Luciano De Crescenzo
Così Parlò Bellavista

I won't be brief. It's not like me and I'm sorry, but I couldn't do otherwise. 

Statistics say that in the Naples area, over the last two years, the air has become foul, it has turned into garbage. Cases of pancreatic cancer have increased by 10% and I try not to fall for the allure of statistics and let myself be torn apart only by reality. Here, I believe only in reality: my grandmother died of pancreatic cancer just over a year ago and every Sunday we go to the cemetery to feel her close again as in normal days.

I go to the cemetery by the circumflegrea and to get to the station from my house I necessarily pass in front of the supermarket and its illegal parking attendant, the first emanation of the Camorra on any of my normal days. The current one isn't bad, quite affable, if it weren't for the fact that he occasionally organizes the robberies at the supermarket he "works" for, but I'm not the owner and then it can be passed off as proletarian expropriation. The previous one sold stolen car radios and was definitely worse (just any small capitalist). Ten meters before the entrance of the circumflegrea there is normally a fruit vendor with his cart pulled by a pony. On Sunday, as I walked past him, I saw an old man over seventy stealing a pea from the cart as he was entering the station. He was ahead of me by about twenty meters, peeling his stolen pea while he limped towards the trains. He peels and eats it. He's about to throw the peel on the ground when he hears my steps behind him: he turns around and stuffs everything into his pocket. From the train, I look outside. There's something dreamlike about looking out the window of a train. I look and see at the Trainano stop some junkies who have occupied (now permanently) a cabin of the circumflegrea to shoot up normally, under a gray sky that I do not recognize.

It takes a good forty minutes to arrive (it feels like I walked to the cemetery) and once out of the circumflegrea, I am greeted by the garbage that marks the boundary at the bus terminal. The stench blocks your nose and thoughts: the only thing it allows you to do is run away, and indeed I run. I walk quickly through the streets of Pianura, amidst its illegal buildings, because it's not a pleasant walk to walk on the crust of a dying world. I go down Via Provinaciale where there's another free fruit vendor, pass Via Salvator Dalì where Rai came to talk about Camorra on a normal day in an abnormal TV program and normally there wasn't even a soul in the streets to show face for an issue that normally doesn’t concern them. A hundred meters before the cemetery begins the land of a guy who has a donkey in the garden (in the city, to be clear).A week ago on this same land there was only one house and a cube of sheets supported by four wooden beams. Today there are two houses, both inhabited.

Upon arriving at the cemetery, I greet Michele, the illegal parking attendant who marks my point of arrival. Michele is rather busy, a bit aloof, because Pianura is playing, and they have been promoted to Serie D. It's a whirlpool of people, a degenerated chaos, a hell. I go in. In the cemetery, to my left, are the graves of Gigi and Paolo, two innocent boys killed by mistake by the Camorra on the night of August 10, 2000, which surely was another normal day.

What is normal and what is not normal in the last plebeian metropolis, in the last great village, animated by a desperate vitality? I don't know, I sincerely believe everything because here everything happens to you, everything marks your face, and the average Neapolitan is even more incomprehensible. Many (Pasolini, Goethe, Gramsci…) have tried to explain or summarize the enigma and the best (I mean it) summary I know of is Così Parlo Bellavista (1984) by Luciano De Crescenzo (a rather economical philosopher). He doesn't throw around random judgments, he just observes, and he does so with the ironic eye (it's a comedy) of someone who has already gotten too angry over things beyond his control (maybe also a bit rhetorically), of someone who knows that he can do nothing else but laugh about it, and indeed you laugh every thirty seconds and this is a good thing (is it the best film in the history of the Universe?) for facts or situations that seem abstract but are instead real… and this is not a good thing.

A film, therefore, that synthesizes and achieves its aim of explaining the mutability of fate ('a ciort) for a Neapolitan (a standard ideology for everyone in this violent city). Misfortune doesn’t exist since to an unfortunately, there corresponds a fortunately. Unfortunately, I was born in Naples, fortunately not in Corbetta and that's why I constantly touch wood, because you never know how the wheel will turn. It's science, it's superstition, it's Naples.

In summary, not a film about, but a film a part of.

"The world is big and terrible and complicated. Every action launched upon its complexity awakens unexpected echoes". Antonio Gramsci