Observe Neapolitan life pass by – at speed
Iknow where I should be now. Not stuck to this sofa (literally, thanks to the heat and my shorts) but in Naples. For the past three years Mrs Jones and I have attended an event there around now. For reasons that we are all bored with hearing about, it has been cancelled. But I will return. This city under the volcano sums up why, despite the fact that I am entirely happy in my garden, I must start poking about in other corners of the world – just to see and feel what is beyond my gate. Naples is inexhaustibly fascinating.
Last year I was at the Museum of Archaeology – a junk shop of conspicuous ancient Roman, Pompeian, house and garden consumption. The doomed population was busy acquiring all this “now” stuff, just before the pyroclastic flow engulfed them. It’s
rewritten as Nobody seemed to be reading Catullus or Cicero. They weren’t standing in a toga legislating. They were lounging, drinking, dinnerpartying and getting pissed.
A small and exquisite statue of Dionysus stands in one corner – his animal skin draped across his shoulders, his gaudy jewellery picked out in relief. He is properly, androgynously, poutingly perfect (except for the loss of the jug he was carrying for feeding his pet panther, which broke off some time ago).
I can see exactly why they worshipped this god. Not as “the only god”, like Christians, but as a representative of one bit of us – the desire for the mysterious, exotic, irrational state of “being human”. We need strangeness, the excitement of “peculiarity”. That’s Dionysus (and why he is also Bacchus, associated with getting totally out of it). He is the “Stranger God”.
I travel to get out of it. On my third visit to Naples I was still in thrall to the mysterious, irrational excitement of the place, or places. The first year, Mrs Jones and I mooched around in the renovated Shoreditch quarter, behind the park: where the shops and supermarkets and ice cream parlours are a modern, indulgent Pompeii.
“But this is southern Italy,” you cry. “Isn’t it depressed? Aren’t the Italians all riding on a black economy to financial doom?” Search me. Crooks have to flash their money. Watch
This must be where they spend it. Ferragamo and Prada and black-market clubs down every alley. Delicious bambino outfits hang in every window. Just the prices bring you out in a sweat.
Cross the road if you can and head off eastwards into the Spanish quarter, and Peter Sarstedt land. “I remember the back streets of Naples…” People live in cavelike dwellings in the blocks on the streets. Whole families balance on single scooters charging at breakneck speed down steep alleys. In “the old town” – another outlandish district – there are the churches. Go in them. If you meet a set of steps, go up them. Yes, there are rubbernecking cruiseship parties, but they will stick to the obvious routes. Naples has a superfluity of knockout, empty, socially distanced holy space, accessed by simply opening the biggest door you see.
Baroque-encrusted, Ruskindismaying glories such as St Gregory are matched by unexpected, soaring, austere Gothic masterpieces such as San Domenico. In the empty cavern of the nave of semi-forgotten St Nicholas, a man approached, beckoning. He ushered us into a crescent of hidden, florally carved sandstone Roman temple altars, dating from early in the first millennium, solely because we looked interested. Repairs to a back wall have revealed the ancient remains, bricked up centuries ago. Only in Italy, I felt. Only in Naples.
Go beyond the list of guidebook “must-sees”. Walk, climb or, more sensibly, take the funiculars. There is an entire third city above you on the hill. Vomero is an ordered settlement of parks, cafés and comfortable streets in the cool. Quieter. Buffered. Extraordinary.
We took one of the forgotten under-used, mile-long staircases that once served it – as wide as any street, inaccessible to cars – to get down. Donkey steps led past fading palaces and forgotten gardens (abandoned to inaccessibility), descending through elegant decay to the chaos of the ant-heap town below, with glimpses of the blue bay and the overrated choke points of Capri and Sorrento.
Naples is as various as Rome, as laden with treasure as Florence, as deeply mysterious as Genoa and as glamorous as Milan. And unlike Venice, it is not bonkers-touristed in June. The place seethes on, obsessed with its own concerns. It sums up why I travel. I go in the name of Dionysus. In an increasingly homogenised world, we can still find the unexpected and the exotic and the different. Next year, perhaps.
Go beyond the list of guidebook ‘must-sees’. There is an entire third city above you on the hill
Read more of Griff Rhys Jones’s travel writing at telegraph.co.uk/ travel/team/griff-rhys-jones