Napoli for New Year’s, where the smoke runs as thick as fog

Napoli is a rough city. It’s missing toilet seats, sort of like Southern Mexico and Greece, and there is a garbage strike, which has been in effect for either two months or four years, but which has caused little change in the practice of Napolitanos. They walk downstairs each day and drop their plastic bags of garbage on the every growing mounds that have engulfed the commercial trashbins on the city streets.  Napolitanos seem to pay us visitors no mind, careening their scooters within centimeters of our bodies, but they do shoot us dirty looks when we stop to take photos of the garbage — this is one step too far, they seem to say.  We are no longer participating, we are merely gawking. This trash, I’ve heard, will provide particularly gruesome and awesome fodder for the antics of the wayward boys this New Year’s Eve.

For some reason, I have left the tranquility of Florence for Napoli on New Year’s. I have come to Napoli with my good friend S, a Belgian national living in Florence, her boyfriend, who is a native Napolitano, and one other friend, to experience the carefree and relatively lawless southern Italy.  Compared to Napoli, I find out, Florence is a cakewalk, gilt-edged and artisan.

Napoli is not a nice city, but it does have character, particularly in the Centro Historico, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where the boys are gearing up for this New Year’s Eve spectaculo we’ve heard so much about. “They’ll start bombing in the early afternoon,” our guide for the Napoli Sotteraneo tour tells us.  He is a wiry little guy who loves to affect a Liverpudlian accent when he speaks English, and who hopes to return to England to work for an underground music magazine.  He gives us a tour half in Spanish and half in English, stopping to answer his phone to give a friend party information in Italian.  “No, no, I’m at work, man,” he whispers in Italian.  “Yeah yeah, but the party it’s at…”  He holds his finger up to us and whispers in English, “Excuse me one moment.”

Eventually, he leads us down 200 plus stone stairs into the old Roman acqueduct, which was used, ironically enough, as a bomb shelter in World War II. Several hundred feet above us, groups of rag tag boys and many well groomed young men are all milling about with commercial grade firecrackers and fireworks tucked into their pockets.  They wander casually to the middle of an open square, bend down, fiddle, then hurriedly walk away.  A few moments later, a blast rocks the alley streets like gale force wind, knocking every pedestrian a bit off the straight and narrow path. S and I wonder if this is what it’s like to live in a warzone.

After the Napoli Sotteraneo tour, which culminates with a candlelight walk through a passage only 50 centimeters wide to view an eerily beautiful cistern, we repair to our “bed and breakfast”, the Bed and Breakfast DiLetto, which offers a kitchen to cook in and private rooms, some with private baths.  I meditate on intentions for the new year, then we set back out into the raucous streets, earplugs in hand, to eat good luck lobster and venture down to the waterfront for the “spectaculo.”

The walk down Via dei Tribunali that night is more harrowing than usual — the fearless motorscooters are fewer and farther between, but my mind is on high alert for any group of young men who appear to have too little going on.  Blasts continued to rock us from every side, and each time Stephanie and I jump and seize on to the men.

Via dei Tribunali, the artery of the Centro Historico, is no wider than an average American alley, but seems to still fit motorscooters, taxis, and innumerable pedestrians.  It starts near the gauntlet of streets leaving the train station, a circular morass of sleezy drugs, sorrowful prostitutes, and wistful cab drivers (“Amalfi Coast, I take you to the Amalfi Coast,” one shouts insistently at us the next day, with glazed sad eyes).  Tribunali then heads up a mild incline, past fishmongers, discount stores, cheap jewelry makers, the intermittent enoteca, churches and apartment buildings with thirty foot tall wooden entry doors, and pizzeria after pizzeria after pizzeria.

Foodies go to Napoli for the stellar pizzas, and Tribunali is pizza alley.  We ate at Sorbillo (32 Via dei Tribunali), a three generation restaurant of nineteen related pizzaiolos, all of whom have a pizza named after them.  The trick is to get there early; the wait can be at least an hour, even for a small party.  Nary a word was spoken as we scarfed down our deliciously burnt and gooey pies.

Past Sorbillo, which, like most restaurants is now shuttered for the holiday weekend, Tribunali heads west and uphill past La Locanda del Griffo, where we eat our new year’s meal of buttery sweet pasta and lobster and through the Quartiere Spagnoli, by far the easiest place to score hash if one can be discrete about it.  Tribunali finally spits the pedestrian (and one should only be a pedestrian in this city) out on the uncharacteristically wide Via Toledo.

At Via Toledo, we turn left and head toward the water.  I have an eagle-like grip on our groupmate’s arm, and Stephanie and her boyfriend clearly in my sight.  My boots slip sometimes on the slick cobblestones, on a motorist’s spit, or on dog shit, and my eyes move through all planes — up, down, around, and behind me — anticipating the teenager messing with us from a balcony, or the pairing of two ten year old boys unaware of the destruction a firecracker to the face can actually cause.  My walking partner, and my vice grip, keep me standing and with a tenuous grasp on a false sense of security.  I can’t decide if I prefer the earplugs in — all sound is muted, which is good for my eardrums, but bad for my sense of well being.  I opt to remove them.  One hopes to be as finely tuned as possible to one’s surroundings in these cases, and walk with a great sense of purpose.

We cross a giant plaza, where a large stage concert is taking place. In this crossing, I am subsumed by a modern day rave on the grounds of two thousand year old cobblestones, dwarfed by the a building I never knew the name of, but which is most likely an ancient palace turned into a museum, government building or bank. I am amazed at the universal affinity humans have for blinking neon paraphernalia.

Past that plaza, we enter into the other half of Napoli, where Parisian-style apartment buildings glitter, and the finest hotels sit along the water.  We are no longer overtaken by the fear of bomb blasts.  We cozy into the walk, passing sparkling dining rooms of rich Napolitanos.  We round the corner of the bay, settle down on the wall of the Pontile Castello dell’Ovo, and crack open the first bottle of prosecco.  It is 11:30pm.  Before us the Bay of Naples expands and encircles us; the Castel dell’Ovo frames the view to the left and the glitter of a hundred Christmas trees on the balconies of the Hotel Vesuvio make up the right.  The low hills of the bay sparkle, and the occasional firework erupts.  In Napoli, it is easy to buy commercial grade fireworks, and most every local has done so.

We get high on prosecco, and the clear night sky, and the ancient battiments and secret ruins below our feet.  We wonder about the attractive blondes in front of us.  They are wearing matching coats and talking to some men with children.  Are they airline stewardesses or high-end escorts?  The young boys at the restaurant below the bridge are lighting fireworks while their fathers watch with pride.  The bridge is quickly filling with well-dressed Italians who have finished dinner at the fine hotels and now hope to also see the spectaculo.

At midnight, we pop the second prosecco and the Bay of Naples erupts in a commercial-grade fireworks display.  The pops and sparkles overwhelm our senses and again I am taken aback at the universal human love for glitter.  The reds and golds rain down on the rooftops, the silvers become greens and the little baby fireworks accent the big ones in a million small explosions.  We drink straight from the bottles, pass them around, and scream “Auguri!”, the traditional Italian phrase to welcome in the New Year.  S and I even sing Auld Lang Syne.

Over the next hour, the sky becomes cloudy with smoke.  A sense of familiarity descends upon me.  Even in the cold night air, I suddenly feel warm, and I have fully forgotten about my previous state of high alert.  The way the smoke begins to mute the fireworks makes me feel like I’m in San Francisco on the 4th of July, or staring out across a neon sparkling playa muted by the dust of thousands of wheeling bikes.

For a few minutes, even an hour or two, I am blissfully happy, either completely unaware or simply at peace with the danger we all face in any given day in any given city.  Equanimous comes to mind, but I think I’m too drunk for that to apply.  Simply put, I feel at home, sparkly-eyed and fog-dusted, for a small time in this city that is quite an adventure, but never quite comfortable.