Critics of Naples face court action from city fed up with its bad press
NAPLES is famous for its beautiful Baroque churches and as the birthplace of pizza. But criticise the city and you could find yourself in court.
The council has set up a website called Defend the City, where Neapolitans can denounce negative coverage of the sprawling port city. It is threatening legal action against anyone found guilty of what it deems unfair criticism.
Naples has much to offer visitors, including underground catacombs and sublime views of the brooding cone of Mt Vesuvius and the island of Capri.
But it also has a dark side, from uncollected rubbish to crumbling masonry, beggars, touts, prostitutes, hustlers and the Camorra mafia.
The mayor says he is fed up with the negative press and is prepared to go on the offensive against anyone found to be defaming the city and its inhabitants. The council will consult its lawyers about potential cases of defamation and take offenders to court.
Neapolitans simply have to take a screenshot of the offending newspaper article, social media page or website, and send it to the authorities.
“It isn’t that we can’t take criticism, or that we want to spout propaganda. We just want to defend the city when anyone, whoever it is, portrays it in a way that is contrary to the truth,” said the mayor, Luigi de Magistris.
The website, “Difendi la citta” in Italian, warns: “For some time, and ever more often, we have seen a distorted and sometimes defamatory portrayal of the city of Naples, making it the target of prejudices, stereotypes and damaging generalisations.”
A recent edition of the Time Out guide to Naples, for instance, says visitors who step out of its principal railway station “may wonder whether they’ve made a terrible mistake … it’s threatening and mesmerising, alienating and entrancing”.
The initiative was met with ridicule by some Italians, who said the council would do better directing its efforts at cleaning up the city rather than persecuting its critics. Its leaders were cultivating a victim culture rather than “taking the trouble to confront real problems”, a columnist wrote on the front page of the Corriere della Sera daily newspaper.
The most recent slight to Naples’ honour came last month when the mayor of Cantu, a town near Lake Como in northern Italy, branded the city “the hellish cesspit of Italy”.
Claudio Bizzozero, a member of the Northern League, the Right-wing party that once campaigned for the secession of northern Italy and traditionally regards the south with disdain, said Naples was a place of “criminality, environmental and social decay, parasites and profiteers”. “Naples is a dirty, polluted, mafia-infested, corrupt and uncivilised city,” he wrote. The city council is suing him for his remarks, which he posted on Facebook.