A Sweet and Glorious Land (6 page)

This unification process followed after Giuseppe Garibaldi, born in Nice before that Italian city was part of France, led an expedition to liberate the South from the Bourbons, who had been given sway here by Austria decades earlier. Historians still debate Garibaldi's motives, but when he heard of an anti-Bourbon revolt in Palermo, he decided it was time to conquer Sicily, long held by the Neapolitan Bourbons. Without much support from the government in the North, he recruited the famous “Thousand,” actually, according to one source, 1,087 men who largely were northern Italians and nearly all students, young professional men, and artisans. Only about one hundred of these “red shirts,” so called because of the uniforms they wore, were southerners.

These volunteers sailed from Genoa, landed in Sicily in May 1860, and, with rusty muskets and bayonets, took the island in the name of Vittorio Emanuele within two months. The Sicilians supported them, but started taking matters into their own hands. Garibaldi had to suppress a series of peasant revolts before he could set his sights on liberating Naples—and all the South—from the Bourbons in the name of the northern Italian king.

In August 1860, Garibaldi, fortified by thousands of new volunteers, crossed the Strait of Messina and easily won a series of skirmishes against the Bourbons on the mainland. Three weeks after landing, he took Naples. Neapolitans welcomed Garibaldi as a hero because they did not like the Bourbons. The city's largest square, in front of the main train station and now choked with cars and buses, is named for him, as are many main squares throughout Italy. But the Neapolitans were not enthusiastic about being part of a united Italy; they gave the king a lukewarm reception later that year.

This ambivalence of the early Neapolitans is characterized by their reaction when Rome became the nation's capital in 1870 after it had been wrested from the pope. Naples' leaders changed the name of a main boulevard from the Spanish appellation of Via Toledo to Via Roma. People in that section of the city simply refused to use the new name. The old name, Via Toledo, now is back in favor, and contrary Neapolitans still often refer to the street as Via Roma, despite what the street signs and official maps say. It is typically Italian that they see no confusion in this juxtaposition that does much to confuse the casual visitor.

So, in the 1860s and the immediate decades after, Naples and southern Italy played virtually no role in the unification process. The South was simply invaded once again, this time by idealistic northern liberals, and then turned over to “northerners who never wanted to rule the South, and who certainly had not fought for it,” according to Martin Clark, author of
The Italian Risorgimento.
The North “acquired it not because the Neapolitans themselves wanted that outcome, nor because of any feat of arms by the [northern] army, but because a great guerrilla leader and military genius [Garibaldi] so decides.”

*   *   *

And Naples over the decades lingered on, devolving into a third-world city filled with squalor and besieged by cholera well past the middle of the twentieth century. In the early 1970s, Robb tells us, nearly half of Neapolitan houses lacked bathing facilities, and only one-fifth had indoor toilets.

The city today is fighting back, say my Italian and expatriate friends—some of whom still refuse to come here. But I wonder if the struggle is overwhelming. The Neapolitan crime organization, the
camorra,
is growing. Young people, like the
ragazzo
who yanked at my bag and picked my pocket, have few employment options. Meanwhile, as in troubled American cities, televisions blast messages of prosperity and images of material wealth into the crowded, shabby homes in Naples' desperate center, showing the people how the rest of the world—and especially northern Italy—lives.

There is prosperity “everywhere but in the South,” a young man told me during a brief, but revealing, conversation at a bus stop.

Modern Italy has another danger as well: the automobile. It is distressing most everywhere along the peninsula, and in Naples, particularly so. Narrow, Neapolitan streets follow the course of Roman and, before them, Greek, roadways. In modern times, many of these streets remain only wide enough for two passing chariots. Yet, much of the day, they are jammed by honking cars and smoking buses, or are torn up for resurfacing. Roads remain under construction for months, even years, with utility lines exposed and few walkways provided for pedestrians, who regularly navigate rubble, loose cobblestones, open pits, piles of dirt, and cars parked on sidewalks.

Much of the street work during my visit in early 1998 was along the busy Via Toledo—or, depending on one's politics, Via Roma—the major artery designed and built under the Spanish viceroy Don Pedro de Toledo in 1536.

I walked past one spot on the Via Toledo/Via Roma where drainpipes from under a building were dripping evil-looking liquid into a hole dug near the edge of the torn-up street. A disconnected sewer line waiting to be reconnected? How long it had been like this, uncovered, uncapped, I had no idea. There were no workers in sight. Perhaps it would be untended for days, weeks.

It was a strange contrast: many people wearing stylish coats, furs and leathers, pushing past me on the narrow, temporary sidewalk, a few feet from an open sewer line, in front of stores hawking the latest fashions. Mysteriously, in a city rampant with poverty, the stylish stores seem to survive, and the people generally appear healthy and well fed.

Here, across busy streets, pedestrians do not have the right of way. They must pick their openings, looking left and right, arms tucked in, holding possessions close like a footballer heading for a score. Traffic lights and Walk lights, only colorful window dressing in this troubled and crowded city, are ignored.

My distress over jammed streets, open sewers, and what appeared to my American sensibilities to be abject poverty all contrasted sharply with Englishman Gissing's now ludicrous 1897 lament that organ-grinders had disappeared. His consternation had even carried over to Paola, my destination the following day. There, he bemoaned in the late 1890s that rural Italians were not wearing their traditional garb—their colorful costumes that painted such an idyllic, stereotypic picture in his mind.

Eventually, I guess, we are all doomed to watch our stereotypes and preconceptions crumble. The movement away from traditional peasant dress, Gissing believed, was the result of “this destroying age” of nineteenth-century modernization. Strong words, but, in view of his Victorian, pre-automobile sensibility, he believed they were appropriate.

Those words are appropriately strong today, if not more so. If only Gissing had lived to see the impact of the automobile on Italian cities! From my standpoint in the 1990s, “this destroying age” is best represented by the vehicles that pack narrow Italian streets from north to south. Another British novelist writing one hundred years after Gissing, Ian McEwan, uses in his book
Amsterdam
the most appropriate phrase: “tyranny of traffic.”

Professor Baldassare Conticello, one of Italy's preeminent archaeologists and an expert in early Greek colonization in southern Italy, checks a reference from one of the hundreds of books in his Rome apartment library.    
Photo by John Keahey

I certainly can accept that it is not the job of modern Italians to walk around in “peasant dress” to satisfy the Gissings of the tourist world. Change, after all, is inevitable and proper. But I do regret the loss of serenity that I imagine used to hang over once quiet town squares that today have become giant parking lots. I grieve at my inability to walk down a narrow street lined with magnificent medieval buildings crafted out of stones pillaged from ancient Greek and Roman monuments without being narrowly missed by small, darting cars or by careening teenagers on high-pitched, whining motor scooters.

Of course, while lost in such idyllic thoughts I choose to ignore why southern Italians, late last century and early this century, fled what today's tourists view as quaint villages and countryside, vowing never to return or to look back at the crushing, bone-jarring poverty, malaria, and near starvation that were so prevalent here then and that still have not entirely disappeared.

“You cannot eat ‘quaint,'” said an Italian man with whom I shared a train compartment a few days later as he shook out the newspaper he held, buried his nose deep within its pages, and silence enveloped our small, southbound compartment.

Within this quiet space—the only sounds being a rustle of the gentleman's newspaper and the clack of wheels—I shifted from reflecting about Italian poverty to the question of why Greece moved west so long ago.

*   *   *

I recalled a conversation in Rome, in a small, cramped, book-lined study located in an exquisite apartment owned by one of Italy's leading archaeologists, Professor Baldassare Conticello. We have an appointment for an early afternoon lunch. I am delayed at the airport, picking up a friend who is being treated at a first-aid station for what could be food poisoning acquired during his long flight from Texas. I call the professor, and we reschedule for dinner. My friend is deposited in his room, sleeping off the mysterious affliction, which was never resolved. I arrive at the professor's home at five o'clock and leave around midnight, my stomach full of fine Italian food prepared by Signora Lucia Conticello, my head full of ancient history.

Conticello has an impressive résumé. He has been superintendent of archaeology for many regional areas, including ten years at Pompeii. Nearing retirement, the sixty-seven-year-old scholar is central inspector for archaeology in the Italian Ministry for Cultural Goods and Environment.

As I write this, I visualize the mustachioed professor at his desk. Behind him are floor-to-ceiling bookshelves taking up most of the tiny room. Sometimes, to underscore a point, he reaches across the desk to where I am writing in my notebook, the index finger of his right hand tapping the back of my hand.

Frequently, he jumps from his chair, scans his bookshelves, and pulls down and opens a volume to illustrate a detail. He is passionate, but calmly so. When my passion over the subject matter rises, I gesture expansively, raise my voice, and struggle with the words, whether Italian or English. Years of digging into the ancient past have made Conticello reflective. He leaves the outward display of emotion to students—and interviewers.

His appearance is conservative. He is wearing a comfortable forest green sweater covering a pale blue shirt cinched together at the neck by a darker blue tie, specked with reds and yellows, that peeks above the sweater's collar. He says he purchased most of his shirts at Brooks Brothers in New York City, a place he loves to visit.

He fits my image of a scholar, pausing occasionally to rub his eyes with long, tapered fingers that look like a piano player's rather than those of someone who has pulled artifacts from historic rubble or unearthed massive Roman and Greek columns and statues. All that is missing to complete the professorial image is a pipe or wire-rimmed spectacles. He does not smoke or drink alcohol.
“Sono astemio,”
he says with a sigh.

He used to smoke cigars—“the ones called
toscani,
a typical Italian cigar made of Kentucky and Burley tobaccos”—until late 1998.

“I was famous among my friends for always having a cigar in my mouth. All my official and private photos are with a cigar. Finally, my family and my friends convinced me to renounce. I did it many times in my life; once for three years. I hope that this is the right one.”

But why no wine? I asked.

That, too, is unfortunate, he told me, sighing.

“I used to drink wine and I make my own wine:
vigna d'Aglianico
from Rionero in Vulture, Potenza. Recently we discovered I have a C hepatitis still going on and I was forced to surrender.” He offers me wine, from his private label, at dinner, but alas I, too, for reasons of health, must say,
“Anch'io”
—Me too—
“Sono astemio.”

“Ah.
Ho capito. Bravo,
” I understand. Good for you, he says wistfully and, for both of us, sadly.

We move from the pleasures of the flesh to those of the soul.

Conticello lectures to his solitary visitor as if to a class, but in a way that captivates, holds attention. His words paint vivid, exciting pictures. Tough concepts, despite his heavily accented English, turn from murky to clear.

The Greeks, the professor tells me, are behind much of Rome's cultural greatness. Greeks captured by the Romans, he says, built the Latin language for their jailers in the third century
B.C.E.
The Romans did not use abstract expressions in their speech before the influence of Greeks. “This is a pencil,” Romans could say in Latin. What they could not put into words is the concept behind the pencil. The Greeks changed that.

What drove their much earlier expansion into Magna Graecia, then wide open to sophisticated colonists? Frustrated Greek merchants, the professor tells me. Ah, I say to myself. Once again, money is power.