by Bill Bryson
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 washing-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 habitués 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 assholes 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 passageways. 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 spacious grounds. The path meandered and climbed, so much so that I grew breathless again and propelled myself onwards by pushing 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 washing 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 citizenship 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 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 screwing 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 Caffè Funicolare, then wandered idly into the main square. The German and Japanese 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 cluster to cluster, as they would at a cocktail 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 café to café, 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 associate with Naples – mean, cavernous, semi-paved alleyways, with plaster peeling off walls and washing 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-shirts.
I felt as if I had wandered onto another continent. In the centre of Naples some 70,000 families live even now in cramped bassi – 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-ass 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 snatchers 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 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 prostitution, 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 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 passed the Istituto 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.
Eventually, to my considerable surprise, I found myself in the Piazza Garibaldi, in front of the central railway station. I had walked right the way across Naples. Sweat-streaked and footsore, I looked back at the city I had just walked through and thought about giving it one more try. But I couldn’t face it. Instead I went into the station, waving off the twenty-seven taxi drivers, and bought a ticket to Florence. Things would have to be better there.
15. Florence
I went on the world’s slowest train to Florence. It limped across the landscape like a runner with a pulled muscle, and it had no buffet. At first it was crowded, but as afternoon gave way to evening and evening merged into the inkiness of night, there were fewer and fewer of us left, until eventually it was a businessman buried in paperwork and a guy who looked as if he was on his way to an Igor look-alike competition and me. Every two or three miles the train stopped at some darkened station where no train had stopped for weeks, where grass grew on the platforms and where no one got on and no one got off.
Sometimes the train would come to a halt in the middle of nowhere, in the black countryside, and just sit. It would sit for so long that you began to wonder if the driver had gone off into the surrounding fields for a pee and fallen down a well. After a time the train would roll backwards for perhaps thirty yards, then stop and sit again. Then suddenly, with a mightly whoomp that made the carriage rock and the windows sound as if they were about to implode, a train on the parallel line would fly past. Bright lights would flash by – you could see people in there dining and playing cards, having a wonderful time, moving across Europe at the speed of a laser – and then all would be silence again and we would sit for another eternity before our train gathered the energy to creep onwards to the next desolate station.
It was well after eleven when we reached Florence. I was starving and weary and felt that I deserved any luxury that came my way. I saw with alarm, but not exactly surprise, that the restaurants around the station were all closed. One snack bar was still lighted and I hastened to it, dreaming of a pizza the size of a dustbin lid, drowning in mushrooms and salami and olive oil, but the proprietor was just locking up as I reached the door.
Dejected, I went to the first hotel I came to, a modern concrete box half a block away. I could tell from the outside that it was going to be expensive, and it contravened all my principles to patronize a hotel of such exquisite ugliness, especially in a city as historic as Florence, but I was tired and hungry and in serious need of a pee and a face-wash and my principles were just tapped out.
The receptionist quoted me some ludicrous figure for a single room, but I accepted with a surrendering wave and was shown to my room by a 112-year-old porter who escorted me into the world’s slowest lift and from whom I learned, during the course of our two-day ascent to the fifth floor, that the dining-room was closed and there was no room service – he said this with a certain smack of pride – but that the bar would be open for another thirty-five minutes and I might be able to get some small snack-stuff there. He waggled his fingers cheerfully to indicate that this was by no means a certainty.
I was desperate for a pee and to get to the bar before it shut, but the porter was one of those who feel they have to show you everything in the room and required me to follow him around while he demonstrated the shower and television and showed me where the cupboard was. ‘Thank you, I would never have found that cupboard without you,’ I said, pressing thousand-lire notes into his pocket and more or less bundling him out the door. I don’t like to be rude, but I felt as if I were holding back the Hoover Dam. Five more seconds and it would have been like trying to deal with a dropped fire hose. As it was I only barely made it, but oh my, the relief. I washed my face, grabbed a book and hastened to the lift. I could hear it still descending. I pushed the Down button and looked at my watch. Things weren’t too bad. I still had twenty-five minutes till the bar closed, time enough for a beer and whatever snacks they could offer. I pushed the button again and passed the time by humming the Waiting for an Elevator Song, puffing my cheeks for the heck of it and looking speculatively at my neck in the hallway mirror.
Still the elevator didn’t come. I decided to take the fire stairs. I bounded down them two at a time, the whole of my existence dedicated to the idea of a beer and a sandwich, and at the bottom found a padlocked door and a sign in Italian that said IF THERE IS EVER A FIRE HERE, THIS IS WHERE THE BODIES WILL PILE UP. Without pause, I bounded back up to the first floor. The door there was locked, too. Through a tiny window I could see the bar, dark and cosy and still full of people. Somebody was playing a piano. What’s more, there were little bowls of peanuts and pistachios on each table. I’d settle for that! I tapped on the door and scraped it with my fingernails, but nobody could hear me, so I bounded up to the second floor and the door there was unlocked, thank goodness. I went straight to the lift and jabbed the Down button. An instant later the Up light dinged on and the doors slid open to reveal three Japanese men in identical blue suits. I indicated to them, as best I could in my breathless state, that they were going the wrong direction for me and that my reluctance to join them had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor or anything like that. We exchanged little bows and the door closed.
I pushed the Down button again and immediately the doors popped open to reveal the Japanese men. This was repeated four times until it dawned on me that I was somehow cancelling out their instructions to ascend, so I stood back and let them go away. I waited a full two minute
s; caught my breath, counted my remaining traveller’s cheques, hummed the Elevator Song, glanced at my watch – ten minutes till closing! – and pushed the Down button.
Immediately the doors opened to reveal the Japanese men still standing there. Impulsively I jumped in with them. I don’t know if it was the extra weight that kick-started it or what but we began to rise, at the usual speed of about one foot every thirty seconds. The lift was tiny. We were close enough together to be arrested in some countries and as I was facing them, all but rubbing noses, I felt compelled to utter some pleasantry.
‘Businessmen?’ I asked.
One of them gave a small, meaningless bow from the shoulders.
‘In Italy on business?’ I elaborated. It was a stupid question. How many people go on holiday in blue suits?
The Japanese man bowed again and I realized he had no idea what I was saying.
‘Do you speak English?’
‘Ahhhr ... no,’ said the second man, as if not certain, swaying just a tiny bit, and it dawned on me that they were all extremely drunk. I looked at the third man and he bowed before I could say anything.
‘You guys been to the bar?’ A small uncomprehending bow. I was rather beginning to enjoy this one-way conversation. ‘You look like you’ve had a few, if you don’t mind me saying so. Hope nobody’s going to be sick!’ I added jauntily.
