At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  Of course, your impression is superficial. There are other sides to it. There are marked differences in the character of the Italian regions, and especially between the north and the south of Italy. In Genoa you are in the relatively flourishing, money-minded, businesslike north. Here people say, “This is not like the rest of Italy. This is like London or Rotterdam, a place of serious people—bankers, merchants and shippers, steel mills, docks.” And indeed the weight of the commercial buildings does suggest the northern gravity. The city, especially in the dock area, was badly damaged in the war, but that has been put right now. The new elevated highways, the armies of cranes over the harbor and the mills, the big ships blowing in the harbor, the banks and shipping offices, establish that commerce comes first here.

  The competition with Marseilles is constantly in the port’s mind. The Genoese weigh their disadvantages and advantages. The first disadvantage is obvious. Shut in by high mountains, the city is like flights of stairs cut out of rock. It cannot spread far backward; it has been forced to stretch for twenty miles of suburb along the narrow shelf of the coast. It has no great navigable river. It is near the Alps, without a natural route through them. There can be no water traffic with central Europe. Everything has to go by train through the Alpine tunnels. And it is only with great difficulty and huge expense that the harbor can be enlarged. The advantage is the industrial and mineral wealth of the hinterland: behind Genoa are Milan, the most vigorous up-to-the-minute city in southern Europe, a place of millionaire manufacturers, and Turin, with its Detroit just outside, pumping its little Fiat cars into Italy, the rest of Europe, Africa and even across the Atlantic. The density of cars on the road in Italy, at any rate around the cities, must be one of the highest in Europe.

  Fortunate Genoa. It is commercially and industrially rich, yet in the nineteenth century industrialism did not destroy its character. The city is piled up into its steep hills, so the ground floor of one street is at roof level of the one below. The colors are gentle, soft saffrons and pinks and pale greens in the old city, and in the new one they are still not garish. The city is pierced by road tunnels—the Italians have had to be the world’s great tunnelers—and one seems to be passing from one town to another as one whizzes through them. Genoa is cooled by arcades. It has gateways that suggest a late-medieval city, and old merchant palaces that remind one that it was one of the great city-states. Historians tell us that when Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain deported the Jews, they called in the Genoese bankers, who were far harder than the Jews in their dealings. Columbus, who was born in this city, was a hard bargainer; he was a trader before he was a seaman.

  Great seaports are liberal and independent in spirit. Foreign trade civilizes. Populations mix. People are accessible.

  I used to go and call on the editor of a newspaper in Genoa.

  “What is the character of the Genoese?” I asked him once.

  “Like Londoners,” he said. “Except that here everything is run by interrelated families. But if they tell you the Genoese are interested only in money and not in the arts—deny it, I beg you.” There is no need to. Genoa has its superb palaces.

  “The essence of the Genoese,” he went on, “is, first, pride, then independence, liberality and love of work.”

  The great wooden shutters of the editor’s room—he was an old man— were drawn, and in the cool semigloom he sat at a table covered with pamphlets. He had a deep, gentle voice and a sun-cracked skin, and he wore an open-necked casual shirt. “Pride,” he repeated. “Mazzini was born here, Garibaldi’s father was from Genoa. The Risorgimento, the liberation of Italy, began here.”

  The good restaurants of Genoa are hidden away down side alleys. They are not infested with musicians. You enter by the kitchen and you see the whole family, maybe three generations, working there, with the oldest woman at the cash desk, with the voice of authority. You are in a large room, without any show, where the businessmen order enormous quantities of food, choosing their fish or their pasta or meat from the dish or spit, saying exactly how they want it done. (But a Genoese won’t cook, say, in the Florentine fashion; he will direct you to a Florentine restaurant for that—pityingly.) Italian food has no great art but it relies, as the people do, on the fresh natural taste of things. In fact, if the Italians of the Mediterranean have the art of living, it is because they live openly, simply, immediately, naturally. Whatever may be going on secretly in their lives, they have outwardly the art of appearing smiling and pleasing on the stage of life.

  There is a narrow street, a kind of alley, that wanders for a long distance across the city just above the dock quarter. It must have been one of the old main streets. You go steeply down and are suddenly—as you seem so often to be in Italy—in the whole of life. There are the lively little shops, the bars, the churches, and down the street stroll the respectably dressed-up women and their children, walking severely past the prostitutes smoking at the doorways or the priests on their way into the church. The gamblers pitch their little tables on which they do their card tricks. These always fascinate men and children, even those who know each trick inside and out. Patiently they watch, in suddenly acquired naïveté, which they can instantly conceal if a real customer comes along. A pretty girl goes by with her basket and every man turns and studies her body, and she shows it off with pleasure. They shout admiringly at her, they pinch her, they put an arm round her. She is never cross, but she evades neatly, laughing. Who is she? The girl from the cakeshop, no doubt. Nearby men, with no commercial sense, are standing four or five together trying to sell transistor radios. If naval vessels arrive, there is a sudden rush to sell enormous dolls to the sailors. It is far from being an innocent street, but it is well mannered.

  And then, rich and poor Genoese have the superb coast to play with. The small and the grand bays of the Gulf of Genoa are at your door. For tens of miles, the buses, cars and motorbikes charge noisily down the winding corniche, twisting around promontories that stick out into the dazing sea, roaring over gorges, looping round deep valleys, banging past the dusty walls that seem to topple under flowers. The hills are made of villas all the way to Rapallo. Dozens of little launches lie at Santa Margherita, to go across the bay to the fantastic little hothouse cove of Portofino, where the yachts of the film stars and the millionaires are gaped at by the factory workers of Manchester, Düsseldorf, Lille and Turin.

  The Mediterraneans of Genoa may be southerners to us, but they are northerners to themselves. Severe, hard-headed, hard-working, active, businesslike people—even harsh and puritanic; that is how they see themselves. They deny that they are actors. The actors, they say contemptuously, are in the real south, in Naples, Calabria and Sicily, the Italy that is poor, ignorant and, in religion, childishly superstitious. This is right, up to a point. Naples is a city given over entirely to the histrionic. It is theater in every gesture, in every yard of pavement. It is a very Spanish city, for it was long a Spanish kingdom, and its sense of theater has a lot in common with the theatrical strain in Seville.

  The stage setting is notoriously spectacular. The whole world knows the famous view and never tires of beauty that seems ever to renew itself. There is Vesuvius (silent for years now, almost a comic friend to be greeted) at one corner of the bay, and below it the vineyards and orchards and carefully tended market gardens that grow on the rich volcanic soil. The walls, even of the houses, are masses of lava rock. The city rises in terraces over the steep hills between Vesuvius and the massive castle at Santa Lucia, and then sweeps for miles along the boldly balustraded seafront in avenues of palms, to rise to Posilipo, to sink to little sea towns like Pozzuoli, and to rise again, sweetly smelling of herbs and myrtles, to Greek Cumae, the Lake of Avernus, the world of Parthenope and Ulysses. From the city one looks out on the Apennines hanging in the haze above the close orange and lemon groves of Sorrento, and before us Capri is cut out like a blue cardboard stage piece. The heat is moist, the honeyed air hangs on the body, the sea is glazed and almost silky wh
ite. Energy seeps away.

  Coming in from the airport, one is struck by the steepness of the hills, the scale of the buildings. The famous ones are immense and massive, with high, cool halls; the whine of the air conditioner is rare. In old Naples, the streets are narrow and the houses very tall, and it must be said that the city is brownish, yellowish and ugly in color when you are below; though from above, it is roofed in terra-cotta tiles and broken into livelier yellows and whites. It looks dusty, dry, gritty and wearying. It has some horrible, ugly fountains and an out-of-date bourgeois pretentiousness in its nineteenth-century avenues. The dramatic things are its monasteries on the cliffs in the middle of the city, its well-placed palaces and its barnlike churches, great crumbling and peeling gorgonzolas of baroque and rococo.

  But it is the human swarm that is the real sight of the city. When one asks what Naples does, one has to say that it makes people. It has certainly exported them to the United States and the Argentine by the hundreds of thousands. And here we come to anti-Neapolitanism. From Victorian times until the end of the war, perhaps still, Naples has been regarded as one of the sinks of Europe. The seat of a kingdom, it has never been governed and it is said to be ungovernable. Its poverty is notorious. The washing that hangs across the poor streets was a favorite subject for painters of picturesque squalor. Its sexual immorality, its beggars, its thieves and pickpockets, its propensity to cheat, and its crimes are famous. Shelley called it “the metropolis of a ruined Paradise.” At the end of the last war, after the city had been badly bombed, the spectacle of hunger, of begging children, was terrible. A lump of sugar, a crust, a pomegranate were snatched feverishly from one’s table.

  But in the last twenty years there have been notable changes. The bombs cleared long stretches of the dock-area slums. Industry has moved down from the north to make up for the losses of a not very flourishing port. NATO has a base there, and this is responsible, alas, for the ruin of Posilipo, once a hill of orchards and gardens but now a terrace of ultramodern apartment houses inhabited by the American colony and the rich property speculators who have made fortunes all over the Mediterranean. The mass of people are obviously just a little better off, and if one were to judge by the tens of thousands of Fiats driving round and round the city like so many beetles, all day and all night, by the swarms of motor bicycles and the noise, one would say that more people shared in the city’s wealth than before. I saw only one beggar on my last visit to Naples, and she was a gypsy. There was no begging down in those amusing restaurants by the harbor at Santa Lucia. The farcical collection of violinists and singers there kept up their soulful or roguish antics as usual and seemed even prosperous. I’m afraid Neapolitan food is not very good as a rule, and when it is, it is never hot enough. The waiters are so frantically caught up in private dramas that they dash about, leaving your dish to go tepid.

  It is said that thieving on the crowded buses has declined—however, I did have to give a sudden twist one day to get a man’s hand out of my jacket pocket. There was nothing in it. His face was superbly blank. They say that matters improved after bus drivers were obliged to drive all their passengers to a police station if anyone cried “pickpocket.” At this, the brilliant Neapolitan pickpocket could be relied on to slip your wallet back without your knowing it, so that at the police station the passengers would fall on you for raising a false alarm.

  I like to think such tales are true; if they are not, they are perfectly in accord with the Neapolitan temperament, which delights in intrigue and the tit for tat of farce. A foreign dealer in ceramics, to whom I had said that Neapolitans are born rascals, replied, “They go far beyond that. They are criminals. But you mustn’t be morally indignant. They love it when you see through them and laugh admiringly, indeed affectionately.” This upsets the rigid moralist. An old cab driver once doubled my fare and gave an explanation so farcical that my wife and I burst into laughter. He was delighted. We had caught him. He could hardly stand for laughing, and indeed put his arms around our shoulders to support himself. We rocked together, and for two pins we would all have kissed one another.

  The fact is that a Neapolitan cannot resist making little plays. At Santa Lucia the tourist is pestered by peddlers of watches, fountain pens, photographs, tortoise shell and flowers. The tourist becomes exasperated and indignant. He even shouts and waves his arms angrily. But during the lunch hour, when the streets are empty, I have seen two peddlers amusing themselves by acting the tourist-peddler comedy to pass the time: one takes the part of the tourist; the other pesters. They imitate us! The accuracy of observant mockery is brilliant.

  In the narrow streets of Naples you see the whole of life with little or no protective veil over it. Sometimes there are terrible primitive scenes, cose all’italiana: a madman rushes screaming down the street; children stop their play and run after him, throwing stones at him. Their mothers come excitedly to the doors to watch. At night cripples come out like injured insects to take the air. There may be refuse in the streets, but the houses are clean. The women have a passion for laundering. You learn to look at the cobbles as you walk under the lines of washing, for there you can see which sheets are dripping and so avoid them. A lot of life goes on on the balconies; people talk and shout from one balcony to another.

  The family’s only room contains decent furniture—a couple of double beds, a dining table and chairs—and is also the workshop of some small trade. First thing in the morning the chairs are put on the table, to make room, and will stay there until mealtime comes. The family is large. Perhaps three generations will live together. All the events of life take place before all eyes: copulation, childbirth, illness and death. As you pass by you will see a sick man in bed, a woman ironing or sewing; or a family eating while, in a bed within reach, the wax-faced, toothless grandmother is drinking her bowl of soup. Once the meal is over, everyone goes out into the street.

  In the evening, when the dead heat goes, and late in the night, the doorsteps are crowded. The birds that were twittering in their cages outside almost every window during the day are silent. The candles on the innumerable shrines twinkle. And everyone shouts what he has to say. No one is drunk in the south of Italy. They have more excitement in their blood than alcohol could ever give them.

  Naples is Greek, Roman, French and Spanish. Some say the intensity of facial expression is purely Grecian. If you stand in the Galleria, that central arcade near the Opera House, and watch the crowd of men who stand there in a large knot, talking so loudly that one seems to have come to some Bourse at the peak hour of buying and selling, you notice the individuality of the faces and gestures. They are astonishing. I watched two men talking in a café here, and their gestures were so extraordinary—a finger to the eye, the temple, the nose, the palm of a hand, fingers flickering, a hand on the heart, clenched hands, wrung hands, circles made by thumb and finger—that at first I supposed they were dumb and that this was sign language. But they were in fact talking.

  What is that crowd of men in the Galleria talking about hour after hour, every day? It is their club. Or, as some say, it’s the labor exchange. They are looking for a job. The prostitutes are around the corner. Do you want a girl? Do you want to buy something, see the museum? What do you want? Essentially, they are looking for what is called a “combination.” You do not buy a house or a lorry, you do not make a straight deal. You enter innumerable personal intrigues, working from person to person, bribing, obtaining the ear of someone, trying the back door. Dozens of people gather around your enterprise, to be in it or to obstruct. The financial corruption of Naples, the collapse of any kind of government, springs from this “big flea and little flea” system. The failure of government has created a vacuum that has been filled by the church, which, in Naples, is completely identified with the childlike, even playful fantasies of the mass of people. They passionately like to be distracted and amused. Life is bitterly hard. For historical reasons, what northerners call society does not exist. There has been no strong middle c
lass. All but one of the university professors I wanted to see were never there; they spent half their time at other universities. To live they have to “combine.”

  The fact is that Naples simply exaggerates what has been general in Italy. The state is weak. Law is unreliable, money and justice are hard to come by. Two thousand years of history have been savage. The Italian, therefore, puts all his faith in the family: the interests of the family come first. Nepotism becomes the supreme virtue. Family comes before the police, the courts, even public opinion and private conscience—according to Luigi Barzini in his brilliant book, The Italians. On this last point I can cite the case of an English doctor who had a small motor accident in Italy. If he had not had the presence of mind to get out of his car quickly and take several photographs of the two cars, his case would have been lost. For the rival motorist gathered a formidable group of “eyewitnesses”: several of them came from twenty miles away, and all of them turned out to be his relatives. The defense is that the family is the only secure thing in an unstable state. The general hostility to divorce is not religious—even the Communists oppose divorce. It is sad that individuals suffer, but we are not in this world for the pleasure of romantic love. We are here to beget children and survive. The family must not be weakened; if it is, money, property, jobs, status, all are jeopardized.

  This doctrine gives great power to women in a country where they have little apparent liberty. Yet as the south “organizes itself”—that is to say, as it comes into the late-twentieth-century world—the family tends to break up. Jobs change. Children scatter. People defy the divorce laws. The young assert themselves. In the industrial north the family system has been shaken. The Neapolitan is alarmed. The outward face of Naples itself has changed enormously in the last twenty-five years. How can the inner life not change too?

  They say the sun, the curiously corroding climate—which takes away the power of concentration and saps the will, so that one lives for the moment only—will preserve the ancient Mediterranean habit of thought and feeling. I do not want to convey the impression that Naples is picturesque. It is not. It is ugly, harsh and horrifying. Yet such is the expressiveness and vitality of the people, they seem superior in looks, in human dignity and intelligence, to the stunned slum populations of Liverpool or New York.