Edward Hutton returned to Naples in 1957 having first visited the city sixty years before. Although Italy had changed dramatically, especially after the Second World War, there was something unchanging about Naples. Here I reproduce his Preface to Naples and Campania Revisited.
While Italy is still the most delightful of all countries to live in, I must admit that with the rapid democratization of the world since the Second World War a rather saddening change has befallen her.
The age of the traveller is gone; even the age of the tourist too. Now the tripper, decanted in crowds from charabanc and motor-coach, descends on the lovely cities, and passes like a flood from Cathedral to gallery and museum, open-mouthed or indifferent; or masquerading as a pilgrimage swamps such a city as Assisi, so that it is only possible to enjoy the place in peace in the winter from November to March. Pandemonium resumes her reign at Easter.
And then there is the sophistication of the countryside. Even the Via Appia, the “Queen of Roads”, the backbone of Campania, is outraged with every sort of commercial placard and advertisement. And all its antiquity has been sacrificed to the motor-car.
It is, of course, petrol and perhaps America that are the great levellers.
The noise everywhere in the cities has not only increased but has changed its nature. It is no longer human but mechanical. Every city, every town proclaims at its gates: Zona di Silenzio, which means that it is forbidden to sound the motor-horn in its streets. But what is the good of that when every car, every lorry, every Vespa, every motor-cycle is driven with open exhaust to make as much noise as possible? For the Italian seems to believe that noise is power. In many cities, in Florence for instance and in Rome, too, it is difficult to get any sleep till the not so early hours of the morning, and then at five or six o’clock it begins all over again.
Naples, save Rome the only capitol city in the peninsula, seems largely oblivious of those incursions, which are absorbed perhaps by the Cathedral of S. Januarius, and the museum, but chiefly I suspect by Pompeii and Capri. At any rate the churches of Naples, full of pictures of the seventeenth century and Neapolitan Baroque, are for the most part unvisited, and if the Toledo once no doubt “inexpressively Neapolitan” has been commercialized till it is entirely anonymous and has really become the “Via Roma”, that is to say like any other main street in Milan or Turin, there still remains as unvisited as the churches, and almost as I remember them when I first came to Naples sixty years ago, many strade, vichi, salite, fondaci, and not least the Via del Tribunale and the speccanapoli—the Via San Biagio and the Piazza Capuana with its lovely Tuscan gate and its market entirely Neapolitan neither vulgarized nor emasculate.
To stroll in those narrow streets filled with light and shade between the lofty balconied houses from church to church, from the majolica cloister of the Clarisse of Santa Chiara to the arcaded and fountained garden of San Gregorio Armeno under its many coloured dome, from the Guglia of the Immacolata to the Guglia of San Domenico, from the shrine of the blood of S. Gennaro to the ossuary of Sant’ Agostino alla Zecca, from the tomb of Tino di Camaino in the Donna Regina to the strange Baroque statues of San Severo, to leave Donatello in Sant’ Angelo a Nilo to find Antonio Rossellino in Monte Oliveto, to search for the pictures of Caravaggio, of Caracciolo, of Stanzione, will fill many a morning with quiet unhustled happiness, as though today were yesterday, and almost as though the Regno had never passed away. For in Naples certainly the old songs are the best.
O dolce Napoli,
O suol beato,
Ove sorridere
Volle il creato!
Tu sei l’impero
Dell’ armonia—
Santa Lucia!
Santa Lucia!
1957
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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958. Preface. Pp. vii-viii.
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