Cheating death, wide awake, in Naples

"If you don’t like Naples, you don’t like Italy."

For the last few nights I have had this dream. In the dream I’m a little boy again, and I’m at Heathrow with my mother. And we’re going to Barcelona, but on our way to the gate I break off and make for the British Airways flight instead, flight 11492, and it’s going to Naples. I get on this flight instead and leave my mother behind. She’s going to Barcelona. I have this dream routinely, waking just as the plane lands, but always before I can disembark.

As divinity would have it, I’m now in italy with my girlfriend, visiting family. I know instantly, as soon as we get to Telese Terme, their small city in the midst of the bootleg, what I have to do. We agree to travel to Naples on Wednesday to realise my dream. I was a young boy and I was happy.

The alarm rang at 8am, not objectively early but, coming off the back of a few 6am wake-up calls for familial activities, a quick shot to the gut. We scrambled ready and took ourselves out into the heat, even then suffocating, and down to the “train station”.

Comprised of two small platforms, our journey from entrance to platform came via a small metal bridge which is on the same level as the tracks itself, and which one crosses by looking left, looking right, and observing no trains in the distance, making the sign of the cross over oneself and taking the plunge. We survived to platform 2 and awaited our train.

For all the despair that is to come, the outbound train was excellent. Double-decked, air-conditioned, slow enough to take in the rural surroundings — we were hopeful, hilariously hopeful, that our Neapolitan journey might resemble my fanciful dreams.

Whatever hope we clung to withered by the time we exited Naples Centrale, the city-centre station. We had decided on this vintage market — dubbed “the biggest vintage thrift in the South of Italy” — with a stunning view of Vesuvius, so we set out on the 1113 Metro line.

As will become apparent, Naples is inseparable from dirt. It is dirty, unclean, decrepit, decayed, unhygienic, unsanitary — it is nasty. The metro station, praised on social media for it’s glorious architecture, is no different. Naples Garibaldi, anyway, is a metal box, with sparse, low-effort graffiti on the walls, dirt on the tracks, and one lonesome sign hanging, hanged, with the name ashamedly written. The train itself was no better, a steamy, sweaty mess of businessmen and schoolchildren, natives as confused as us tourists — in large part, due to the fact that most stations don’t have stop names, and the ones that do aren’t announced on the tannoy anyway — because none of the stops are announced, and there is no tannoy.

Using a mixture of Google Maps and faith in something bigger, we made it to our stop, and picked up our bodies and our morale in the dawn of this most exciting vintage market.

The vintage market, if you would like to call it that, was a street and a half of stalls, power-banks and hair-clips, overpriced and sad. We quickly shook ourselves free and trekked back up to the station, intent on at least getting a glimpse of Vesuvius. We asked a tour guide if there was anywhere in walking distance that we could get that phenomenal view of the volcano that we were promised.

As it turned out, the nearest view site was 10 minutes walk away, by which time we would have missed our train back to the city-centre (at this point, we were yet to walk around the city, and still thinking of it as this metropolitan / old town hybrid, a Rome mixed with Milan with the romanticism of Venice), so we forfeited that too. Dejected and sweating, we got the suffocating metro back into Naples Garibaldi, and resigned ourselves to an underwhelming McDonalds in the birthplace of pizza.

And then it was time to explore the city itself. The area around the station was, in no uncertain terms, completely awful. It was dirty, with a general air of crime and menace, perpetrated mostly by the small gangs of men with wild eyes, concentrated outside of rundown shops and cafes, who would stare at us as we walked past, turning their entire bodies as they did so, and occasionally getting up and starting towards us before we scampered around a corner. This was absolutely terrifying at 2pm on a Wednesday, the least scary time, and yet we were as vigilant as Marines for the duration of our ‘stroll’.

All this may be forgiven if the city itself were architecturally beautiful, but it isn’t. It is decaying, uncared for, the runt of the litter. It has been discarded, disowned, by the majestic Romantic beauty of Rome and Florence and Venice. There is so much trash on the streets, the main streets right around the central station, and animalistic, feral junkies looking for money, drugs, or violence on the street corners. In the right slant of light it feels, by all accounts, like Gotham.

So around 3pm, 4 hours earlier than our projected exit time, we packed up and left. We were deliriously joyful at this point - having suffered through the city itself, in a blanket of weather-warning heat, we had lost our better sense and resigned ourselves to finding the experience, which we had been indignant against so far, hilarious. Our train home was sweatier and slower, but at that point we didn’t care so much. And when we arrived back in Telese Terme, population 7,000, we were so happy. It had never looked so grand, so welcoming. It was a small oasis that invited you in, told you that you were safe… that nothing could possibly go wrong, that everything was as it should be. And, cuddled up in the mollifying arms of this tiny town, the esoteric home of my maternal cousins, we unclenched our jaws.

I don’t doubt that there are lovely parts of Naples - it became apparent to us on our scroll through social media, on the train back, that we had missed all of the picturesque bay area and traversed only the seedy underbelly, the criminal wasteland. But I no longer have that dream where I’m a little boy again, and I don’t leave my mother alone on the Barcelona flight. I don’t dream anymore, at all. I don’t sleep. I don’t ever sleep.