Nothing that I’ve heard about Naples has ever seemed quite true. The city is too grand, too boisterous, too outlandish, for any one description, and that makes every statement about the city feel just a bit off. Of course there’s no easy way to encapsulate any large metropolitan area, but there’s something about Naples, this extravagant, roaring, fiery amalgamation that’s nestled along the Mediterranean, in particular, that ensures that simple conclusions are even more wrong than usual.
Even a short stroll reveals that Naples comes with many faces. Just when you start to comprehend the rhythms of one street, you’re surprised by the haphazard, discordant nature of what you discover a few steps away. Voguish restaurants with opulent dishes and expansive views are adjacent to rundown bars; a grand boulevard with a sidewalk congested by fast-walking professionals leads into a downtrodden, more tenuous neighborhood; in the narrow alleys you pass timeworn sculptures and a maze of shuttered stores, the crowds endless, pulsing, the smell of sweat just a bit too strong, the shouts just a bit too loud.
The casual eye won’t notice the distinctions, but every piazza comes with its own manners, its own character, its own style, even though they all, somehow, still share the overriding, familiar Neapolitan notes. And one of those common sensations is of an endless twilight: you look at rows upon rows of palazzi in sunstained yellows and oranges, at the faded green shutters and heavy shadows, at how even your feet trod upon lustrous stones, and you sense in all these late-day Mediterranean hues that the city has a crepuscular feel, the sun forever balanced just above the horizon.
If you combine the Latin neo and polis, you end up with the fairly straightforward new city, which is Napoli in its Italian spelling. Though obviously newness isn’t your first thought in Naples. A few millennium of residue along every street doesn’t orient the mind toward beginnings. So the outsider, in Naples, is primed to look backward, with the piazzas and lungomare and vicoli too timeworn to not stir a historical mood—the tangle of today’s streets followed the same grid in the Renaissance and, much earlier, when tread on by Romans and Greeks. But that’s certainly an outsiders’ view. That’s not necessarily what the Neapolitan sees, and perhaps there’s something fitting, in fact, in the city’s dated name: one consequence of chaos and boisterousness is that Naples forces you to live in an all-consuming, perpetual present.
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