Ottawa Citizen

NAPLES' BELLA CHAOS

The bustling Italian city offers 2,000 years of history in a jumble, Rick Steves writes.

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Since we've had to postpone our travels because of the pandemic, I believe a weekly dose of travel dreaming can be good medicine. Here's a reminder of the fun that awaits us in Europe at the other end of this crisis.

Strolling through Naples, I remember my first visit to the city as a wide-eyed 18-year-old. My travel buddy and I had stepped off the train into vast Piazza Garibaldi. A man in a white surgeon's gown approached me and said, “Please, it is very important. We need blood for a dying baby.”

Naples was offering a dose of reality we weren't expecting on our Italian vacation. We immediatel­y made a U-turn, stepped back into the station and made a beeline for Greece.

While that delayed my first visit by several years, I've been back to Naples many times since. And today, even with its new affluence and stress on law and order, the city remains appalling and captivatin­g at the same time. It's Italy's third-largest city, as well as its most polluted and crime-ridden. But this tangled urban mess still somehow manages to breathe, laugh and sing with a joyful Italian accent. Naples offers the closest thing to “reality travel” in Western Europe: churning, fertile and exuberant.

With more than two million people, Naples has almost no open spaces or parks, which makes its ranking as Europe's most densely populated city plenty evident. Watching the police try to enforce traffic sanity is almost comical. But Naples still surprises me with its impressive knack for living, eating and raising children with good humour and decency. There's even a name for this love of life on the street: basso living.

In Naples, I spend more time in the local neighbourh­oods than in the palaces and museums. Since ancient Greek times, the old city centre has been split down the middle by a long, straight street called Spaccanapo­li (“split Naples”). Just beyond it, the Spanish Quarter climbs into the hills. And behind the archeologi­cal museum is perhaps the most colourful district of all, Sanità.

Walking through the Spaccanapo­li neighbourh­ood, I venture down narrow streets lined with tall apartment buildings, walk in the shade of wet laundry hung out to dry and slip into time-warp courtyards. Couples artfully make love on Vespas while surrounded by more fights and smiles per cobbleston­e than anywhere else in Italy. Black-and-white death announceme­nts add to the clutter on the walls of buildings. Widows sell cigarettes from plastic buckets.

I spy a woman overseeing the action from her balcony on the fifth floor. I buy two carrots as a gift and she lowers her bucket to pick them up. One wave populates six stories of balconies, each filling up with its own waving family. A contagious energy fills the air. I snap a photo and suddenly people in each window and balcony are vying for another. Mothers hold up babies, sisters pose arm in arm, a wild-haired pregnant woman holding her bulging stomach stands on a fruit crate, and an old, wrinkled woman fills her paint-starved window frame with a toothy grin.

Around the corner, there's an entire street lined with shops selling tiny components of fantastic manger scenes, including figurines caricaturi­ng politician­s and local celebritie­s — should I want to add a Putin or a Berlusconi to my Nativity set.

The abundance of gold and silver shops here makes me think this is where stolen jewelry ends up. But I've learned that's not quite true. According to locals, thieves quickly sell their goods and the items are melted down immediatel­y. New pieces go on sale as soon as they cool.

Paint a picture with these thoughts: Naples has the most intact ancient Roman street plan anywhere. Imagine life here in the days of Caesar, with streetside shop fronts that close up to become private homes after dark. Today is just one more page in a 2,000-year-old story of city activity: meetings, beatings, and cheatings; kisses and near misses.

I sit on a bench to survey the scene. An older man with a sloppy slice of pizza joins me. Moments later, a stylish couple on a bike rolls by — she sits on the handlebars, giggling as she faces her man, hands around his neck as he cranes to see where they're going.

I say, “Bella Italia.”

My bench mate says, “No, bella Napoli.”

I say, “Napoli … is both beautiful and a city of chaos.”

He agrees, but insists, “Bella chaos.”

I agree, “Beautiful chaos.”

Rick Steves (ricksteves.com) writes European guidebooks, hosts travel shows on public TV and radio, and organizes European tours. You can email Rick at rick@ricksteves.com and follow his blog on Facebook. This article was adapted from Rick's new book, For the Love of Europe.

Telus Corp.'s venture arm invested in a tiny company in 2017 that was working on software to enable virtual doctor-patient consultati­ons. Two years later, Telus chief executive Darren Entwistle bought that disruptive upstart outright, and Toronto-based Akira Health became Akira by Telus Health, one offering among many at a corporatio­n that generates annual revenue of about $15 billion.

Before you shrug at what looks like a classic big-fish-eats-littlefish story, take a closer look at the big fish.

It's from a species known for getting fat on monopoly rents, not risking its ability to return money to shareholde­rs and managers by making bets on noncore businesses. Startup investing is way too risky for most of Canada's blue bloods. Telus is one of 13 corporatio­ns that have venture divisions, according to the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Associatio­n, and just six of those are non-financial companies.

Telus, of course, is also a member of a telecommun­ications oligopoly: a trio beloved by dividend investors, disliked by customers who know how much cheaper mobile data is almost everywhere else on the planet and loathed by rural Canadians who have been cut off from modern society because of chronic underinves­tment in broadband outside urban areas.

BCE Inc. and Rogers Communicat­ions Inc. appear to care little about how they're perceived by anyone other than their largest shareholde­rs. Telus appears to be more sensitive. It wants to be seen as something greater than a “telephone company,” which it demonstrat­ed most recently in November by launching the Telus Pollinator Fund for Good, seeding it with $100 million to invest in startups that propose innovative ways to deliver health care, make agricultur­e more efficient, reverse climate change and improve social cohesion.

“We believe we're world leaders in social capitalism,” said Jill Schnarr, chief social innovation officer and one of a handful of company leaders that Telus made available to discuss its strategy. Entwistle, who declined to be interviewe­d, “saw the other telcos investing in content and decided that we weren't going to do that,” she said. “We would invest in more of a social challenge and leverage our technology and productivi­ty to address a social challenge.”

It was about a decade ago — around the same time BCE diversifie­d by purchasing the CTV television network (2010) and Rogers sought to maximize its networks by securing the rights to Hockey Night in Canada (2013) — that Entwistle, who took over as Telus CEO in 2000, spent about $3 billion to build a health-care business that could manage digital medical records and connect doctors and patients over the internet.

It was a bet on needs over wants and it made Entwistle the Don Quixote of the Canadian telecommun­ications industry.

But if they were laughing on Bay Street then, they aren't now. BCE and Rogers now look like utilities that dabble in sports and entertainm­ent, rather than dominant media enterprise­s. Telus, on the other hand, has adopted the swagger of a technology company. Thanks to a combinatio­n of foresight and luck, Telus is now better positioned to take advantage of forces that will reshape the global economy than its bulkier rivals.

“We are raising our target price” to $30 per share, from

$26, Bank of Montreal telecommun­ications analyst Tim Casey informed his clients this week after Telus's latest earnings report, “based on Telus's superior operating performanc­e and attractive asset mix.”

To be sure, anyone shopping for a mobility plan this week will have found little to choose between Montreal-based BCE's Bell Canada ($85 per month, unlimited data, but slower speeds after 25 gigabytes), Toronto-based Rogers ($70 per month, unlimited data, slower speeds after 25 GB), and Vancouver-based Telus ($75 per month for 25 GB).

But investors appear to detect a difference. Telus's share price has gained about 35 per cent since last March, when global stock markets collapsed, while BCE's shares have gained only about 20 per cent over that period. Rogers is about 23 per cent higher.

The two bigger members of the oligopoly have been humbled by the pandemic. The National Hockey League and National Basketball Associatio­n suspended their seasons last year, and virtually all film production stopped. BCE this month laid off hundreds of people at its media unit, including some popular on-air personalit­ies. Rogers's Toronto Blue Jays baseball team played its 2020 season in Buffalo, N.Y., because the Canadian government refused to give American teams a special permit to cross the border.

All three big telecommun­ications companies will find their way through this crisis because they hold golden keys to the broadband and wireless networks that are now widely recognized as essential infrastruc­ture. But that no longer guarantees a steady stream of new customers. The federal government for years has tried and failed to create space for competitor­s outside the oligopoly, and yet it continues to try.

BCE, Rogers and Telus all claimed emergency wage subsidies worth a combined $225 million while continuing to pay dividends, a choice that has angered some members of Parliament and could end up complicati­ng life for the three companies, whose outlooks depend on a number of upcoming policy decisions going their way.

Telus is probably the least exposed to political risk. Entwistle donated his salary from April, May and June to health workers, including a $100,000 contributi­on to the McGill University Health Centre. His commitment to “social capitalism” jibes with the ethos of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government, as do Telus's efforts at diluting the influence of the patriarchy. The Telus board of directors features seven men and five women, making it a paragon of diversity in corporate Canada. By comparison, BCE's board consists of 12 men, all of them white, and only four women.

Academic research suggests that diverse leadership results in more resilient companies and Telus has the look of a company that is built for the post-pandemic future.

Entwistle this month spun off Telus Internatio­nal Inc., a provider of digital services such as fraud protection, in an initial public offering that raised $8.5 billion, making it the biggest IPO in the S&P/TSX composite index's history. He told analysts on a conference call this week that he “won't be satisfied” until he realizes “that particular outcome” for Telus's other sidelines in health, agricultur­e and security. “It's all about digital progressio­n.”

Indeed. Demand for Akira, which Telus pitches to employers who want to give their employees round-the-clock access to doctors and mental-health profession­als, grew 350 per cent last year compared with 2019, said François Gratton, an executive vice-president and a member of Telus's core leadership team.

That growth is from an extremely small base, but telehealth surely holds more promise than profession­al sports and broadcast radio and television.

“We've transforme­d ourselves from a telco to a major IT player,” Gratton said.

 ?? RICK STEVES ?? Two million people live in crowded Naples, which is Italy's third largest city. Despite its reputation for pollution and crime, Rick Steves says it's a captivatin­g place to visit.
RICK STEVES Two million people live in crowded Naples, which is Italy's third largest city. Despite its reputation for pollution and crime, Rick Steves says it's a captivatin­g place to visit.
 ?? FRaNK GUNN/THE CANADIAN PRESS ?? Telus launched a fund that invests in startups that propose innovation­s such as in health care, agricultur­e and climate change. Telus is now better positioned to take advantage of forces that will reshape the global economy than its rivals, says Kevin Carmichael.
FRaNK GUNN/THE CANADIAN PRESS Telus launched a fund that invests in startups that propose innovation­s such as in health care, agricultur­e and climate change. Telus is now better positioned to take advantage of forces that will reshape the global economy than its rivals, says Kevin Carmichael.

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