The Neapolitan Novels

I often had the impression that Lila used the past to make Imma’s tempestuous present normal. In the Neapolitan facts as she recounted them there was always something terrible, disorderly, at the origin, which later took the form of a beautiful building, a street, a monument, only to be forgotten, to lose meaning, to decline, improve, decline, according to an ebb and flow that was by its nature unpredictable, made of waves, flat calm, downpours, cascades. The essential, in Lila’s scheme, was to ask questions. Who were the martyrs, what did the lions mean, and when had the battles and the gallows occured, and the Road of Peace, and the Madonna, and the Victory. The stories were a lineup of the befores, the afters, the thens. Before elegant Chiaia, the neighborhood for the wealthy, there was the playa cited in the letters of Gregory, the swamps that went down to the beach and the sea, the wild forest that crept up to the Vomero. Before the Risanamento, or cleanup, of the end of the nineteenth century, before the railroad cooperatives, there was an unhealthy area, polluted in every stone, but also with quite a few splendid monuments, swept away by the mania for tearing down under the pretense of cleaning up. And one of the areas to be cleaned up had, for a very long time, been called Vasto. Vasto was a place name that indicated the terrain between Porta Capuana and Porta Nolana, and the neighborhood, once cleaned up, had kept the name. Lila repeated that name—Vasto—she liked it, and Imma, too, liked it: Vasto and Risanamento, waste and good health, a yearning to lay waste, sack, ruin, gut, and a yearning to build, order, design new streets or rename the old, for the purpose of consolidating new worlds and hiding old evils, which, however, were always ready to exact their revenge.

In fact, before the Vasto was called Vasto and was in essence wasteland—Aunt Lina recounted—there had been villas, gardens, fountains. In that very place the Marchese di Vico had built a palace, with a garden, called Paradise. The garden of Paradise was full of hidden water games, Mamma. The most famous was a big white mulberry tree, which had a system of almost invisible channels: water flowed through them, falling like rain from the branches or coursing like a waterfall down the trunk. Understand? From the Paradise of the Marchese di Vico to the Vasto of the Marchese del Vasto, to the Cleanup of Mayor Nicola Amore, to the Vasto again, to further renais­sances and so on at that rate.

Ah, what a city, said Aunt Lina to my daughter, what a splendid and important city: here all languages are spoken, Imma, here everything was built and everything was torn down, here the people don’t trust talk and are very talkative, here is Vesuvius which reminds you every day that the greatest undertaking of powerful men, the most splendid work, can be reduced to nothing in a few seconds by the fire, and the earthquake, and the ash, and the sea.