Whatever your real interest is in
Campania, the chances are that
you'll wind up in
NAPLES -
capital of the region and, indeed,
of the whole Italian south. It's the
kind of city laden with visitors'
preconceptions, and it rarely
disappoints: it is filthy, it is
very large and overbearing, it is
crime-infested, and it is most
definitely like nowhere else in
Italy - something the inhabitants
will be keener than anyone to tell
you. In all these things lies the
city's charm. Perhaps the feeling
that you're somewhere unique makes
it possible to endure the noise and
harassment, perhaps it's the feeling
that in less than three hours you've
travelled from an ordinary part of
Europe to somewhere akin to an Arab
bazaar. One thing, though, is
certain: a couple of days here and
you're likely to be as staunch a
defender of the place as its most
devoted inhabitants. Few cities on
earth inspire such fierce loyalties.
In Naples, all the pride and
resentment of the Italian south, all
the historical differences between
the two wildly disparate halves of
Italy, are sharply brought into
focus. This is the true heart of the
mezzogiorno , a lawless,
petulant city that has its own way
of doing things. It's a city of
extremes, fiercely Catholic, its
streets punctuated by bright neon
Madonnas cut into niches, its
miraculous cults regulating the
lives of the people much as they
have always done. Football, too, is
a religion here: frenzied
celebrations went on for weeks after
Napoli, with their hero Maradona to
the fore, wrested the Italian
championship from the despised north
in 1987. Support is not as fanatical
as it used to be, though the club is
currently enjoying some success
again in Italy's Serie A.
Music, also, has played a key
part in the city's identity: there's
long been a Naples style, bound up
with the city's strange, harsh
dialect - and, to some extent, the
long-established presence of the US
military: American jazz lent
a flavour to Neapolitan traditional
songs in the Fifties; and the
Seventies saw one of Italy's most
concentrated musical movements in
the urban blues scene of Pino
Daniele and the music around the
radical Alfa Romeo factory out at
Pomigliano. More recently, a
distinctive style of Neapolitan rap
emerged from the centri sociali
or "social centres" -
groups of left-wing urban activists
who challenge the establishment. The
most famous exponents of this kind
of rap are 99 Posse, who joined
forces with Bisca to record Guai
a Chi ci Tocca ( Trouble for
Those who Touch Us ), which
documented a brutal police attack on
a peaceful student demonstration in
Naples in 1994.
The City
of Naples
Naples is a surprisingly large city,
and a sprawling one, with a centre
that has many different focuses. The
area between Piazza Garibaldi and
Via Toledo, roughly corresponding to
the old Roman Neapolis (much of
which is still unexcavated below
the...
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