woman from Naples named Concetta. She and her fiancé were back in England, but her family were still more than happy to host their future brother-in-law and his wife, plus their friends in the form of my mum and dad, lending truth to the stereotype of southern Italian hospitality.
My parents stayed at Concetta’s grandma’s apartment which was opposite that of her own parents, in a four-storey building near the water. It was surrounded by near-identical buildings divided by gardens abundant with plum tomato plants, the fruit from which went straight into the daily sugo. Every couple of days a man selling vegetables from a cart made the rounds, and would replenish a basket lowered from the balcony by Concetta’s mother, Giovanna.
Food occupied a considerable portion of the Naples experience. Every day Giovanna prepared epic dinners that ran late into the night. My dad used to remember how just as it seemed the meal was ending, several more courses would arrive from the kitchen. Though the food kept coming, Giovanna didn’t eat any of it. Instead she just watched from the doorway, a cigarette in one hand, while intermittently poking her cheek with the knuckle of the other as if to say, “Buono, vero?”
On one such evening Concetta’s younger brother arrived home from a “notte brava” wearing a peaked cap which had, until recently, belonged to the uniform of some unlucky officer from the carabinieri. He then proceeded to sport it around the house at a jaunty angle.
On another evening Giovanna was granted a night off, and instead they all ate at a waterfront pizzeria. The best in town, apparently, not that four young English people would have known the difference in 1978 (or even today). In the early hours they repaired to the home of another relative — Uncle Rosario — where more local specialties awaited. To this day my mum can still recall the dual challenge of struggling to finish arancini while also trying to stay awake.
When they weren’t seated at a large marble table my parents and their friends were being shown around the city by their exemplary hosts. They were also taken on a boat trip to the nearby island of Capri. On their last day they drove to the foot of Mount Vesuvius, from where you could take an old wooden train towards the Gran Cono at the summit. As the train ascended, my mum stood holding a metal pole while gazing out the window at the Gulf of Naples gradually coming into view. Suddenly, she felt a strange sensation in her stomach, almost like butterflies. But it wasn’t vertigo that was causing this new feeling, nor the breathtaking panorama. It was me.
Having been subjected to the overwhelming sounds and smells (if not yet sights) of Naples over several days, evidently I couldn’t take it anymore, and using my tiny body did my best to make my presence felt. The incident became a running joke in my house growing up: that I loved Italy so much I knew it before I was even born. Of course that isn’t true — I highly doubt these were conscious decisions on my part — but in some subconscious way I’d perhaps recognised my spiritual home.
* * *
When I eventually (and reluctantly) emerged five months later it was on a snowy night in Nottingham. I’ve often maintained I was born in the wrong place, half-joking. The half that isn’t joking soon decided to do something about it, and from the age of about twelve I began imagining one day living in Italy. It was a fantasy that later became a plan, in great part thanks to several trips I’d already made there. On those early holidays we drove everywhere and stayed in Siena, Rome and Venice, but my parents never returned to Naples, despite my frequent suggestions. As a young football fan discovering the allure of calcio, Naples seemed a natural destination since it’s where both Maradona and Careca played at the time. I still remember cheap knock-offs of the team’s blue shirts (emblazoned with the ‘Mars’ sponsor) hanging from bancarelle outside the Uffizi. More importantly, I found Naples appealing because it represented what were already, for me, three of the key attractions of city life, all depressingly absent from small town Leicestershire: heat, beauty and danger. In my impressionable head at least, Naples exuded these in abundance. Instead, during idle moments elsewhere in Italy I amused myself by reading aloud from an already outdated and dog-eared copy of a Michelin guide that my parents kept in the door of their Renault. This particular edition had been published in 1971, but could have been written a century earlier: “The Neapolitans are small and dark, with almost Grecian profiles.”
In 1989 my dad (who was a high school art teacher) started running an exchange with a liceo in Borgo San Lorenzo, a small town in the Mugello, a picturesque valley a few miles north of Florence. Through the success of the programme he made friends with several Italian colleagues, one of whom was an English professoressa named Bibi. That was only a nickname. Her given name was Fortunata. But everyone called her Bibi so we did too. Not even five feet tall, she was probably almost sixty when I first met her, but already seemed older (I remember being surprised that her mother, who lived in the adjacent apartment, was still alive). Bibi had been born in the same town but had moved to Naples as a small child, later studying languages at the university. She lived in Genoa, Milan and England in the sixties before returning to Borgo in 1973. By the time we encountered her she owned her entire building, whose unforgettable address was Via Leonardo da Vinci. The cold marble floors and gilded chandeliers of Bibi’s ground floor apartment would, in time, become as familiar to me as the electric fireplace in my own grandmother’s bungalow.
We stayed with Bibi every summer until I was nineteen. My brother and I slept in the living room on a leather “Anfibio” sofa bed (designed by Alessandro Becchi in 1972). During my degree I spent a year studying in Pavia, and after graduating from university moved back to Italy. By this point Bibi’s mother had died, and she kindly offered to host me while I looked for an apartment and a job in Florence. Having recently retired, Bibi had taken in a small but hyperactive black cat whom she’d christened Cholmondeley, after a character in some old novel. Bibi now rarely left the house unless absolutely necessary, and her reclusive nature only seemed to enhance her legend around town, as if she were a forgotten star from the golden age of cinema.
For several years Bibi had employed a woman named Tina to keep the apartment clean and cook her meals, duties that soon expanded to include laundry, grocery shopping, and any other errand that might arise (and they often did). Tina was in her thirties, and married without children. She was also from Naples, and just like Bibi, also went by a nickname. Her actual name was Immacolata, a somewhat burdensome moniker for anyone born in the past century. (Before Tina, Bibi’s housekeeper was a tall, elegant woman from Somalia called Lula — who knows if that was her real name.)
Tina arrived at the apartment every morning around ten, usually with several bags from the supermarket in tow, which she’d begin unloading in the kitchen before lighting a cigarette. Lunch was served at one o’clock and dinner at eight, a precise schedule designed to coincide with both editions of the telegiornale on Canale 5, whose dramatic intro theme served as a cue for Tina to drain the pasta. Bibi’s hearing had begun to wane, to the extent that the volume of the television could prohibit meaningful conversation. On the evenings I returned for dinner after an aperitivo with friends, I remember being able to hear la tivù blaring TG5 from down the street.
Bibi ate very little. What she did eat she’d wash down from a fiasco of Vernaccia, which she’d dilute from a jug of water, probably since she’d already enjoyed her pre-dinner staple: a tumbler of Punt e Mes without ice. Perhaps to compensate Tina heaped vast servings of pasta into my bowl, sometimes twice in one day. Her culinary repertoire didn’t veer far from the neapolitan classics, which was absolutely fine by me. In the spring she’d make pastiera, the famous Easter cake, which I considered her specialty. Tina had Sundays off, and so would often leave a large dish of pasta al forno for Bibi and me in the fridge, complete with heating instructions. If not, I cooked for the two of us myself.
Behind the dining table was a large dresser. Amid the antique silver dishes and floral vases sat an incongruous straw donkey, around whose neck hung a blue pennant with a large letter ‘N’ on it. Bibi still followed Napoli from afar, and every Sunday evening used to ask me their result: “Cos’ha fatto il Napoli?” Unfortunately the once champions of Italy were languishing in Serie B at the time, and without the internet I often had to wait until I’d picked up La Gazzetta the next morning before I could break the often disappointing news.
Bibi and Tina made quite the pair, constantly teasing and bickering like an old married couple, while each complaining about the other to me in private. You would never have known they’d grown up in the same city. Bibi spoke the closest thing to a true Italian with an academic precision, regularly stepping in to correct me when I misgendered a noun or fluffed a passato remoto conjugation. She devoured books in English (my mum regularly sent her the latest fiction) and liked to ask me to explain peculiar idioms she’d stumbled upon. We used to watch a nightly game show called Passaparola and light-hearted drama series such as Il Maresciallo Rocca or Elisa di Rivombrosa. On the other hand, Tina’s broad accent was sometimes difficult for me to understand, and her speech was peppered with dialectal phrases in napoletano. In the afternoons we’d often watch MTV together while Bibi napped.
I only planned to be at Bibi’s for a couple of weeks. I ended up staying five months. After I moved to Florence I’d return for lunch about once a month, and I could tell Bibi missed having me there. That this unlikely friendship would be born from a cultural exchange programme was appropriate. Italy was like a beautiful shop window against whose glass my nose had been pressed for years. Bibi’s generosity had flung open the doors, after which there was no turning back.
* * *
I stayed in Florence for four years, but aside from the occasional day trip or a couple of weekends out of town I never had extra money to travel. By the time I saw Naples for the first time I was living in New York. My wife and I drove there on the A3 autostrada from the Amalfi Coast, where we were staying in a bed and breakfast in Ravello. I didn’t drive at the time, so my wife was the one to navigate the city’s notorious traffic, though it was during daylight hours and thankfully we didn’t cross any armed delinquents on two wheels.
We strolled down Via Toledo, through Galleria Umberto I, stopped for a coffee at Gambrinus, wandered Piazza del Plebiscito, admired the graffiti and hanging laundry lines off Via Lungo del Gelso, stumbled over mounds of refuse on Via Chiaia, and ate lunch at Pizzeria Brandi. Walking down Via Cesario Console towards the bay we saw Vesuvius looming in the distance, so we stopped at Via Nazario Sauro to take a photo across the water. I’d expected to feel something, some sort of ethereal but undeniable connection to a city that had grown mythical in my mind over time, precisely by virtue of never having been there. But I felt nothing in particular, and quickly realised I had no special connection to Naples, besides one inconsequential anecdote that happened before I was even born. I was now older than my mother had been when she felt me kick (or roll over) for the first time. After thirty-two years I was just another tourist.
Like many famous non-capital port cities — Liverpool, Hamburg, Barcelona, New York — Naples sits apart from the rest of the country. It is a country unto itself, and its unique “otherness” is undoubtedly part of its fascination, especially to foreigners. Naples may always remain a subject of ridicule and abuse among many northern Italians, but outside Italy, its image has perhaps never been healthier. Today Naples exists for me through the music of Pino Daniele, the films of Giuseppe Sorrentino, or the novels of Elena Ferrante. From the comfort of my own home I’ve watched Luciano Spalletti’s Napoli side gallop to the cusp of the club’s third scudetto, and whether it’s a candlelit shrine to Diego Maradona or a cat dozing alongside a leather-skinned fisherman, social media projects the best of Naples. It’s an excess of content in more vivid detail than I could have hoped to consume thirty years ago, and though I’m writing this from a distance of some 4,000 miles, Naples somehow feels closer than ever. But while the mystique it once held for me has been finally stripped bare, it remains forever out of reach. It’s not exactly a return to the womb, but you might say I’m back where I started.
This article originally appeared on The Culture Division.