Edward Hutton revisits Naples

  

 

 

 

Revisiting Naples in 1957 after an absence that spanned two world wars, Edward Hutton's initial response was disillusion.

 

To come to Naples from Rome through the now fallen majesty of the Campagna, along that sombre road under Anagni and Montecassino, or by the Pontine Marshes under the Valerian hills, past spellbound Norma and the lilied meres of Ninfa, or to enter it first without warning out of the loneliness, the silence and the beauty of the sea is to experience an astonishing disillusion.

 

For there is nothing, I think, in all the South, nothing certainly in Italy, quite like Naples in its sordid and yet tremendous vitality, a vitality that is sterile, that wastes itself upon itself. It is still, as Bergeret the friend of Fragonard found it, the most animated city in Europe. A place so restless and noisy and confused that it might be pandemonium, so drab that it is not really redeemed even by the Castel dell’ Ovo, the Castel Nuovo and Sant’ Elmo.

 

All this meanness is emphasized and accentuated  by the unrivalled beauty of the world in which Parthenope stands, the spacious and perfect loveliness of the great bay, shining and yet half lost in all the gold of the sun, between the dreamy headlands of Sorrento, of Posilipo, of Misenum; the threatening gesture, the incomparable outline of Vesuvius, the vision of Capri, of Procida and Ischia rising out of the sea, the colour of sea and sky, of valley and mountain and curved shore. For this is Campania, the true Arcady of the Romans, and here more than anywhere else, perhaps, the forms of the past clothed in our dreams are indestructible, and will outface even such a disillusion as Naples affords.

 

In this incomparable landscape Naples stands, not like Genoa nobly about an amphitheatre of hills, nor like Palermo in an enchanted valley, but in the deepest curve of her vast and beautiful bay, at the foot of the hills and upon their slopes, beneath the great and splendid fortress of Sant’ Elmo, which towers up over the city in shining beauty and pride, the noble feature of a place that, but for it, would be almost without any monumental splendour.

 

Sant’ Elmo towers there over the city upon the west; farther away and to the north, upon a scarcely lesser height, stands the great Bourbon palace of Capodimonte, while to the east, upon the far side of the fruitful valley of the Sebethus, rises the violent pyramid of Vesuvius now without its silver streamer of smoke. Seen from afar, and especially from the sea, there can be but few places in the world comparable with this; the vast and beautiful bay closed on the west by Capo Miseno, with its sentinel islands Ischia and Procida, and on the east by the by the great headland of Sorrento more than twenty miles away as the gull flies, and defended, as it were, seaward by the island of Capri, is dominated in the very midst by the height and beauty and strangeness of Vesuvius….

Once in the city, Hutton described the pandemonium of its streets.

 

These long streets the colour of mud, built from the lava of Vesuvius, lined with tall, forbidding houses balconied with iron; those narrow salite climbing up towards Sant’ Elmo or descending to the harbour and Santa Lucia, crowded and squalid and hung everywhere with ragged clothes drying in the squalid air;…the noise that here more than any other city in the world overwhelms everything in its confusion and meanness, the howling of children, the cries of the women, the shouting of the men vainly competing with the hooting of horns, the explosion of the open exhausts of the motor vehicles, the cracking of whips, the beating of hoofs, the sirens of steamers, the innumerable bells—not only those, here so harsh, of the churches, but as I remember them the brutal gongs of trams, the bells of cows and goats; the mere hubbub of human speech that seems more deafening than it is by reason of the appalling emphasis of gesture; all this horrified and confused the stranger, chiefly perhaps, because he could find nothing definite in its confusion for the mind to seize upon—the mind indeed being half paralyzed by the flood of undistinguishable things, not one of which was characteristic, but rather all together. The mere extent of the place too, shapeless as it is, stretching for miles in all its sordidness along the seashore, appalled one; for its disorder was a violent disorder, its voice the voice of the mob, cruel, blatant, enormous, signifying nothing. 

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958. Pp.  1-3.