Pure Complexity

Campania: Day One

Naples is a city of simple pleasures and unadulterated flavors—mozzarella on rich-crusted pizza, grated parmesan on steaming-hot gnocchi sorrentina, and the uniquely local thrill of joyriding to work on a manic motorino. When the Germans say “See Naples and die,” it might refer to the traffic. But it’s simple, this natural, grubby ebullience. Here, in the city where the dignified baroque of Rome turned into something far more densely, wildly, melodramatic, life is so simple, so hot-blooded and black-and-white, it’s incredibly complicated.

Nobody except the Neapolitans have the caffeine-powered, high-octane artistic insanity to understand Naples. It’s the boiler room of Italy, full of loud shouts, smoke and chaos and bright firelight, a marvelous industrial opera of orange sparks and coal smut. It’s the city that gave us both the bloody Camorra and Italy’s frowny-faced clown, Totò. It’s not supposed to make sense.

It’s the romantic seamy underbelly of Italy we all yearn for. Yet, for all its modern-day plebeian pretensions, the city of comic Antonio de Curtis is the city of enlightened Carlo di Borbon. Naples was one of the most cultured cities on the peninsula for centuries, easily outstripping pilgrim-burdened Rome where cows grazed between fissured travertine. Now it’s a bit more seedy, but its spoiled gentility has a certain charm to it. Venice might be the trashed palazzo, but a lot of money goes into making sure it’s impeccable in its grime. Naples is, mercifully, the real thing and its fantastic grime is strangely delightful as a consequence.

Maybe one could compare this recursive dilemma to the operas that Naples made famous at the Teatro San Carlo, Italy’s second-favorite musical mecca after La Scala in epicene Milan. Nothing’s simpler than the world of opera, where the villain’s dragged down to hell and the young lovers embrace in triumph, and yet somehow in between, we all despair at untangling the singularly rococo skeins of one of those impossible plots full of masks and daggers and ridiculous names. When it comes down to it, it’s just the clash of simple passions that unspool in the most unpredictable ways.

It doesn’t matter, though, since at least Figaro and Susanna or Rinaldo and Armida or Bastien and Bastienne know how it goes, and we can sit on the sidelines and be content to watch the kissing and carnage. Or the traffic on the Via de Toledo.

For all the hyper-colored toy-theater landscapes that spring to mind when one speaks of Naples, we set off from Rome on a dour and northern morning through a landscape that seemed more like the inside of Tim Burton’s troubled mind than the wholesome lechery of a Scarlatti opera. Trees with spindly medusa tentacle-branches, still burnished by fall, crowned crests of hills ringed with low-hanging fog, umbrella trees rising disembodied from the clouds. It seemed a world that was strange, beautiful and breathtakingly odd. And preternaturally still, a bizarre counterpoint to the inferno of noise into which we’d soon plunge.

Stranger still was the sight of a whole Italian hill town that had seemingly strayed from Tuscany rising from the sunrise-stained pink clouds, stucco tinted rose and crowned by a massive bulbous water-tower that seemed more like a prophesy of Sicilian onion-domes.

And soon we were in Naples. Looking down on the outskirts spreading towards the hazy bay below, it seemed maddeningly vast and fascinatingly ugly, a never-ending counterpane of cheap tenements with beautifully garish stucco set against the great swathes of green draping the rising hills beyond. We rumbled down a tangle of flyover highway junctions that looked like they’d been designed by a committee of demented Mexican socialists—or optimistically gravity-defying Italians—and found ourselves within walking distance of the Certosa di San Martino.

The old Carthusian charterhouse of Naples stands below the massive golden-brown bastions of the fortress of Sant’Elmo, now crowned with spikes of telecommunications equipment. It’s reached by a tangle of Italian hill-town streets named after famous artists and lined with mediocre high-rises, and when you step across the threshold of its great renaissance portals, you enter a whole other Naples, just as wild and idiosyncratic as the one below, but twice as beautiful, the jewel in the rough, the rose among thorns.

But first, we turned and looked out over the humming city below at our feet and discovered, rather alarmingly, that Mount Vesuvius had seemingly vanished, shrouded in that omnipresent fog. But then we still looked down, eyes mesmerized by the view below. The garish tenements had become beautiful, studded now by rusty church domes and colorful tiled cupolas, patinaed with a ratty elegance. And I looked down a little too far and saw the slope beneath us was littered with around five hundred beer bottles.

Mrs. C., the young wife of one of my (also young) professors was standing along the wall next to me, and I turned in astonishment to point out the junk piled up at our feet, and I saw she was smiling warmly to herself as she studied the city. I decided she didn’t have to hear about the discarded Heinekens.

***

I’d filled two pages of my notebook half-an-hour into our visit to the Certosa. It was a manic monastic funhouse, ironic for all the dour northern gloom that seems to hang over this most ancient and most strange of orders. I’m only faintly acquainted with the austere razor-edged spirituality of the Charterhouse, a world of titanic and anonymous humility which has never once changed in the last thousand years. Carthusians simply vanish into their monasteries—never has a stricter cloistering been enforced.

Though if the Charterhouse is like any of their other foundations, I can’t blame them. We passed through dark wood-panelled sacristies lined with frescoes of white-robed monastic allegories, in and out of an amazing chapel, a controlled riot of simple complexity in the full-blown Neapolitan manner. It was all the work of the premier baroque architect of the era, a character who gloried in the wonderfully evocative name of Cosimo Fanzago. With a name like that, he had to be Neapolitan and baroque.

Around us, marble curled and contorted in seashell whorls that seemed as malleable as stucco, ironwork whipping over rococo grilles with the nimbleness of flame and foam, white stone capitals glittering amid the inlaid intaglio polychromy, whole fields of flowers encased within the shaft of a pilaster. The floor patterns alone could take decades to study. And perhaps the monks that had chanted their lengthy office in those halls might have done just that.

Seems cynical to us today, perhaps, and all these wild colors and rich stones seem perhaps less evocative of heavenly purity than an over-sweet soufflé. But this was the church, the domain of God—and as we passed into the simple courtyard, into the stark domestic world of the monks’ cells, even for the ornate effigies of bishops and saints that crowned so many doors amid tangles of guttae and dog-eared volutes, you could see that behind those walls, the cells were stark as death.

And behind us was that death itself, the tiny old monastic cemetery, ringed with a simple balustrade crowned with no other decoration but a series of stone skulls where finials would have normally been. One was crowned with laurels. Sic transit gloria mundi, indeed. A simple iron cross rose on a solomonic column. There were no other markers, neither names nor dates. The public face was one of color and beauty, the common treasure of the community that was open to all, from the lowest novice to the abbot himself, and on the inside there was nothing but simple mortification. Thus, beauty itself became an act of charity. And somehow Fanzago had done both here, seeming sacred schizophrenia that was actually perfect balance, the juggling act of a Neapolitan tragic clown.

So, we wandered amid Neapolitan nativity figures—Naples is capital of the Christmas crèche, among other things—pleasant little puppets of Moorish musicians heralding the coming of Gaspar or Balthazar or perhaps Melchior, delightful papier-mâché angels on strings, seedy streetcorner types, some almost as old as the United States of America. Neapolitan families, acting with Carthusian dedication, spend decades collecting all of them, from the Christ-Child and those gaudy astrologers with their purple velvets and plumes to the lowest, sootiest chimney-sweep. A perfect hobby for a city that thrives on impatience.

Pure complexity, I tell you. It makes no sense.

***

Soon, the sky began to darken and our day out in Naples drew to a close. We wandered through the pale stuccoed halls of the Royal Palace, argued with sacristans at the vast and slovenly Pantheon look-alike church across the square, and meandered amid the pastry shops of the grand Galleria Umberto Primero with its commercial-ecclesiastic glass dome.

The hotel was by the train station, and did not bolster my confidence by noting that it had a garage on the large sign out front. The room was serviceable, if odd, with barely enough room for the twin beds and a window that was only reachable by cutting a strange cubby-hole in the wall. The bathroom was decorated with baby’s-first-potty-looking tilework.

There wasn’t much chance of walking back downtown to dig up some of the city’s culinary history, like Pizzeria Brandi, the site of that historic moment where an Italian chef first decided to put cheese on pizza and christened his creation the Margherita after the foreign Savoyard queen enthroned in Rome or the trattoria headquarters of Naples’ latest attempt to put a quality-control mark on its food, the fruit of an eccentric plan to guarantee the absolute authenticity of the pizza you were eating.

Too far away. We’d have to improvise.

So, I hunted down Amelia and Maureen (Vera had wandered off to some Charismatic evening prayer service half-an-hour’s walk away), and we set out on grubby streets to find someplace to eat. Maureen’s sweet, tall and plain-spoken and enjoys making fun of France despite being part French herself, so she’s good company at dinner.

At least that was half of the Maenads, anyway. The dynamic duo of Amy and Vera had succeeded in missing the bus that morning, much to everyone’s surprise and had been forced to take the train instead. While I’d like to shake my head and say that Vera’s freewheeling free-spirited habits had finally taken their toll—after years of somehow always getting it right, mind you—but it probably had to do with their third roommate coming down with a cold more than anything else.

So, we started to wander. The night was cold and dank. Shops were closed and dark, and I was hoping that the lack of any major credit cards on my person would talismanically discourage muggers. We turned a corner and suddenly we were in front of a well-lit and cheery hole-in-the-wall pizzeria amid the darkened shops. An avuncular bald cook and very cheery motherly woman were beckoning us in and asking us with loud Neapolitan extravagance whether we wanted to eat.

I was skeptical, but on the other hand, pizza is pizza.

Amelia looked at Maureen, and Maureen looked at Amelia, and the next thing we knew, we were inside, basking in the heat of a wood-fired pizza oven that nearly filled up half the place. It was a tiny, stark, no-frills establishment (save for the fuzzy TV set buzzing atmospherically—soccer, what else?), but the handful of tables that crowded the place were full, and full of locals. The owner—and a handful of staff sitting desultorily at a table stuffed in the back—seemed to be immensely excited to have this rare opportunity to practice his English. Between the three or four of them, we managed to have a halfway half-witted conversation, more hindered by our lack of Italian than whatever their own linguistic skills were.

It was marvelous, and toasty warm, and got even better when I discovered the menu, rather than being some plastic-coated excrescence with studio photographs of food on it was instead written rather vaguely on graph paper. It was going to be a fun—and goshdarn authentic—evening.

They loaded the girls’ pizze margherite into the steaming oven and slid them out, and soon my pizza capprichosa—how Neapolitan a name, capricious pizza—had joined them on the table, molten-hot, white-hot in its abstract purity. Perhaps it was not the heaven of the Carthusian mystics, but it was as full-bodied and baroque a paradise as a Neapolitan Catholic could desire. On a shelf overhead, a tangle of rosaries, the omnipresent Padre Pio and a grubby-faced Our Lady of Grace blessed our discovery.

Capricious pizza. Olives, prosciutto, sausage, artichoke, tomatoes, mozarella. But it wasn’t capricious—it was a collision of purities, like opera and like Naples, so many ideal flavors weaving together and vying for my attention like gilded whorls of a rococo altarpiece or motorini jockeying for position at a streetlight.

I was tasting Naples, and it was good, because, precisely because it was pure, pure confusion and pure complexity.


Tomorrow, read on as Matt gate-crashes a cloistered nuns’ choir, sees the world’s shortest Italian grandmother, wanders through a socialist demonstration while singing Men of Harlech and visits the tomb-chapel of an ex-Masonic Catholic alchemist. Stay tuned.