Naples can produce virtually anything. The tiny backstreet sweatshops produce much of Italy’s haute couture – Armani, Zegna and Valentino all have goods made in Naples. Of course all of these goods can also be bought from street traders at rock bottom prices. Walk down the Corso and you can buy practically any kind of designer accessory from hawkers. Cartier watches, Dupont lighters, Porsche sunglasses, Mont Blanc pens, ersatz one and all. Gold, diamonds and precious stones are also available cheap to the unwary.
The Campania region has been a horticultural centre since Roman times, its warmth and sun producing vast supplies of vegetables and fruit. The Bay of Naples supplies a huge variety of fish and, because of the pollution, questionable shellfish. All of this produce can be bought in the colourful and noisy street markets. Just off the Corso, the main street, there is a fish market. On display are fish, mostly alive in water, and shellfish in buckets that squirt you as you pass. Octopus climb continually out of whatever receptacle they’re in, only to be bundled straight back in again by the fishmonger. Solitary mullet eye you gloomily from shallow trays of water. The merchants constantly throw water over their wares and occasionally their customers; the pavements are wet with splashes and overflows.
There are other street markets where you can buy, under the watchful eye of local carabinieri, cigarettes clearly marked ‘PX stores’ or ‘duty free’. Since Italy ran, until recently, a state monopoly on tobacco, these are clearly illegal, yet no one seems to mind. A cynic may also suspect that electrical white goods, sold at a third of the normal retail cost, might well be stolen. I once heard a story that some years ago an American warship came to Naples on a courtesy visit, probably from the nearby Nato base in Gaeta. Unwisely, all the sailors were granted shore leave, and the ship was docked in the harbour. For months afterwards the contents of the stripped ship were on sale from hawkers and in the markets. ‘Pssst. You wanna buy seegarettes? Wheesky? Radar?’
Naples has that kind of reputation. The gauche, the clumsy and the inept – which often includes tourists – are fair game. Neapolitans, like all Italians, respect the furbo, the smart, and despise the fesso, the naïve. People who walk the streets gormlessly with a wallet stuck in their hip pocket can expect no mercy. People who pay the first price asked of them are marked at once as fesso. These are people who command no respect, which to a southern Italian male is like losing one’s manhood. A man may be poor, live in a hovel, but he must command respect for his ability to navigate the rocky shallows of life.
Part of the obsession with being furbo – what the Irish call being a ‘cute hoor’ – is never being seen to lose face. Being conned is more than bad luck in Italy; it means that you’re not as furbo as you should be. Publicly making someone look fesso is about the worst thing you could do. People have lifelong feuds with others who made them look fesso. Seducing a man’s wife is bad enough, but making a woman leave her husband is serious. Not only has the seducer put horns on the husband, something many Italian men learn to live with, but the husband is publicly seen not to have been able to satisfy his wife. This is a nearly mortal slur on his manhood.
One of the joys and irritations of village life is that your personal history becomes communal property. Stories are repeated in bars and at tables and become part of the local folklore. Families have their own traditions of stories from previous generations and mine is no exception. My great-uncle Ferdinando is remembered for much, but it is how he was fregato with his donkey that is remembered best.
As a child I remember him as an old, wiry man with grey hair and a grey beard sitting at the head of the table, a 2-litre bottle of his own wine on the floor beside him that was not for sharing. Uncle Ferdinando had a donkey. It was a grey donkey with a wall eye and an evil temperament, much given to breaking out and running along the road to the hamlet of San Andrea. The donkey was causing Uncle Ferdinando a severe loss of face – brutta figura; he was teased unmercifully until at last he took action.
Monday is market-day in Atina. The piazza is filled with stalls selling clothes, hardware, food and animals. It was to Atina that Uncle Ferdinando led his donkey early one Monday morning. By modern standards it’s a long walk, over Ponte Corno on to what then was the main road to Isernia, through the hamlet of Settignano, on to Ponte Melfa, where the road from Sora joins up, and over the river once more to begin the climb to Atina, some 250 metres up. I know of no witness to the event, but the story goes that Uncle Ferdinando eventually managed to sell his wall-eyed pest to a gypsy horse-dealer. Blessing his luck to be rid of the beast and drinking to its farewell, he came home to tell my aunt of his cleverness in foisting this animal upon a hapless and gullible gypsy.
And yet, as the weeks passed, it seemed that Uncle Ferdinando missed the beast. He began to invent reasons as to why a donkey would be of use around the farm, how only a donkey could use the mule tracks that led up from the farm, through the small highland plain of La Macchia, up to the Maddonna Sarra, high up La Silara, where only charcoal burners and shepherds ventured. Here Uncle Ferdinando went hunting; even in the 1930s game was scarce in Italy from over-shooting, and only in such high, inaccessible places could ptarmigan and partridge be found. A donkey was the only way to get there, he declared. And so, having convinced himself of its necessity, Uncle Ferdinando went once more to Atina to buy a donkey.
As luck would have it, the same gullible fool that had bought the donkey was there. My uncle, like most Italians, enjoyed getting the better of a bargain, and the horse-dealer seemed a perfect foil for him. The man recognized him and smiled broadly, clearly harbouring no grudges over the donkey he had bought some weeks earlier. No, he had no donkeys for sale this week, he had only horses and mules. Uncle Ferdinando was about to go when he saw a brown donkey tethered to the railings behind the stall. This was not for sale, it was the horse-dealer’s personal property. Uncle Ferdinando decided that he liked the look of it, and determined to have it. They argued, they fought, they cursed one another for pig-headedness and inability to compromise, and eventually the deal was done. Uncle Ferdinando had the better of the gypsy and bought the donkey, not before parting with a good deal of money.
In the bar on the square Uncle Ferdinando drank his own good health, and once more relished a victory over a gypsy horse-dealer. Their reputation for craftiness was, he decided, a myth – or, if it were true, how much the cleverer had he been for twice getting the better of a gypsy.
Uncle strode home, leading his new donkey, whose coat glistened in the sun, who looked at him with two good eyes and not the blank Cyclopian stare of his last wall-eyed beast. They crossed the river at Ponte Melfa, and by the time they had walked to Settignano it began to rain; gently at first, and then as only the Apennines know how, a deluge of biblical proportions. A clap of thunder, and the donkey took off at full gallop down the road, leaving Uncle Ferdinando cursing and swearing.
He stopped chasing the donkey as gradually a realization dawned on him. If this was the horse-dealer’s own donkey, where would it run to, but back to its owner? Uncle toyed with the idea of returning to Atina, but for sure the horse-dealer, the donkey and his money would be gone. And so his joy turned to bitterness and he walked home through the rain cursing his luck and his own gullibility for dealing with a gypsy.
What really rankled was the knowledge that this horse-thief would be laughing with his gypsy pals over his misfortune. Uncle now found himself with no donkey and money lost, too. Wearily he turned off the road at the fountain, and walked past the family chapel to the yard before the house. The stable door was open, and Pepe, who worked on the farm, was standing in the doorway.
‘Did you get a donkey?’ asked Pepe.
‘No,’ Uncle replied, telling half the truth.
‘You’ve got one now,’ said Pepe, still laughing. ‘Come and see.’
Inside the stable stood a piebald donkey, part grey, part brown. Little rivulets of brown rain ran off the donkey’s back into a brown puddle on the floor. Uncle rubbed the donkey’s coat
with his hand: it turned brown. Pepe was laughing uncontrollably.
‘You bought your old donkey back again, didn’t you?’
‘It’s got two good eyes. It can’t be.’
Closer examination showed nothing more complicated than black paint, straight on to the wall-eyed cornea. Brown stain was still running out of the donkey’s soaking coat.
‘I couldn’t believe it,’ said Pepe. ‘I heard galloping down on the road, and then this donkey turned into our drive at full gallop, into the yard and straight into his stable. Knew his way home all right.’
At first Uncle Ferdinando consoled himself with the change in the donkey’s personality, which seemed more permanent than his colour change. For two days the donkey was quiet, calm and easy to handle. ‘That’s the gypsies for you,’ he said. ‘They know how to put manners on these beasts.’ But then the effect of the large lump of sausage the donkey had been fed wore off. The savage constipation that this mortadella had produced in the donkey eventually passed, and with it the donkey’s good nature. I am told that Uncle never again tried to dispose of the donkey, and referred to it from then on as ‘my cross’.
The phrases farsi fregare, or una fregatura – to let yourself be conned, or a con – are always used with a world-weary sadness in the voice, as opposed to ‘L’ho fregato bene’ – ‘I really got the better of that poor sap’ – which is said with a voice full of glee. We were once eating in a small restaurant in Naples, obviously a lunch-time haunt of Neapolitan businessmen. I couldn’t help overhearing the conversation at the table behind me, where four men were talking about Rome.
‘I had to go to Rome last week,’ ventured one, ‘and I was worried sick about being fregato. You really can’t trust those Romans.’
‘What happened?’ enquired another.
‘Nothing. I got out OK.’
What amused me about this trivial exchange was that here were men who had mastered the labyrinthine machinations of Naples – a city holding immeasurable perils of la fregatura for an entire nation of Italians – worrying about being ripped off in Rome. It seemed absurd, yet we were witnessing one of Italy’s recurring neuroses.
If all this gives the impression that Naples is a chaotic donnybrook of noise and bustle, good. It is. But is also a city of great beauty and charm. The restaurants at Santa Lucia on stilts over the sea, the sight of Vesuvio across the Bay, are the stuff memories are made on. Despite the fact that it is a city where a lot of people make a living from the gullibility of others, the only place I did get done was not in Naples, but in a junk shop in Sora. It was more than twenty years ago, but I remember it well. I was rooting through junk, when the owner asked me if I would be interested in something very old. I said that I would be, and he took me into his office.
‘These,’ he said, ‘are two Etruscan statuettes. They’re contraband, you understand, and that’s why they’re not in the shop, but I could see that you knew what you were looking for, a man with a keen eye …’ I succumbed. I bought them.
As it happened, we were due in Rome that evening for dinner with an old friend of my father, Professor Pasqualino Rotondi. He headed the Restoration Department in the Ministry of Fine Arts, and was just the man to appreciate my discovery. We ate dinner al fresco in a restaurant in Trastevere and over coffee I handed over my little package silently.
Silently the professor eyed them, and then pronounced: ‘La solita patacca’ – ‘the usual rubbish’.
Needless to say, they were neither old nor Etruscan. My father, however, was sufficiently enraged, partly I suppose because of the public loss of face, to take the dealer to court. While I was in Ireland we won. I forgot all about it, until in 1990, more than twenty years later, a sergeant of the carabinieri came to my house and handed me a packet. Italian justice had finally run its course, and two tiny statuettes came home.
The reputation for la fregatura that Naples holds even finds official expression. The last service station before Naples on the A2 motorway from Rome has a notice outside the lavatories in four languages; the English reads, ‘Beware of Abusive Traders.’ This is not, as it appears, the work of some anonymous member of the Polite Society, but rather the work of a man with a dictionary; it is a transliteration of the Italian word abusivo, which today means unlawful, and never, if ever, abusive.
The word abusivo is one you hear a lot in Italy. 1 April 1988 was the last day for anyone to regularize with the authorities any building they might possess that did not have the blessing of planning permission – it is the buildings that are abusivi, not their owners. The proverbial casual observer could be forgiven for believing that in Italy there is no such thing as planning permission, or that, should such a thing exist, it is clearly available to anyone who wants it for any construction he might desire. All over the landscape there are half-finished concrete skeletons placed as though beauty and sensibility were concepts far removed from Italian culture.
Planning permission in Italy comes from the town hall, not from the province or region. Since the vast majority of Italy’s comuni are small, with less than 3,000 inhabitants, it stands to reason, at least to a politician, that permission refused is a vote lost. As a result, the biggest sinners in this respect have been small towns and, as usual, southern Italy heads the list. A copy of Il Messaggero of 1988 carried some interesting statistics. In the province of Bolzano, formerly the German Bozen, there were only 2,400 buildings that were abusivi. Of these, 2,300 owners came forward, paid their fines and regularized their position. In Naples, on the other hand, 10,000 requests had been received to legalize unlawful buildings, a figure that seems large, until you discover that there are entire townships on the outskirts of Naples with no planning permission whatsoever.
In the Comino Valley an estimated 10 per cent or less of the owners of unlawful buildings have paid their fines, which means that 90 per cent live with the possibility of sequestration. They seem to know what I only suspect: the possibility is remote.
The debate in Italy is not how great a fine to levy on the law-breakers, or whether the ‘abusive’ houses should be pulled down, but rather whether Italy needs the law or not. There already exist constraints on the granting of planning permission by town councils: for example, you need a hectare of land to build a new house; it cannot be within 50 metres of a river. Despite the many constraints, permission is granted for buildings that are clearly in breach of regulations. There is a law which forbids building within a set distance from a cemetery, yet in Gallinaro there is a house which abuts on to the cemetery wall.
The Latin mind is capable of great flexibility. It understands that on the one hand there is a need for order in construction and on the other that a poor man must build a house on the only piece of land he owns, even if it happens to be in a green belt. Just as the Latin mind can perceive these two exigencies, it administers accordingly. Thus the equity that the law in its starkness lacks is supplied by the administrators at local level. This is the great dilemma of Italian local politics: does the mayor who grants planning permission where clearly it should be denied do it to remedy an injustice, or to get a vote?
Conversations in bars turn on such split hairs. Everyone agrees that there should be some kind of regulation, some sort of plan. But just as everyone agrees that there should be a town dump and no one wants it next to their garden, no one wants a regulation so tight, so all-encompassing, that it might some day affect themselves.
Looking around the Comino Valley, it is hard to see how someone who has built a six-storey block without permission thinks that he won’t get found out. The evidence is there for all to see. There is a man in Gallinaro who got permission to build four apartments and who built six, with a large pizzeria and shops as well. No one finds this outrageous, but they are annoyed that for all the plumbing in so large an edifice he has not included a septic tank, the sewerage being allowed to flow freely over the road.
The Italian attitude to the law has always been this ambivalent. There is a pervasive respect fo
r countries where laws are perceived to be administered impartially without fear or favour, something that has never been possible in Italy. The laws here are vague, complex and sometimes Draconian: justice is administered erratically. Far from being seen as protection for the individual against the vagaries of authority, it is seen as a weapon of the state to keep its citizens off-balance. No one can be entirely sure what the ramifications of any new law might be. Despite this, the laws can nearly always be evaded or avoided by an astute citizen, secure in the knowledge that, should some infraction of a law take place, the wheels of justice turn so slowly that a conviction can be delayed almost interminably.
About six years ago, just arrived, I was lighting a cigarette in the local bar when a friend said: ‘Hope you have that lighter taxed.’
‘What?’
‘Got the lighter taxed.’
It wasn’t a joke. As a measure to protect lighter manufacturers from dumped Japanese disposables, any disposable had to be taxed. This was done, as many lesser taxes are in Italy, by buying a special stamp, a marco da bollo, from a licensed tobacconist. An untaxed disposable lighter was subject to confiscation by the fiscal police. Spectres of dawn raids. ‘Come out with your hands up, with all your lighters!’ Bar conversation revolved for weeks on how this law could be circumvented. The general consensus was that the economics of the tax made the occasional confiscation the cheaper option. It was also suggested that the law may not have had the wholehearted support of the fiscal police, who quite possibly would feel a little silly demanding to see taxed lighters. The law also appeared to apply to cigarette lighters in cars, so for a few weeks most motorists would put the car cigarette lighter in their pockets while driving. Mention this law today and you’ll get a shifty sort of silence. Like any bad law that is unenforceable, it has simply died from neglect.
North of Naples, South of Rome Page 9
