“Delirious Naples: A Cultural History of the City of the Sun is an interdisciplinary and highly diverse collection of twenty-two personal essays dedicated to writing Naples by thinking/feeling it in ways that respectIts complexity as a sublime problem―a city that at once demands to be written and resists being written; a city of difference, of Otherness, that at once demands and resists interpretation. . . Writing Naples is as difficult as writing the sea and the sun.”
– Introduction by Pellegrino D’Acierno, Professor of Comparative Literature and Languages at Hofstra University
Outside my window, the swollen Arno surges under Ponte alle Grazie or Bridge of the Graces. A thick autumn mist slowly wraps its gray shroud over Filippo Brunelleschi’s cupola. The orange jigsaw of terracotta roofs, domes, towers, spires, pigeon roosts, and satellite dishes soon vanishes from sight. Below, shrewd merchants bargain with foreign shoppers while the few surviving artisans scurry to appointed rounds, heels clicking crisply on stone-laid medieval alleys.
Each day, this once-refined Renaissance city buckles under the weight of mass tourism. Last traces of jewelers, sculptors, artists, and the dying silk trade of Florence lie submerged under a flood of Chinese plastic knock-offs, t-shirts, kebab takeouts, and postcards. Ambulant vendors sprawl out their wares for countless busloads of travelers. Troupes of Senegalese unfurl sheets laden with fake Prada and Gucci bags. Young Moroccans lay down posters of saccharine landscapes and iconic David with his anatomical wonder. Chinese hawkers dangle counterfeit scarves from their arms. Only in the evening, when the hordes of modern-day Visigoths march back to waiting buses with their cheap trinkets of plunder, only then does the city exhale in relief.
I find myself here, far from the concrete canyons of Manhattan, or the lofty Tehran where I grew up in the days of the Shah, or in the anarchy of Athens where I was based as a cross-cultural consultant for a decade work- ing across the Persian Gulf. All of that changed when I met Idanna, whose magnetic voice seized me one evening in the East Village.
We had both been invited to a storytelling dinner at an Iranian friend’s flat. Ironically, each of us had separately decided not to go to the gathering, but because of my friend’s melodramatic insistence over the phone—he threatened to throw himself from his third-story window—he was able to lure us there.
So I arrived at the candlelit table and when my turn came I offered the story of Nikos Kazantzakis—author of Zorba the Greek—who defied his ex-communication by Orthodox priests by carving on his gravestone perched in the hills above Heraklion, “I hope for nothing, I fear nothing, I am free.” When we circled the table, Idanna spoke softly, poetically, and told us about a world where Asia spilled into the green Pacific waters. This island was her home. Struck by her words, I knew that I had to know more. Two years later, we were married on Madison Avenue and 25th Street in Manhattan in the Italianate Appellate Courthouse during a blinding December blizzard that blanketed in a white cloak the city for days.
Here in Italy, I’ve seen that Idanna carries a wide, cosmopolitan vision that sets her leagues apart from the smug Florentine society that has been feeding off the city’s legacy for centuries instead of preserving the best of the past for the sake of the future. Idanna’s style differs dramatically. She chooses to play it low-key, unpretentious, and understated.
Peering through the Florentine fog from my desk, I gaze beyond the old cypress in a nearby garden. My eyes fall on two aged figures standing by the bridge staring down at the Arno’s rising waters. They do not move and stand transfixed. Decades still have not washed away their memories of November 4, 1966. On that morning, the Great Flood breached the embankments, submerging the city in surging waves and an avalanche of mud.
A burst of rain lashes at the windowpanes. Suddenly, I turn to find Idanna standing silently behind me. On winter days like these, a deep melancholy overwhelms her. Her mood changes when the humid chill seeps through our walls and settles in. And she is not alone. Most of her ever-feuding Guelphs and Ghibellines succumb too. Pushing back her chestnut-hued hair, she sighs.
“My Neapolitan grandmother rarely smiled, but when she was bedridden, I remember that all I had to do was to utter the word Napoli and a sudden spark would light up her dark blue eyes.”
Though I never met Idanna’s grandmother, I know she had two remarkably different sons. Each reflected life’s great extremes. Her first, Emilio Pucci, shocked the dreary postwar fashion world and exploded into the sixties with succulent colors—hot pink, turquoise, and lime—in psychedelic prints drawn under a Tuscan sky. Her second son, Puccio, chose the opposite trajectory. After separating from his young wife who left for Africa, he closed his palace doors and chose to retreat in solitary seclusion.
So Idanna grew up in a shadowy world with random bursts of sunlight when her uncle’s models preened on the palazzo roof for photo shoots with the Duomo in the background. At eighteen, uncle Emilio helped her escape to New York where she worked at Saks for two seasons. But once she understood that fashion was not her path, she set out to for Southeast Asia and settled on an Indonesian island. There, she studied Balinese mythology and then wrote a book, The Epic of Life, about the ceiling paintings of the ancient Royal Court of Justice of Bali inspired by an episode from the Mahabarata that hauntingly reminded her of Dante’s journey into the afterlife.
They say her grandmother, nonna Augusta, was a religious woman, quietly severe, who carried the scars of polio from childhood. Yet, sometimes, nonna would amuse her granddaughter by recounting memories of a Pompeii-red villa flooded by magical sunrises, when eastern light poured across the great jade bay circling from Sorrento to Posillipo.
Staring out my window into the mist, Idanna’s words about her nonna linger in the air. “You know, in my family,” she says, “the word Napoli always conjures up light.”
For myself, Naples holds another pocket of illumination, the Istituto Universitario Orientale, set in the historic center, which happens to be one of Europe’s finest centers of Near Eastern studies. A leading expert on Persepolis, Adriano Rossi, teaches there. I have urgent need to speak with him about my book on Iran.
“Adriano just wrote,” I reply. “He’s back at the Orientale.”
“Yes, andiamo, let’s go!,” she says without missing a beat.
Next morning early, we drop by to bid our farewells to Idanna’s father seated behind his desk in the darkened office. A single desk lamp casts its rays downward on his documents. Hearing about our journey south, he raises his eyes and smiles. Puccio was born in Naples.
Speaking in his clipped British accent, he asks me, “You know what they say, old boy?”
“No, tell me, Puccio,” I coax him.
“Below Rome, they say, Italy ends and Africa begins.”
Then he pauses, negating the words he just uttered. “Terribly mean, all that. Well, don’t you listen to them, old boy! I adore Naples. Haven’t been back there since the war. It has been such a long time . . .”
Drifting off in thought, he then catches himself and waves his finger sternly: “Now, for heaven’s sake, don’t leave anything in your car!”
I nod respectfully and we turn to leave.
By the time we pass into Umbria, the rain slackens. The fog begins to lift. Rolling hills topped with fortress citadels float lightly above the highway. Soon, green plains of Sabina surround us. We circle Rome’s immense periphery with massive Autogrills offering inedible fast food and quick coffee injections, and enter into the land called il Mezzogiorno: “High Noon.” I follow all arrows pointing south to Napoli.
Idanna sleeps as I pass the invisible line that splits one mentality from the other—the work ethic of Milano from the arrangiarsi of Naples or “the art of making do.” A look of contentment has settled over her face. Recounting her country’s layered culture, she has guided me over the years through the labyrinth of Italian customs, where blunders can often end with final judgment.
By late afternoon, the sky dims with twilight streaks of violet and coral. Our long journey comes to an end on a corniche that hugs the sea cliffs of Naples in a quarter called Posillipo, from Pausilypon in ancient Greek: “respite from worry.”
We park in front of grandmother Augusta’s aging villa overlooking the magnificent bay. Scanning to the horizon from this promontory, the gulf spreads out before us. To the west drift the isles of Capri and Ischia. Across the bay, migrations of fishermen sail home like birds in flight with the day’s catch. I watch Idanna sigh and fold her hands quietly. Her thick braid falls behind her soft shoulders. I sense that memories of nonna are flooding back.
Originally built by the Duke of Frisio in the eighteenth century, the villa was purchased by Idanna’s great-grandfather, who gave it his family name: Villa Pavoncelli. Regrettably sold in the seventies by the last heir, it is now an exclusive apartment building. At the entrance stands a doorman in polished uniform. The gate is firmly closed. A sense of pride for its preserved beauty crosses Idanna’s face. From the sloping garden soar giant pines and palms like silent sentinels. She stares at the grand verandahs that descend toward the private beach.
“There!” her hand points down to a white sand cove. “That’s where my father and my uncle played each summer as children.” She holds the moment briefly. Then it all fades away with the last light.
Further up the cliffs, we arrive at Paola Carola’s home. An old friend of Idanna, she welcomes us into her world filled with bohemian sensibility. Now in her seventh decade, she still exudes a magnetism that is the touchstone of all muses. Her admirers include a collection of writers and artists: Arthur Koestler, Gregor von Rezzori, Raffaele La Capria, and Alberto Giacometti. On her bureau stands her bust by the sculptor, along with an autographed portrait of beloved Neapolitan playwright Eduardo de Filippo, who stares out seductively with his smoky eyes.
Paola first discovered her bohemian side in Paris after she divorced her wealthy elderly Armenian husband, a great art collector. She had met Monsieur Giacometti and then enrolled at the Sorbonne to enter the field of the unconscious with the Freudian disciple Jacques Lacan. Much later, she would return to her native city where she still practices as a psychoanalyst.
“Neapolitans are deeply superstitious,” she confesses. “They don’t greet psychology with the open mind of Parisians.”
Bound by taboo, mental problems in her city often carry public stigma. Personal torments remain tightly bound in private inner family walls. Her patient visits must be shrouded in secrecy, unlike in Manhattan where having an analyst is a badge of honor.
Next morning, Assunta in her sky-blue apron brings to the breakfast table a pitcher of warm milk to add to our brewed espresso steaming in porcelain cups. Light illuminates the dining room that faces the rippling great bay where a shrill sun reflects its silver sheen on the jade-blue expanse. Vesuvius’s twin craters lift high above delicate nesting clouds. The grand marine arc stretches from our host’s terraces to the far cliffs of Sorrento. Marmalade from Ravello lemons covers our toasted bread. Idanna leafs through the heavy volume La cucina Napoletana.
“It’s by Jean Carola, Paola’s mother. Listen to her words,” she says. “This book is dedicated to the grandchildren of all the Neapolitans scattered around the world. How can I, neither a scholar nor a writer of literature, express my love for this most unfortunate city, so rich in its past and poor in its present?”
Standing at the door in her burgundy silk dressing gown, Paola savors every word. Then, she takes her place at table and recalls how the Carola family meals often ended with her father’s biting remark that his own mother’s cooking was the best in the world.
“Hearing those unpleasant words, my mother always fell silent. But slowly, with persistence, she managed to surpass her mother-in-law’s reputation. She abandoned the typical Neapolitan recipes and ventured into a level beyond her rival’s reach—the territory of the legendary monsù.”
These alchemist-chefs exist now only in legend, but once they reigned in the aristocratic kitchens of Naples. After the French Revolution, they fled Paris and came south to offer their services to the nobility. Over time monsieur morphed into monsù.
Paola describes with great relish the world of her mother’s kitchen where preparations took entire days. Pasta frolla filled with fresh shrimp and mussels; miniature boats of buttered pain carré with parsley; fried sliced zucchini a’ scapece dressed with fresh mint; chestnut and cacao balls coated with caramel, candied orange peals, chocolate truffles . . .
“And, finally, in triumph, my mother published her book,” she says, “Now it’s known as the ‘Bible of Neapolitan cooking.’”
As Paola pulls away from the table she announces that it is her wish to escort us into the quarter of ancient Neapolis.
“To . . . day, I will show you una mer-a-viglia,” she purrs, tasting each syllable. “A true wonder. There is the Cara-vag-gio, you must see . . .”
“How lovely.” Idanna says.
“But remember,” she says sternly, “leave your valuables behind. Carry nothing.” Paola echoes Puccio’s warning.
We dutifully prepare. I assist Paola in the ritual of closing up the house. I bolt each shutter while she carefully shuts every window. Slowly darkness swallows room after room. When the last window is closed, the illuminated outside world retreats completely. Then she sets the alarm.
We follow her through the shaded garden of palms, cactus, pomegranate bushes, and then climb the stairs that lead to the gate and the road of Posillipo. Harsh sunlight blinds us with its white uniform haze. We leave behind one face of Naples and descend into another.
A half hour later, our taxi driver pulls up in front of the imposing Duomo of San Gennaro and we step out. Idanna whispers in my ear, “Inside there, the relics of the city’s patron saint are stored. When his blood miraculously becomes liquid twice a year, Naples goes into a complete frenzy.”
Over two millennia ago, Greek colonizers laid down the grid pattern of the city’s “historic center.” Spaccanapoli. Spacca meaning “cut.” And slicing through the heart of ancient Napoli is Via dei Tribunali—the Street of the Tribunals. First laid down by Hellenic founders, this ancient artery cleaves the old city in two. It still follows its original trajectory in spite of layers of urban chaos where buildings have risen and crumbled and risen again for centuries. Here dwells a sea of humanity pressed together like sardines. Underground, extends a vast network of caves and tunnels carved out since the Roman epoch from the soft volcanic tufo that was quarried to build the city’s structures above. Beneath the old city rests a negative space mirroring what stands above.
This living archeological site, the writer Curzio Malaparte describes in his book The Skin: “Naples is the most mysterious city in the world. It is the only city of the ancient world that has not perished like Ilium, Nineveh, and Babylon. Naples is a Pompeii that was never buried. It is not a city: it is a world—the ancient pre-Christian world—that has survived intact on the surface of the modern world.”1
Navigating through the dense crowd, we enter a jumbled forest of once-proud palaces and timeworn tenements. I marvel at the anarchy. Along a stretch of broken pavement and down a side street we step into a tiny piazza, and pull up before a forlorn church façade. At the entrance, a gap-toothed woman sits quite comfortably behind her makeshift table hawking cigarettes. A speeding Vespa with a sixth sense maneuvers in around me in a split-second, scraping at my ankles. I hurriedly follow the ladies inside. And, as the wooden door closes behind us, the bedlam subsides. A quiet hush.
Before us, a tiny wooden sign reads “Le sette opere della misericordia—The Seven Acts of Mercy.” My eyes slowly rise to the grand painting above the dimly lit altar. I step closer, drawn in by the eerie chiaroscuro, with figures so lifelike. I’ve never seen any painting like this. Startling. Magnetic. Strange. In the painting, an old man suckles a woman’s breast as she turns her face nervously toward a grim alley. What’s happening here? Costumed men grapple in the darkness. Who are they? Someone holds a torch, two dirty feet stick out from under a sheet, a sword blade shines, a half-naked body kicks up some dust. From above, a mother and child peer at the chaos below. Two angels fall to earth, grasping each other. Their wings bat against the walls. Yet, they look more like Neapolitan street kids. I don’t understand (see plate 14-1).
I turn to Paola, but she offers no explanation. Instead, she sits content on a scarlet cushioned chair, delighted that she’s offered us this unfathomable painting. After lingering for a while, Idanna turns to leave. I do the same. Paola rises too.
Suddenly, a voice behind us echoes off the walls.
“Ma che fate, what are you doing?!”
A thin man with silver hair and blazing eyes moves toward us through shadow and light.
“Non andate via, Don’t leave,” he cries out. “Listen! If you’ve got time, I will explain the painting,” insists the thin man with fiery eyes.
His loud words stop us in our tracks. He draws nearer, looking at me quizzically.
“You’re not Italian?” he asks, “American?”
“Yes,” I reply.
“And you, signora?”
“From Firenze . . .” answers Idanna.
“Ahhh, I worked in Grosseto many years ago,” he says, smiling.
“I am Neapolitan,” interrupts Paola abruptly. “These are my friends.”
He turns quickly in her direction, welcoming her.
“Grazie, signora, for coming here with your guests.”
His face holds a battery of emotions with a pair of bright blue eyes gleaming behind his glasses perched on an aquiline nose. His wiry torso is charged with the tension of a compressed spring and energy to burn. Standing before the painting, he asks.
“Do you know what it means?”
As he begins to describe what we have not seen, I somehow understand him through his thick Neapolitan accent.
“It’s from the Gospel of Matthew,” he says, “These scenes could be happening, just around the corner, in one of these alleys.”
The man’s cadence is gripping. Our eyes are fixed on the painting. As he speaks, the figures seem to stir alive. All the noises, smells, and loud intensity of the streets outside now pulsate from the canvas. Strong, raking light picks out each character.
“Look on the right side. We should begin there.” He points over to a young woman and an old man’s head reaching out from prison bars.
“Isn’t she beautiful? And what is she up to? You won’t believe it. She’s breastfeeding her father. Look, she’s raised her skirt and put it under his chin for comfort but also to prevent the milk from spilling. In those days, families had to provide food for relatives in prison. So you see, this scene combines two acts of mercy—feeding the hungry and visiting the prisoners.” He pauses in admiration. “Of course, it’s also about honoring your parents and the elderly no matter how and what.”
Then, he carefully guides us through all the acts, one by one, pointing out that Caravaggio ingeniously managed to place all seven in one narrative. “With so little space, how did he do all this?” he wonders out loud.
Idanna and I both exchange glances. The passionate erudition that flows out of the humble man is unnerving. As I listen to his delivery, I realize that this is no textbook rendition. It’s coming from a deeper place within him. Like most Neapolitans, he seems to have a natural gift for theatrics and pacing.
When he stands back and takes a breath, I offer him my bottle of water. “Prego . . .”
“Grazie,” He takes a sip. “You see Caravaggio suffered so much in his life. The Vatican wanted his head. A man had been stabbed to death,” he stresses in a hushed tone, handing me back the water. “Come nearer, and look down in the lower left corner.”
I crane my neck but don’t see anything. Idanna stares in concentration on that spot of the canvas.
“The painting shouldn’t be seen in artificial light,” he says firmly, “but sometimes it helps.” He reaches behind the curtain and flicks a switch. The scenes glow brightly in the electric light.
“Under that sword, you see?”
I recognize a small figure crouched in shadow behind the blade, hands folded.
“That’s his anguished soul, I’m sure. This entire painting is his cry for forgiveness and compassion in this mad world. But, isn’t that what we all want?”
Idanna reaches out and touches his arm.
“Excuse me, but what is your name?” she asks suddenly, changing the subject and looking straight into the man’s crystalline blue eyes.
“Angelo Esposito,” he replies. “I am the guardian here.”
Paola, who has been silent, plucks out some money from her purse and gestures for him to take it.
“Signora, please!” he steps back offended.
“For your next coffee . . .”
“No, absolutely not! This is my duty and my love.”
She lowers her hand.
He then flips over the lapel of his jacket to show us a silver badge with: Comune di Napoli.
“I work for the city,” he announces proudly.
“And how long have you been here?” probes Idanna.
“Almost five years.”
“And before?”
“I worked fifteen years in the Sanitation Department,” he answers candidly.
“Really?!” Idanna exclaims. “Not . . .”
“Yes, in the city sewage system. But then they moved me over here to culture.”
He smiles at our startled expressions. From the cupola, a stream of sunlight flashes on his sharp nose and firm chin.
We thank him warmly and shake hands. His eyes sparkle as he walks over to switch off the electric light.
Before pushing the door, I turn back to take one last look. The thin guardian stands dwarfed underneath the painting.
Outside, an old woman offers us cigarettes and a big toothless smile. Motorcycles roar past.
Idanna asks Paola, “But how can he know so much about Caravaggio?” “I have no idea . . . this is Naples,” she answers dismissively.
We cross over Piazza San Domenico and Idanna disappears inside a bookshop. I wait outside with Paola who seems eager to return to her home on the cliff. Soon, Idanna surfaces with a book in hand.
That evening, she sits absorbed and lost in the pages of her new acquisi- tion. Paola has long since gone to bed. After some time, she looks up as if surprised to find herself here still in the living room. I close my dog-eared copy of Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana.
“Since my childhood days in Florence,” she tells me, “I’ve seen many spells cast on travelers, but today . . .”
“Yes,” I agree, “He is possessed.”
“Tomorrow, I want to go back there . . . ,” she pauses, “to the church.”
Harsh dawn light batters the wall with white streaks. Careening seagulls cry as Idanna peers out into the glare. Curtains of Indian muslin wrap around her like wind-blown sails. She gazes out at her grandmother’s bay. But from her eyes, I know she is still thinking about our encounter with the guardian and the painting of “mercies.”
From the cliffs of Posillipo, we head past nonna’s Villa Pavoncelli down to Mergellina and then along the promenade all the way to the medieval Castel dell’Ovo or Egg Castle that floats offshore—still oozing its curious history of subterranean intrigue and murder.
In Santa Lucia, facing the sea, we stop for a coffee. At the next table, a couple of men in suits pompously chat away. They look like political operators and fixers trading their harvest of jokes, puns, and double entendres. Their obedient drivers stand by government-issued “blue cars” parked at the curb. In any just society, such shady rogues would be locked up. Yet, here in Italy, they enter politics. The party hacks climb up the ladder of their parties and over time, thanks to an endless stream of brown envelopes passed under tables for government contracts, they become rich. In the end, the system is rigged.
Everyone is bound to them for favors at a price—a job, a building permit, a license, a contract, and more.
Idanna looks at them sternly. “Just imagine, Italy has only been united for about 150 years, when the North conquered southern Italy. Since then, two secret organizations have kept the country in suspended animation— the Mafia and the Freemasons. After the war, some would add a third—the Vatican’s Opus Dei.
“And these politicians?”
“They just do their bidding. Idiotic governance hand in hand with the Mafia, holds everything hostage. Corruption, nepotism, and inside deals ruin this beautiful country. Have a look at those faces and you know why Italy will always be in a mess.”
I scan their expansive waistlines, Prada glasses, slick hair, Rolex watches, and glistening Gucci shoes. One lifts a morning prosecco. Another puffs his cigar.
Even under the bright morning sun, this improvised entourage clouds over any dolce vita fantasies with chiaroscuro. These toxic characters—straight out of central casting—seem all too happy to illustrate modern Italy’s curse for us.
From Santa Lucia, we trudge up to Piazza del Plebiscito and the Royal Palace before descending into Piazza del Gesù Nuovo, which faces the heart of the old city. Slowly we re-enter Spaccanapoli’s jumbled forest of architecture from all ages and seasons. On dark and pungent San Biagio dei Librai Street, I hear swarms of voices speaking rapid-fire, laden with nasal drawls so similar to Alexandrian or Beiruti cadences in worlds east of Naples where I had spent a decade in those Middle Eastern lands of broken hopes and dreams.
A familiar warmth sweeps over me as we walk wedged between battered relics of palaces and historic buildings, long since decayed, and shedding their cracked and wrinkled skin. Ambling along Via dei Tribunali, Vespas weave maniacally in and out between cars. Anxious drivers honk their horns, asserting their manhood. A young kid puffs on contraband Marlboros and casually tosses firecrackers into the traffic. Idanna grabs my arm.
Finally we find our way back, retracing our steps into the little piazza. Standing before the weatherworn façade of the church, I spot the woman hawking her cigarettes who recognizes us and grins her gap-toothed smile back in our direction. A speeding motorbike deftly skirts around Idanna. She holds her purse firmly. We pass through an iron gate and push open the wooden door. At times, churches in Naples are not so much places of spiritual comfort as places of refuge from the blaring noise of the narrow streets.
A cool draft of wind blows over us.
The church is empty. And the door closes behind. All the chaos of the street outside subsides. A quiet hush. Peace. The grand painting looms above the dimly lit altar. Drawn by its mysterious beauty, we step closer. In silence, I count the characters: sixteen. Who are they?
Then, I hear his voice.
“I’m happy to see you again,” Angelo says with an air of surprise. His eyes glow as he moves toward us across the black and white marble floor.
“I found this book by Mina Gregori,” Idanna pulls it out from her bag. “She’s a friend of my family in Florence . . .”
“Che bello!” He holds it, and his smile lights up when he sees the title, The Age of Caravaggio. “You know, you can get hooked on him, if you’re not careful,” he jokes.
“I can imagine,” she agrees.
He thumbs the pages of the book. “No painter can be compared to him. Not even Leonardo. At least this is what I think. But if you want to go deeper, you have to look for the symbols,” he stresses. “You have to use biblical and classical eyes.”
Idanna is impressed by his erudition. “Excuse me, Angelo, that woman up there. Who is she?” She points to the only female in the painting.
“Ever heard the story of Pero and old Cimon?”
“No.” She shakes her head.
“In ancient Rome, there was a young woman called Pero. One day, her father was arrested for some reason I don’t remember. Well, she goes to his rescue and keeps him alive.”
“Breastfeeding her own father!” Idanna gasps.
“Look closely . . . she’s afraid that somebody may see her. But her papa is so famished that he has even spilled two drops of milk.”
Sure enough, I see the drops on his beard.
“What she fears most are the prison guards.” Angelo raises his hand. “But when the guards come out, they will be so moved by her daring that they’ll open the prison doors. Her father will walk out a free man!”
The guardian waves his hands in triumph. Idanna stares at Pero’s face glistening with light.
“Caravaggio always shocks us,” he emphasizes, “pushing us beyond taboos.”
Angelo is so right. Caravaggio takes stories that are so remote and gives them a familiar immediacy. What is so far in time seems to happen next door.
“And who’s the pudgy man?” I ask, pointing up. “The one in the corner.” “An inn-keeper.”
“He looks German, a heavy beer drinker.”
“Good guess. In those days, the whole world came to Naples. And everyone passed through the Cerriglio, Caravaggio’s favorite hangout.
“Does it still exist?”
“Of course, but now mostly students from the Orientale go there. But look, he’s inviting two pilgrims into his tavern, giving them shelter. One has a red beard and a walking stick. The other, we can only see his ear and a leg.”
I then ask him about the red-bearded pilgrim.
“See the small conch on his hat?” he replies. “That’s the clue. It’s the symbol of the famous pilgrimage site, Santiago de Compostela, and also of Saint Rocco, the most popular saint of Southern Italy.”
“And who’s that man with a torch?”
“That’s a priest looking down at a corpse. When Caravaggio arrived in Naples, death was everywhere. Those two feet belong to a victim from the famine who is being carried away.”
“Burying the dead?” Idanna prompts.
“Yes,” he nods. “You see, each figure in the painting is separate and yet moves in unison with the others. Caravaggio catches them in action and freezes the moment.”
“And the young knight with the shining sword?” I ask.
“He’s cutting his cape to give it to the cripple on the ground. He’s Saint Martin.”
I look intently at the naked man who is pushing his body closer to the passing knight, with the little strength he has.
“Clothing the naked and healing the sick. Martin’s gesture is powerful.”
“That’s when the weather changes suddenly and it becomes warm,” recalls Idanna.
“Yes, on his name day, always in November, the summer of Saint Martin. It usually lasts a week.”
“Indian summer,” I say.
“Look, he’s given up his cloak, so God blesses him with warm weather,” smiles Angelo.
Two angels fly above the street scenes in wonder. Their wings churn in a whirlpool of feathers, holding up the mother and child.
“And,” Angelo puts a question, “where to do you think Caravaggio got the idea of the white flowing fabric wrapped around the angels?” Not waiting for our reply, he grabs my arm.
“Come!” He rushes us outside and around the corner and points at the clotheslines high above our heads.
“See those sheets up there?” The wind lifts the dangling white fabrics just like in the painting. “So you see, Caravaggio didn’t have to go too far. He just had to observe life right here in Spaccanapoli.”
The sheets sway between the decaying buildings and the brilliant sky. The guardian clearly enjoys seeing us hang on his every word. He moves with agility as he spins around the cigarette seller.
“Giovanna!” He blows her a kiss.
“Grazie! Angelo!” she cries as we are swept back into the chapel.
Inside, I ask about one last character. “And who’s that fellow drinking?”
The tavern’s light spills on his rugged face. The guardian beckons us to move closer.
“Samson. He’s quenching his thirst. ‘Water to the thirsty.’”
“Exactly, drinking from the jaw of an ass . . . But, he’s also cleansing his soul from the blood of all the enemies he has killed.”
Angelo lowers his voice, “I think it’s Caravaggio’s self-portrait. I told you how he stabbed a thug who had provoked him in Rome.”
“But didn’t he also have big problems with the Church?” I prod.
“Of course,” Angelo replies. “He couldn’t stand their hypocrisy. The papal police were after him too. In the end, his art isn’t about bishops in silk robes giving handouts to the needy. It’s about simple people helping one another. He’s the artist of the poor. Our artist! There’s no one else like him. It’s all there! Cosa volete di più? What more do you want?”
His voice echoes in the chapel. His eyes, enlarged by his spectacles, are lit with flame.
NOTES
Editor’s note: This essay is excerpted from Terence Ward’s The Guardian of Mercy: How an Extraordinary Painting by Caravaggio Changed an Ordinary Life Today (New York: Arcade, 2016). Reprinted by permission of Arcade Publishing.
- Curzio Malaparte, The Skin, trans. David Moore (New York: New York Review of Books, 2013), 39.