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A Sweet and Glorious Land
Revisiting the Ionian Sea
By John Keahey St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2000 John Keahey
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7603-3
CHAPTER 1
Naples
Naples is chilly — unusual for late March. A cold wind blows constantly from the gulf toward land. It mocks the belief that early spring in the southern Mediterranean should be warm. I have a shirt on, covered by a flimsy windbreaker that I pulled out of the pouch I found tucked in a remote pocket in my luggage. No sweater, no overcoat. It must be in the high thirties or very low forties, barely warm enough to keep the frost off the gurgling fountain across the way. White exhaust pours out from behind cars. Steam rises out of grates in the sidewalk. My glasses fog up when I walk into a warm, crowded coffee bar.
I am foolish not to have dressed more warmly. In Italy in February and March, one can wear light shirts and still break a sweat as far north as Genoa. I remain too trusting of my beliefs about delightful Italian weather, honed over more than a decade of walking in the warm Italian sun.
My first morning here I awake to look over a foreground of tall umbrella pines and see a patch of new snow on Vesuvius, which the afternoon before stood brown over the Gulf of Naples. The giant volcano's bulk dominates everything to the east, a sword hanging over the heads of Neapolitans. Scientists warn that at any moment Vesuvius could erupt, or spawn major earthquakes, potentially killing millions. Wind whips a plume of smoke — or is it a safe cloud? — hanging above its crater. The bluster could be a maestrale blowing southeastward from northern France, or a dust-laden sirocco from the deserts of Libya.
Weather terms defeat me, just as do most new Italian words that I want to add to my inconsiderable vocabulary. Perhaps it is a function of age, of corroded synapses. I am learning Italian in my fifties. For younger people, languages appear to hold no mystery. Years ago, my then teenage daughter seemed to become fluent in French overnight. Later, she picked up basic conversational Japanese in weeks. Now, in her mid-twenties, she is just as eagerly learning Latvian. I am amazed and envious.
I must constantly refer to my well-worn, and perpetually bent, pocket dictionary, speak agonizingly slowly in restaurants, hotels, and train stations. The words do not come automatically, even after I use them many, many times.
One of the great things about Italians is that, unlike Parisians, they appreciate a foreigner's attempts at their language no matter how poor the pronunciation or syntax. The only time an Italian ever corrected my pronunciation was when I misspoke the name of his city. I used the word "Naples," a perfectly acceptable English pronunciation. A man on a train, proud to be a Neapolitan, instantly corrected me: "è Napoli!" he said emphatically, all the while ignoring my other mispronunciations and scattered syntax during a pleasing hour-long conversation.
Words describing weather are just as hard. I still do not understand how El Niño differs from La Niña. Italians seem to have a name for every type of breeze, every kind of storm. I only know "cold," "hot," "warm," "chilly," "breezy," and "stormy." In Italy, I vow to change, to become knowledgeable about the nuances of il tempo (the weather), and words that describe its subtle shifts.
Italians, even city-bred ones, appear on intimate terms with their land, and with the subtlety of how weather affects growing things and the people who cultivate them. In cities, even in the poorest quarters, potted gardens tumble their vines from window ledges packed with pots, and from balconies too narrow — or too crowded with plants — for a person to stand. Small patches along railroad tracks that in the United States would be full of wrecked cars, battered refrigerators, and rubble are cultivated, season after season, by city dwellers who spend their spring, summer, and fall weekends tilling soil and growing things.
I am sure that Italians have a name for this wind that whips through me as I huddle in the grand, open space of the Piazza del Plebiscito, cleared of automobiles in recent years by Naples' progressive mayor; and I am sure that I am cold — and regret not packing a warmer coat.
Englishman George Gissing, a Victorian writer well known among his peers, was here one hundred years ago, perhaps standing on this very corner at the southwest edge of the Plebiscito where it connects to Via C. Console and where I am looking toward the bay and at the hazy outline of the island of Capri far across the water. If the wind was whipping through him as it is me, I am sure he did not mind. There is a passage from a chapter entitled "Winter" in one of his last books — The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft — that seems to capture what I perceive Gissing's attitude to be about the natural forces of weather: "For the man sound in body and serene of mind there is no such thing as bad weather; every sky has its beauty, and storms which whip the blood do but make it pulse more vigorously." Somehow this knowledge did not make me feel better as I stood there shivering. I walked quickly up to the Via Toledo, found a store with inexpensive sweaters, and bought one.
* * *
Gissing arrived in Italy on September 23, 1897, his third journey to the southern Mediterranean in nine years, and spent time in Siena working on his critical study of Charles Dickens. He completed it on November 5 and sent it to his publisher. A short time later, after a few days in Rome, he launched his famous foray into the South of Italy to rediscover the cities that originally had been founded by the Greeks.
The result of that journey, a travel narrative published in 1901, By the Ionian Sea: Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy, is what drew me a century later.
His trip, so well documented in the nearly one-hundred-year-old classic, was taken after two earlier journeys to the Mediterranean, one to Rome, Florence, Venice, and Naples in 1888, and another a year later to Greece and Naples, where, according to biographer Korg, he experienced congestion of the right lung, "the first serious touch of the illness that was eventually to kill him" in 1903. Today, scholars generally believe he died of emphysema, although his death certificate is unclear about the cause.
* * *
Born in 1857 into a family of limited means, George Gissing grew into a dour man who seemed depressed much of the time and who often retreated into the recesses of his mind. He showed little outward emotion in life, took long, solitary walks in the English countryside, and acknowledged in his diary that he daydreamed about ancient Greek and Roman civilizations.
His twenty-two novels and collections of short stories dealt with English life in the Victorian Age of the late nineteenth century, and focused on the disparity among the social classes, and on life along the mean streets of the newly industrialized, smoke-belching cities.
Gissing's personal life was not a happy one. As a young man, he had been a brilliant student, particularly in the mandatory study of the classics that English schoolchildren were subjected to in that era. But he was expelled from college and briefly imprisoned after he was caught stealing from classmates to support a prostitute, with whom he had become infatuated.
In disgrace, he left England in September 1876 and eventually landed in Chicago. During this American exile, he tried his hand at teaching and later barely supported himself writing short stories of fiction for daily newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune. Later, he was an assistant to a traveling photographer, journeying throughout New England.
Just before his twentieth birthday in the fall of 1877, Gissing returned home, eventually marrying the prostitute he had stolen for. This was the first of two failed and, by his accounts, miserable marriages. The marriage to Marianne Helen Harrison, whom he called "Nell," caused him continual despair over her unrepentant lifestyle of alcohol and drug abuse. Through it all he continued to write. He and Nell eventually separated, but he continued to care for her through numerous health crises. In a study of Gissing's image of women, Portraits in Charcoal, James Haydock writes that once, when Gissing took Nell to the doctor for one of her ailments, the physician detected the presence of venereal disease. When the doctor asked her about it, she blamed her husband. Later, Gissing, who did not have the disease, told a friend that he had felt trapped during Nell's telling of her phony story to the doctor and "so endured the doctor's angry rebuke in silence."
Nell died in February 1888, just a few days after her thirtieth birthday, from the effects of untreated alcoholism and, probably, syphilis. Gissing took care of her funeral arrangements, hiring mourners, paying the mortician, clearing out her squalid room. His diary entry describing the scene in that room when he was called by Nell's landlady to identify her body is particularly compelling:
"On the door hung a poor miserable dress and a worn out ulster [a long, loose overcoat of Irish origins, made of heavy material]; under the bed was a pair of boots. Linen she had none. ... All the money she received went in drink. ... Her associates were women of so low a kind that even Mrs. Sherlock [the landlady] did not consider them respectable enough to visit her house. ... I drew out the drawers. In one I found a little bit of butter and a crust of bread — most pitiful sight my eyes ever looked upon.
"She lay on the bed covered with a sheet. I looked long, long at her face, but could not recognize it ... she had changed horribly. Her teeth all remained, white and perfect as formerly. ... Henceforth I never cease to bear testimony against the accursed social order that brings about things of this kind. I feel that she will help me more in her death than she balked me during her life. Poor, poor thing!"
A book Gissing completed just a few months after Nell's death, The Nether World, was, according to his biographer Jacob Korg, "his ... most bitter book about the problems of poverty."
Gissing scholar Maria Dimitriadou, writing in the October 1998 issue of The Gissing Journal, says that Gissing acknowledged "that his intellectual desire was to escape life as he knew it and dream himself into that old world, and that the names of Greece and Italy drew him as no others did and made him young again." Dimitriadou then quotes the Italian scholar Francesco Badolato's observation that Gissing's forays into Greece and Italy "provided him with the kind of refuge from the grim realities of the modern industrial and commercial world."
Gissing's third journey to the South, coming after his second marriage started breaking up and as he was continually registering serious concerns about his health, represented what he may have perceived as his final "cheery excursion," according to an editors' introduction to a memoir of a Gissing contemporary, Brian Ború Dunne. "Gissing went to Italy to escape from the most profound and extended period of depression in his life, and he came there prepared to be happy." Why not? Despite his troubled early years and disastrous second marriage, by 1895 Gissing was viewed by some literary experts as one of the three best late-Victorian-era writers, sharing company with Thomas Hardy and George Meredith. The Dunne memoir's editors say of the final Italy trip: "Gissing thus entered what is now regarded as one of the happiest periods of his life."
* * *
In November 1897, standing along the Via Santa Lucia near the Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples, Gissing looked across what was then a garbage dump-cum-landfill known today as the Santa Lucia district. That monstrous dumping of earth into the former pristine waters along that short Gulf of Naples stretch was part of a late-nineteenth-century public-works project. It extended the northwest crescent of this city hundreds of feet into the gulf. Old photographs, taken before this landfill was created, show how boats were directly tied up at a stone wall that bordered Via Santa Lucia. It was the site of the city's old shellfish market, and each day's catch was handed up from the bobbing boats to fishmongers who sold their wares on the stone embankment above.
It was a colorful, noisy place during Gissing's first and second trips in 1888 and 1889. He knew, by the time of the third trip a decade later, that this aliveness was being buried along with the tiny harbor area he witnessed being filled up with dirt and refuse.
Today on this fill, much like the one that created the Marina District of San Francisco, are six- or seven-story buildings that appear to date back to the end of the nineteenth century, when Gissing had the last unobstructed views from Via Santa Lucia of the gulf, the Sorrento Peninsula, Capri, and Ischia.
Santa Lucia is one of this struggling city's few high-rent neighborhoods. But it remains an area where people of mixed means live side by side — a typical Neapolitan lifestyle. Basement rooms in these elegant structures are occupied by entire families, and the ground-level and lower floors contain workshops, known as officine, and businesses of various types. The higher floors, piani nobili, are occupied by those who can afford the steep prices. Friends tell me this pattern is slowly shifting. As Naples becomes more Americanized, the poor and the affluent do not mix as much as they used to.
Along Via Santa Lucia are churches, cafés, restaurants, a cinema, and a take-away pizzeria. One hundred years ago Gissing had an unobstructed panorama of the gulf from this old street that used to be lined by makeshift fish-sellers' stands, replenished each morning from the boats that once were docked only a few feet away. Now the sea is three or four blocks farther south, and passersby along Via Santa Lucia get only occasional glimpses of the sea at points where newer north–south streets join at perpendicular intersections.
A Rome friend, Maria Findlow, travels to Naples several times a week to teach. In an early 1999 letter, she described an event she witnessed in Santa Lucia that shows how the old continues to mix with the new.
"I was walking along Santa Lucia during a morning of cold, windy, wet weather, and a funeral procession was winding its way towards a church. The mourners, following the coffin being pulled through the streets by a carriage being drawn by three huge, black horses, were carrying colored umbrellas contrasting with their black clothes and the black carriage.
"It is obviously the funeral of someone important — probably a camorrista, a local crime boss — because the ornate gold and black carriage is reserved for the rich and famous, and the police are present, including two long-haired policewomen.
"As the procession passes, men standing outside a small café make the sign of the cross, and other people come out of the shops to pay their respect to the dead. Children can be heard on the side streets shouting in Neapolitan dialect, 'Vieni, o'funnarale!' (Come, a funeral!)."
What Gissing feared about this historic district losing much of its character as the land is unnaturally pushed out into the sea has happened. He remembered seeing a beautiful Via Santa Lucia that, during his brief visit ten years earlier in the 1880s, offered spectacular views of the Sorrento Peninsula and Capri. Those two landmasses serve as a partial natural breakwater, keeping the Gulf of Naples generally blue and serene for passersby along the little street. Now, when the panorama of Capri and the peninsula can be spied only at brief points, the view is often blocked by a screen of post–World War II industry-generated haze that settles in almost daily.
As he looked over the fill — "a wilderness of dust-heaps" — Gissing could see that the Santa Lucia would become "an ordinary street, shut in among huge houses, with no view at all."
* * *
Some things have not changed. The area above the still-cobble-stoned street was, in Gissing's time — and for centuries before — a haven for smugglers. It still is. Now, however, a police car is regularly on duty outside the offices on the seaward side of Via Santa Lucia, but bribery of police remains commonplace, and there has been a much-publicized scandal reported about this in the Italian press.
But that is hidden. Here now can be seen vegetable and fruit stalls displaying, even in winter, oranges, pineapples, tomatoes, and multicolored peppers, with garlic and red peppers hanging from the awnings. Just past a news agent's stall is the church of Santa Maria delle Catene, Our Lady of the Chains. This sixteenth-century church at one time overlooked the sea; now it overlooks modern buildings built on the hundred-year-old landfill.
Farther beyond, toward Via Partenope, which now skirts the bay at the far edge of Gissing's "dust-heap," are the fortress-like walls of Pizzofalcone, one of the city's finest old residential quarters. Via Chiatamone leads off to the north from Via Santa Lucia toward Piazza Vittoria and the Villa Comunale, a beautifully designed park used by families and courting couples.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Sweet and Glorious Land by John Keahey. Copyright © 2000 John Keahey. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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