Just as Well I'm Leaving: To the Orient With Hans Christian Andersen by Michael Booth

Author:Michael Booth [Michael Booth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780099477457
Google: zOJNPgAACAAJ
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2006-11-15T00:32:45.178551+00:00

Chapter Five

NAPLES

If evidence were needed that Italians really ought to switch to decaff, it is Naples – a city so chaotic and squalid that it makes New Delhi look like Guildford. Neapolitans must be the most hyperactive people in the world. They do everything – drive, eat, talk and quite probably make love – at warp speed and, arriving by train from Rome, the frenetic energy of the place hit me like a roundhouse punch.

The sensation of having arrived in the capital of a banana republic on the brink of revolution intensified as I walked into the Centro Storico to try to find my hotel. With my rucksack now equivalent in weight to a wheelie bin full of phone books, I felt about as agile as one of those great lumbering, vegetarian dinosaurs. Any minute now, I thought to myself, a gang of thieves will descend on me like a pack of razor-clawed veloceraptors. Confused and unable to move at anything more than tortoise pace, they would pick this straniero clean within seconds and spit out the bones. And even if I somehow managed to run the street-gang gauntlet I would probably only stumble straight into the path of one of the city’s mentally ill taxi drivers. In Naples the cars literally drive at you, giving way to no man, woman or backpacking brontosaurus, and in the city’s labyrinthine, cobbled streets there aren’t even any pavements on which to take refuge. It is like the Pamplona Bull Run with Fiats.

It seemed the city had given up on any hope of progress around about 1972. I lost track of the number of museums, churches and other sights that were ‘closed indefinitely for repair’ (come to think of it, I believe we have our alternative tourist board slogan for Naples right there). The buildings are crumbling, the streets are piled high with rubbish, the transport infrastructure is antique and the fashions are ten years out of date. None of the public clocks work. In fact, you can’t help wondering if the people in charge of capital investment in these parts know something about the future activities of Vesuvius that the rest of the world doesn’t . . .

When Andersen first visited Naples in early 1834 Vesuvius was aflame. It was just one example of the timeliness that typified his arrivals in foreign places. He had arrived in Rome on that same trip just in time to see the exhumation and reburial of Raphael (recording how, when the pall bearers tipped the coffin to ease it into to tomb, he heard all the bones slide to one end); later in his Poet’s Bazaar journey in 1841 he sees Venus in a unique position in the skies above Malta – it was just the kind of thing that led one exasperated friend, on hearing Andersen’s latest travel story, to exclaim: ‘It’s a lie, a downright bloody lie! That kind of thing never happens to any of us!’

Vesuvius was a ‘river of fire flowing downward .

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