See Naples and Live

You can spend a lifetime prying up rocks and rooting around the garden muck in order to find that single, misinformed life form that doesn't like Venice. Mention Naples, on the other hand, and detractors exit in force from the woodwork, carrying signs (one supposes) protesting "this pimple on the earth called Naples." Why is that? Why does this nearly unanimous display of disgust not deter those who love Naples and visit time and time again?

Let's try the literary answer. Waxing nostalgic over San Francisco before it became an overpriced lair for haughty tech types, I've been reading a book about better times in The City called "The Beats Abroad" by Bill Morgan. It turns out that John Clelion Holmes, the guy who introduced the phrase "beat generation" to the world, spent some time in Naples. His essay, See Naples and Live appeared in the June 1970 issue of Playboy in fact. Bill Morgan tells us Holmes' first impressions of the city everyone loves to hate:

"Although he [Holmes] described the city as 'festooned with loaded wash lines, littered with stale vegetable gardens, ill-lit, pestilential, a filthy rabbit-warren of steep alleys raw with onion, and tenements as noisome and noisy with the stench and uproar by which the poor insulate themselves," he found that there was "a feeling of neighborhood, of community created out of passions, appetites, and dangers suffered in common." ~ See Naples and Live

Yes, yes and yes! If you are a reader of books and stories, this explains the literal and literary love of Naples. How? Have you ever thrilled at a traveler's tale like this?

"Well, our plane was on time, we got to Florence and absolutely fell head over heel in love with Rennaisance art, and then had a delightful trip to Venice, where our 5 star hotel took care of us at every turn and made us a special coffee called Caffè Americano!"

Then silence.

This is not a story. It needs contrast. It needs difficulty. Like Vonnegut says, 'nobody ever tires of a guy getting in trouble and getting out of it.' We thrill to tales of of survival on the mean streets, of having a magnificent meal, not safely in a restaurant where the famous chef allows the well-heeled a portion of his genius played out in the form of veal and truffles, but in a neighborhood dive, where the plate loaded with tasty traditions of the land emerges from darkness and the workers in their greasy rags slumping at the surrounding tables tear the bread with a vengeance while speaking loudly of sex in alleyways. Shoot, in Naples you don't even need a restaurant...

Danger sits in full view, a volcano that smolders. Yet the tomato growers on the slopes refuse to move from the likely lava path. Our tomatoes are the best. We strive for the best always.

And the pizza is the best. Everyone knows that. Not because it's different every time you go, or because a new place has opened in which the pizza guy throws 101 things on top of a slab of fat bread and calls it "pizza". No, real pizza Napoletana has a pedigree from the Associazione Vera Pizza Napoletana:

Genuine Neapolitan pizza dough must be kneaded by hand or with a low-speed mixer and must be formed by hand without the help of a rolling pin or other machine. After the rising process, it must not be more than three millimetres thick and must be baked for 60 to 90 seconds in a 485C stone oven.

You know what you're getting. And if you want tradition, you have three choices:

Pizza Margherita is made with San Marzano tomatoes, extra virgin olive oil, basil and sliced mozzarella. Pizza Margherita Extra is made with San Marzano tomatoes, extra virgin olive oil, basil and water buffalo mozzarella made in Campania.

Golden Naples

Yes, there's more to Naples than pizza, rabbit-warren alleys and garbage. Sfogliatelle. Baba. Pastries glowing like the sun. Cheap enough for the poor. Good enough for anyone.

Christmas Alley

"Did you ever see anything more touristy in Naples?" a travel journalist said to me as we strolled the heart of the city. I was stunned. Yes, tourists visit the Via San Gregorio Armeno, a street of workshops where you can purchase any kind of figurine you can imagine for your nativity scene. Of course you won't, because in Naples Mary, Joseph and Jesus in the manger take a back seat to figures of characters that range from the typical inhabitants of the "tenements as noisome and noisy with the stench and uproar by which the poor insulate themselves" to politicians dirtying their hands and priests raking in the take from the poor...

Here's the thing about Christmas alley. You get to see people working artistically. You get to see inside typical houses. During the year, tourists gawk, seldom buying anything. Near Christmas, Italian tourists come to buy a new thing for their ever-growing presepe, which isn't just the manger scene, unchanged year after year, but a living, growing, thoughtful, delightful Hodge-podge of real life.

Just like Naples.