THE CLOSER our tour bus got to Naples, the denser and more maddening the traffic became. The autostrada was a mess, as small trucks refused to yield enough space for a large bus to change lanes, and cars darted in and out erratically without signalling (an infraction that should be punishable by death, in my opinion). How the bus driver managed it without becoming unhinged was a mystery to me. Traffic around Naples, I had been warned, is the worst in the country, perhaps on the planet, and the unanimous advice—from friends, guidebooks, television programs, and newspaper reports— had been to avoid Naples like the plague.
The traffic wasn’t the only drawback.
“Don’t go to Naples,” an Italian friend had told me. “If you do, be careful. Neapolitans are always out to screw you.”
With a ringing endorsement like that, I had without a smidgen of regret nixed Naples from our travel plans.
“It’s too bad we’re not going to Naples,” pouted Mom, looking beyond the gridlocked traffic and suicidal driving habits in front of us.
“It’s a dangerous place,” I told her.
“Nonsense,” she scoffed.
Uh oh. I knew what was coming. She was going to try and wheedle a trip to Naples out of me.
Before she could open her mouth I managed to divert her attention with a loud “Whoa! Did you see that?” as the bus driver deftly nosed his shiplike vehicle into a four-foot opening in the bumper-to-bumper log jam, bypassing the mayhem and hitting the accelerator.
I suppose you have to expect traffic like this in a place where 6 million people live in the most unstable volcanic area on the planet (second place goes to Sicily’s Mount Etna) and where the evacuation plan states quite plainly that it can only reasonably save 600,000 of them. In other words, if the Gulf of Naples is the epicenter of volcanic disaster, it is also the epicenter of denial.
Back in Roman times, folks who lived in the vicinity of Vesuvius had no idea their mountain was a luxuriant forested bomb. All they saw was a staggeringly impressive landmark:
Before its infamous eruption, Vesuvius measured about 6,500 feet; today it is just over 4,000 feet, having literally blown its head off more than fifty times since the Big One in ad 79.
In AD 62 an earthquake had rumbled through these parts, an early warning signal for what was to come, but back then people didn’t know about earthquakes. They went about their daily life unaware of the magma huffing and puffing beneath the surface, until August 24, ad 79, when the pressure came to a terrifying climax just as everyone was polishing off their pastrami sandwiches and preparing to bed down for siesta.
The eruption first manifested itself as a silent, gigantic ash column four miles high, resembling a nuclear mushroom cloud. Then, with a massive deafening boom—representing the power of three atomic bombs—it tore away a mile-long stretch of one side of the mountain and unleashed a ferocious combination of fireworks, bubbling mud, poison gas, lava, white-hot stones, and ash. Many of the townspeople bolted for the caves along the shoreline and the lower levels of their homes to wait out the storm.
Over the next twelve hours pumice and ash rained down on the city of Pompeii and the nearby seaside resort of Herculaneum. When it stopped, both places had disappeared from the face of the earth, and the coastline around Naples had been totally reconfigured. Lava covered everything and had consumed almost all of the towns’ 25 ,000 people. So profound was the horror of this event that no attempt was ever made to rebuild either town; they were left as graveyards.
In the late 18th century, archaeologists accidentally discovered Herculaneum and Pompeii under about eighty feet of ash and stone—roughly the height of a four-storey building. Today the two sites compose the most fascinating tourist attractions anywhere, not so much because of the ruins, which are rather incredible, but because of the way tour guides talk about “the eruption of ’79” like it was 1979.
Our bus rolled into the parking lot and deposited us smack-dab in the midst of a raft of souvenir stalls that jammed the entrance to the ruins of Pompeii.
“Do you think you can manage this?” I asked Mom skeptically as we regarded the long walk from the parking lot to the ruins proper.
“I’ll see how far I can get with my walker,” she said calmly.
“If it gets difficult I’ll just turn around and come back here.
You go on ahead.”
We were each given a headset and a small receiver that could pick up our tour guide’s patter as we surged through antiquity.
“I don’t want to listen to anyone,” said Mom, handing the headset back to me. “I just want to look.”
She made it as far as the entrance to the first attraction, the small, thousand-seat Odeon. She scanned the theater’s ruins, gave me a been-there-done-that look, pointed her walker in the direction of the coach parking lot and the souvenir kiosks, and toddled off.
As our tour group moved to the colonnaded remains of Pompeii’s gymnasium, our guide suddenly raised her arm for silence and gave me a puzzled look.
“Where is your mother?” her booming voice crackled through the receivers and headsets.
“Don’t worry about her,” I replied buoyantly, in an effort to make nice after my earlier tirade. “She travels at her own pace.”
All heads in the group swiveled toward me and emitted the sort of glare reserved for child abusers and death-camp commandants. I used the next few moments to become engrossed in the contents of my purse until the group moved off to consider my punishment.
We shuffled through bathhouses; we saw bake ovens and frescoes, chariot-rutted roads, and roadside tabernae and thermopolia (the Roman equivalent of fast-food joints). There were gracious homes with atria and tidy courtyards with wells, fountains, and chapels. Mosaics and intricate tile work framed gardens, doorways, and pools. A plethora of sculptures, bronzes, and friezes testified to the importance and proliferation of art and architecture in Pompeii. It really was a remarkable place.
The city was also prolific when it came to sex. The Aussie I had met the day before in the Sorrento gelateria had been right: Pompeii had quite the booming brothel trade. The brothel we toured, the Lupanare (sex wolves, anyone?) had ten rooms on two floors, each kitted out with a single stone bed. That couldn’t have been comfortable. The front hall was decorated with a series of colorful frescoes that, upon closer inspection, revealed explicit advertisements for the various services this particular establishment offered. Would you prefer your sex doggie-style? Standing? Crouching? Missionary? Perhaps a little fellatio with your threesome?
While the others in our tour group obediently filed upstairs to check out the other rooms, I hung back and studied the frescoes, tallying my personal expertise and wondering whether prostitution would have been a suitable career path for me.
After two hours our group circled back to the parking lot. I spied Mom trolling the souvenir stalls. She did not look happy.
“This is a very dirty place,” she scowled at me with disapproval. “They have posters and statues of a man with a very long, um . . . ”
“Penis?” I asked, picking up a small statue of Priapus from one of the souvenir tables. All around us were posters, key fobs, pens, calendars, statues of every size of Priapus and his impressive organ.
“Oh, it’s disgusting,” she said, shaking her head and scrunching up her nose.
“You could give these to the ladies in your bridge club,” I teased. “They’d appreciate this kind of souvenir, don’t you think?”
“Really! What an awful thing to suggest,” she snorted. “Put it down.”
My eye fell on a series of fridge magnets replicating the erotic brothel scenes I had admired earlier. I collect interesting fridge magnets during my travels, and these would have been perfect. But Mom was hovering. If she caught me buying them there would be no end to her nagging about how such a purchase was indicative of my moral decline.
“Actually,” I began, still holding the statue of Priapus and adopting a scholarly look, “There’s an interesting s
tory here. This guy was the Greek god of fertility for . . . ”
“Oh really, Jane.”
Mom spun around her walker, f licked her head, and marched away.
After lunch—and it would have been a good pizza had the rain not intercepted it during the waiter’s journey to our al fresco table—the tour bus took off for Vesuvius. Clouds the color of gunmetal moved stealthily across the sky.
Turning into an upscale residential area, our bus followed a paved, tree-lined road upward and ever upward. My ears popped several times during the ascent, while Mom remained resolutely still, eyes closed, as the hulking bus rounded hairpin turns. Mom is not a fan of heights. I tried to interest her in the dense pine forests that lined the road opposite the sheer cliff or in the profusion of broom that appeared to be mere weeks away from blooming into its distinctive yellow flowers. She refused to open her eyes.
Gradually the bucolic green gave way to a barren moonscape of gray, black, and brown, where thick, dark ropes of lava from the last eruption, in 194 4 , had cooled into shapes that resembled massive pythons rippling beneath the surface of the earth. Craggy, misshapen rocks lay exhausted on a landscape that had been battered and beaten to within an inch of its life.
“If you want to see the crater you will have to hike to it— it will take about a half hour—and it will cost you an extra six euros,” announced the guide as the bus pulled into an almost empty parking lot.
I leaped out of my seat. A long walk was precisely what I needed.
“You’re going?” gasped Mom, grabbing my arm. “Don’t fall in!”
I was the first off the bus and strode excitedly toward the entrance gate. At the turnstile I looked behind me to see how many of my fellow busmates were also taking the challenge.
Not one. I could not believe it. I was about to stomp back to chastise the lot of them when two figures morosely descended from the bus. I think their spouses had shamed them into it.
I paid my entrance fee and set off through thick fog on a barren path of reddish-brown dirt that, as I could faintly make out, switched back and forth to the summit.
It was a spooky walk. Occasionally the ominous silence was broken by the skittering of small pumice rock. I picked up a few pieces and stuffed them into my coat pocket as souvenirs.
I passed groups of young teenagers on a school trip, wearing the bored, blasé expression of a generation that requires constant stimulation. It is a sad day when you cannot get kids excited about walking up the side of a volcano. This particular group was milling around a rest stop braying for Cokes. Please, God, I muttered, let the volcano burp right now. God wisely ignored my supplication.
Before I knew it I had reached the top and the gaping crater. Bulbous, gnarly rocks had risen haphazardly around the perimeter. Through wispy threads of fog I spied a few patches of snow on the floor of the crater—a good sign, I reasoned.
I imagined the site in full explosion—angry blasts of lava, rocks being hurtled in every direction, the roar of the eruption. It reminded me of past arguments with my mother. And now here it was, dried out, benign, exhausted.
It is not readily apparent when you visit the crater, especially in inclement weather, but Vesuvius is heavily monitored by the Osservatorio Vesuviano in Naples. Seismic measuring stations, gps and satellite imaging, ground-measurement radar, and chemical analysis of the gases arising from the fumaroles and vents are all used to track magma activity. This information would at least give people a head start in case Vesuvius wakes up.
Scientists figure Vesuvius is having a fifty-year rest, which means it is somewhat overdue to blow. Time to dust off the evacuation plan, although that is little consolation. The plan states that it would take a week to ten days to evacuate the entire population in and around Naples. Well, that sealed my decision: There was no way we were going into Naples.
“A week seems like a long time when you consider how much Vesuvius destroyed in just half a day back in ’79,” I said to our young tour guide once we were back on board the bus.
“They are trying to get people to move out of the zona rossa, the red zone—the area around the mountain,” she said. “They have offered them money to leave.”
“And do they take it?” I asked as our coach descended from the desolate summit and reentered the leafy, placid life of the world at sea level.
“Not many do. People are stubborn here,” she said with an apologetic smile and that Neapolitan shrug that conveys, “What can you do about it?”
The participants of the Second International Conference on Early Warning in 2003 decided to get busy on improvements to the evacuation plan. “The final objective is that in about twenty to thirty years the lead time will be reduced to two to three days,” it reads.
That night, safely back in Sorrento, Mom and I dined on the top floor of the Hotel Mediterraneo, directly across the Gulf of Naples from Vesuvius. The mountain’s peak was now veiled in a cloud. A prettier scene could not be imagined as the pink-orange of sunset intermingled with the fading blue sky. A dinner cruise ship glided peacefully in the Gulf as the twinkling lights of Naples began to light up the coastline.
Amid such beauty is it any wonder the Italian soul is lulled into complacency? Volcanoes, schmolcanoes.
12
Viterbo
IF I’D told her once, I’d told her a hundred times. “After Sor-rento we are going to Viterbo. We are spending three weeks there, and Colin is visiting us for three days.”
We were at the halfway mark of our trip, and I reckoned that a brief interlude with Colin would smooth the increasingly ragged interactions with Mom. Yet Mom persisted in maintaining a mental block about Viterbo. How many times did I have to repeat myself?
Of all places, I figured Viterbo would be a surefire hit with her. The charming 13th-century town house I had found for us was right smack-dab in Viterbo’s San Pellegrino district— the medieval quarter, according to the Internet description. Its owner, who lived in the U.K., had supplied me with lots of information about both the town and the house. She had elderly parents, too, she had said, and was sensitive to my mother’s needs.
As for Viterbo itself, the place positively oozed religious history. It is located about seventy miles northwest of Rome and once vied with the capital as the official papal residence. It was where popes and cardinals went when the political intrigues in Rome got too hot. The word “conclave” was coined in Viterbo; Thomas Aquinas preached from Viterbo’s pulpit; and Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor from 1122 to 1190, walked its streets. When Franco Zeffirelli was looking for a medieval location for his 1968 film Romeo and Juliet, he chose Viterbo over fair Verona.
With the added promise of antique stores right outside our front door, I knew this would be the perfect place for Mom. For me it would be a chance to give up driving for a while and immerse myself in small-town Italy, to put down temporary roots that might—who knew?—one day turn into permanent ones. I could hardly wait to get there, even if my travelling companion seemed certifiably amnesiac about the idea.
The sun was shining as we made our way up the A1 auto-strada. Traffic was light, the drive was relaxing, and we had not made any wrong turns. Mom was unusually quiet, the result of not getting her way.
“Why are we going to Viterbo?” she asked for the umpteenth time.
For Christ’s sake!
“Why do you keep asking me that question?”
“Because you didn’t consult me on this.”
“That’s crap,” I retorted. “You told me you were leaving all the plans up to me. I told you about Viterbo. I showed you pictures of the place we’re renting. Why are you suddenly surprised by all this? And how come you’re questioning our plans now? This was booked months ago.”
She didn’t answer. She set her jaw and stared out the window.
When we entered Viterbo I followed the signs to the centro storico until we arrived on Via San Pellegrino. The cobblestone street narrowed until it looked as if it could no longer han
dle vehicular traffic. I pulled to the side of a small, deserted piazza, deciding that the prudent thing was to set out on foot to locate our accommodation.
“You stay put,” I instructed Mom with as much good humor as I could muster given that she was being totally recalcitrant. “According to the directions, it’s not far from here.”
On a dark sliver of a partially covered street a few short blocks from where I parked the car, I found Signora Marconi’s home; Signora Marconi was the keeper of the key to the house when its owner was not in residence. I knocked on the door.
A tall man answered. It quickly became apparent that neither Signor nor Signora Marconi understood English.
I pulled out my phrase book. As usually occurs in these instances, I could immediately call to mind phrases such as “Voglio fare l’amore con te” (I want to make love to you) but not, “Hi, I’m the person who rented the town house over on such-and- such street. May I please have the key?”
Eventually I was able to make the couple understand why a weary Canadian was standing at their door. Signora Marconi grabbed her black sweater and the house key and led me back up the street to Via San Pellegrino, across to the next block, then down another wedge of cobblestone.
An ominous feeling began to gather in my stomach the farther we progressed down the tomblike lane. The cobblestones were rough like cobblestones are, only a bit worse. I wondered whether Mom’s walker was equipped with shock absorbers. The distance down the street was not far for an able-bodied person, but for an old gal with dodgy mobility it would be like an obstacle course. Oh dear, I thought.
“Essa,” said Signora Marconi, pointing out the town house.
Its obvious charm was muscled out by the horror of a dozen or so steep steps to the front door. Oh shit.
“Now, calm down,” I told myself. “Let’s reserve judgment until we see inside.”
But within seconds of stepping over the threshold I knew.
This would definitely not work out for Mom. At all.
Incontinent on the Continent Page 18
