See, Naples!

by Victoria Cano (United Kingdom (Great Britain))

Making a local connection Italy

“If we don’t find this place soon, I’m going to have a heart attack.” Coming from my father, a man who was in extreme heart failure a mere six months ago, this is no idle threat. It’s also the reason we are in Naples, the city of my father’s birth and baptism. Naples, the long-lost city of childhood, a town my father has not set foot in for over a century, spending the past fifty years living contentedly within his adopted American borders. That is until his heart stopped. There is a famous Italian proverb: ‘Vedi Napoli e poi muori.’ It translates to: See Naples and die! Well for us it was a little different; see Naples and live. Please. “You have to promise me,” I begged over the crackle of a long-distance call as they were wheeling him into heart surgery. “You have to live to see Naples with me. Promise.” And he did. We’ve been walking for hours: cavorting past the un-airconditioned archeology museum; left down the book seller’s alley of Porta D’Alba; straight onto the Via Toledo, the old sugar rose pink and earthen olive-green Spanish style houses repainted in layers of cheap black and silver graffiti; above us always are the zig zags of clothing lines, the multi-colored laundry of the Neapolitans, spread out feathered plumes on the ridgeback of a mythical bird. Naples is not so much a city as a great membranous thought plucked from the collective consciousness, rendered to life with spitfire, dirt, and noise. She feels impossibly alive. My dad, out of shape at the best of times, is struggling to manage under the intense Italian heat and my poor map reading skills. It will not be long now before even the promise of gelato fails to compel him one step further. But we can’t stop, not yet, we are so close---he doesn’t know it but there is a buried treasure chest that belongs to him hidden somewhere in these hills. I smile. I can’t wait to see him remember. We find it by accident, a series of lucky left turns, and the building appears; an unassuming little church tucked away in the crook of one of Naples’s many, many, many backstreets. I push my father towards it and wait for the memory to slide into place. Instead he looks at me in confusion. “It’s the church where you were baptized!” He surveys the building, looking around for some something: a familiar windowsill, a doorway, anything that might dislodge his long-buried memory of this place. It does not come. “Can we have some ice cream now?” he asks with the patience of a child who has dutifully eaten their vegetables and now awaits their sugary reward. Defeated, we walk back down the many, many hills; ambling towards the Piazza del Plebiscito, collecting our consolation prize along the way: two scoops of pistachio for me, and some stracciatella for dad. Naples is at its best in the early evening, when all the afternoon sleep has washed the day’s work from your limbs, and an evening carpeted in rich wine, unctuous food, and unabashed laughter unfurls itself at your feet. I lead us across the Piazza, towards the bay where the great Vesuvius casts an ever-watchful gaze across her city, a junkyard dog sleeping with one eye open under the hot summer sun. My father has given me so much, I just wanted to be able to give him back Naples. I failed; memory is too mercurial; this city no longer belongs to him, or to us. Lost in thought, I don’t notice the flock of birds I’ve upset till they rise before me, me like Moses parting a sea of feathers and dropped breadcrumbs. Suddenly I can’t hear the familiar slap of my dad’s walking sandals against the uneven ground---he’s stopped in his tracks, hands at his sides in shock, the gelato on his plastic spoon slipping off to become a temporary tattoo on the pavement. “The pigeons.” “What about them?” I ask. He turns to me, his goofy grin made wider by the new dentures he got especially for this trip. “I remember them.”