Ciao Napoli!

          Imagine onion soup, served by a no-nonsense waitress in a workaday Parisian restaurant across the road from the Gare de Lyon. It sounds like a cliché, but it really happens and, when it does, one’s expectations are fulfilled and all is right with the world. After all, when in France you want things to feel French, n’est-ce pas?

          Yes, up to a point, but a tourist like me can soon struggle linguistically when situations become more complicated than ordering from a menu – or even before that stage is reached. Then, it comes in handy to be served by a waitress accustomed to floundering foreigners.

          I was trying to be respectful and speak a few words of the native tongue, but the problem was that I have been learning Italian these past few weeks and I was getting merci mixed up with grazie, a miserable failure and one for which no apology should atone. The slightly aggrieved waitress reacted by demonstrating her mastery of English delivered with a side order of Gallic contempt. It was a truly authentic Parisian episode and prompted me to sharpen my linguistic responses pronto, as we were about to catch a train to Milan, where we would overnight before travelling to our destination, Napoli.

          Compared with flying, trains and overnight stops offer a more immersive foreign experience, which is in keeping with our preference for staying a few weeks in rented apartments in the centres of cities. Tourists like us can always feel reassured that English will be spoken by someone, somewhere along the line, but the point of going abroad is to feel the difference and stir oneself out of complacency, for better or worse.

          Insofar as they are large centres of populations with infrastructural complexities, all cities are similar. Their mayors meet at international conventions to discuss problems and swap ideas. Yet, even within a region within a country, each of these urban environments has characteristic elements that are unique, wherein lies the fascination.

          Our first day in the scruffy yet deliciously vibrant centro storico of Napoli was spent ‘tasting’ the place with all our senses. Knowing that we have a few weeks to savour its delights in depth, we felt no need to rush at things. The abundance of religious buildings alone would overwhelm all but the most intrepid explorers of antiquity, let alone those of us with a limited appetite for over-wrought church interiors.

          My plan is to pick them off, one by one, as the fancy takes me and as prompted by an unusual guidebook, A Traveller’s Reader by Desmond Seward, a “topographical anthology” of extracts from historical documents ranging from the serious to what might be described as tittle-tattle. For instance, a Protestant Englishman visiting San Domenico Maggiore in 1594 reported that the monks there “sing, or rather howl, rest to the souls” of their benefactors, a sliver of contemporary commentary that brings a bit of real life to an other-worldly institution by mocking its celebrants.

          When you stay in a city so old, its antiquity infuses daily life. The backdrop of ancient buildings, though they are adapted to modern living, oblige a respect for bygone eras and instil an understanding of how society functioned and how it subsequently adapted to the present day. The question of how we shall be living in our cities in the centuries to come may be fodder for sci-fi but, looking at the evidence so far, the past is likely to remain at the heart of life – so long as it is neither razed nor erased, that is. Meanwhile we, the tourists, do our bit to ensure an enduring future of this city’s past, by paying towards its upkeep.