Naples

Pictures of our adventures Naples can be found here.

There are few feelings in life like waking up early, drinking a cup of coffee, going downstairs, and having an entirely new City at your feet. And Naples is just that - a City. Capital C.

Naples is loud, chaotic, and incredibly densely populated. Vespa scooters are the preferred mode of transportation through the narrow streets of the city center, sometimes carrying an entire family - and sometimes driven by children who look barely out of diapers. Add to this cars, trucks, and of course people. A lot of people. Stop signs are taken as loose suggestions at best, and I think I saw a total of one traffic light. Yet despite all of this, I never felt the least bit unsafe walking anywhere in the city.

Naples has an amazing amount of flow. The chaos isn’t chaos at all, not once you figure out a few things. You can walk out into the middle of traffic blindfolded in the center of town and you’ll be fine. Cars will slow down, the scooters will swerve around you, nobody will even honk at you. Eye contact isn’t necessary - the drivers know you’re there and always have one foot on the brake. Holding your hand straight down with your palm flat and facing the ground is sometimes used to mean “don’t run me over,” but even that is mostly a formality. But you’ve got to keep moving. No hesitating for a small break in traffic, or taking a tentative step out into the street - it breaks the flow of the city.

The best thing about this flow is that there’s no anger involved. Honking is used to say “you might not be able to see me, but I’m here,” not “screw you buddy!” or “hurry up asshole!” If you walk out in front of a car and the guy has to slow down, that’s just the normal flow of things. Nothing to get upset about, not a personal insult, nothing to think about past the moment. Traffic is worse, but there’s no road rage. There isn’t the pent-up anger you find a lot of places in the United States that sometimes comes out in mundane things like driving. And there isn’t that sense of testosterone-fueled competition and defensiveness simmering on the streets and lingering below the surface of every mundane social encounter. Which I think is why, despite several people telling me Naples was a dangerous city, I felt much more at ease than in other, supposedly “safe” cities back in the United States.

One of my first encounters in Naples was on the subway. I was sitting in the right hand seat of a four-seat bench. The doors opened, and a father and son, who looked about 7 or 8 years old got on. The father sat on the left side, and the son in the middle. Without a trace of self-consciousness, and despite not being crowded, the kid learned his head against my shoulder and put his elbow on my leg. The father (I think because he noticed I was reading a book in English) eventually apologized and pulled the kid over to him, giving him a big hug and holding his hand the rest of the trip.

That scene is perfectly normal in Italy. And, to a large extent, I think it explains that lack of macho territorial energy that is so prevalent in countries with an Anglo-Saxon heritage. I have no way of proving it, but it seems to make sense to me that kids that grow up hugging their dads are generally much more chill. Naples is crowded, chaotic, energetic, and might be dangerous (although I didn’t experience it). But it’s not mean.

Another thing that breaks the flow, that took me a few days to figure out, is passing people on the street. In New York, and most of the United States I think, the instinctual reaction when walking down the street and coming up to someone walking the opposite way is to veer to the right to avoid them. After a couple of days of doing a lot of the “pedestrian tango” (you know, veer to the right…jerk to the left…stop…step to the left…jerk to the right…fall over your feet…manage to pass each other), I figured out what I was doing wrong. The natural instinct in Naples when coming upon that situation is to veer to the left, not the right. It’s not instinctual to us (traffic flows on the right hand side of the street in Naples also after all), but that realization was key to feeling at home navigating the Neopolitan streetscape.