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Rating: In Naples, I've been there, adding up the total days, for a week of my life. Initially based in Secondigliano, then in via Francesco Saverio Correra that leads onto Piazza Dante. A short time, too short, but enough to understand that Naples is a world apart, perhaps that's why I came to love it; the thought struck me as I descended the Pedamentina staircase that leads from the Certosa of San Martino to the historic center, all the way down to the Spanish Quarters, traversing kilometers of ruined beauty, deteriorated, disordered. My favorite kind of beauty: anarchic.
Anna Maria Ortese, a wanderer of Italy, lived in Naples for over twenty years and in 1953 published "Il mare non bagna Napoli," a collection of novellas that brought her to public attention but also caused her one of the many sorrows of her life, the unjust accusation of being anti-Neapolitan that forced her to physically leave the city she loved, while her thoughts would always remain there (she also wrote “Il porto di Toledo” in '75). This is because Anna Maria Ortese projects the despair of living onto Naples, her sense of disorientation and that of post-war Italy, using Naples as a canvas to paint her own anguish and disillusionment. The portrait of the city that emerges from the stories is inescapable, it's an infernal tangle of alleyways without light, urban and spiritual lowlands of the people who inhabit them (repeatedly defined as “larvae,” not even people), a reality unwatchable if not through a dreamlike film that masks the horror. But the horror doesn't reside in Naples, it exists in the eyes of the beholder.
In the first novella ("A Pair of Eyeglasses," from which Carlo Damasco drew a short film in 2001), Eugenia is a half-blind child who has always wished to truly see the world, "the world made by God," and for this reason, Aunt Nunziata decides to give her a pair of glasses. Eugenia is happy, wears her gift, runs past her poor courtyard's gate but suddenly "her legs trembled, her head spun, and she felt no joy anymore." Eugenia collapsed on the ground and "moaning, she vomited." Similarly, Anastasia Finizio, in the second novella, when she hears that an old suitor has returned to the city, abandons for a moment the resignation to a life in solitude and dreams, dreams of being married, in a house having breakfast with him on the terrace, sees her life "like a path that seems to die in a barren field, and instead, suddenly, opens into a square full of people." But then when she learns that Antonio is engaged, the dream collapses, and she returns to the path. Disillusionment, the fall of every myth. The writer sees Naples as the ideal stage for her affliction, delving into the dark places that nobody ever describes when talking about the city, she looks at the other side, through the succeeding novellas she abandons the narrative style in favor of journalistic inquiry - she is first and foremost a journalist -and delves into the hellish conditions of the Neapolitan populace: "La città involontaria" is the moment when nightmares become tangible, the exploration of an appalling residential complex (the III and IV Granili) is an evocation - intentional or not - of Dante's infernal circles, a sprawling nest of larvae in which the lower floors lack light, people are deformed and distorted sub-humans, the smell so nauseating as to be unearthly. Then climbing the stairs toward the higher floors, the living conditions become almost decent, where some light reaches.
The second part of the book is entirely made up of "Il sonno della ragione," a long novella in turn divided into several parts, which targets the Neapolitan writers of the era (Luigi Compagnone, Domenico Rea, Raffaele La Capria, Michele Prisco, Pasquale Prunas) viewed as living personifications of the monsters and disillusionments first entrusted to places and/or imaginary characters: those who are lonely, those who are vain, those who speak for a populace that no longer has reason to express itself. It was this last story, more than the others, that brought Ortese the disdain of the Neapolitan population of the time, blindly in love with the joyful, colorful image that postcards always portrayed of the city. But Anna Maria Ortese loved Naples, she really loved it.
While I walked along via Toledo, with my back to Piazza del Plebiscito, I rarely ventured into the dark patch shadowing to the left, she wanted to see it. All of it. The book nevertheless brought her the Viareggio prize.
"A misery without form, silent as a spider, dismantled and renewed those meager fabrics in its own way, increasingly entangling the minimal layers of the populace, which here reigns. It was extraordinary to think how, instead of diminishing or halting, the population grew, and expanding, ever more bloodless, terribly confounded the ideas of the Public Administration, while inflating the hearts of the clergy with strange pride and even stranger hopes. Here, the sea did not bathe Naples. I was sure no one had seen it, nor remembered it. In this pitch-dark pit, only the fire of lust shone, under the black sky of the supernatural" (from "La città involontaria")
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