Arrivaderci a Napoli

I loved Naples. I felt comfortable there. I think it’s the kind of city I could eventually even feel at home in. But I know I’ll never truly know the city. Not if I lived there the rest of my life and learned fluent Italian tomorrow. It’s too deep.

Some cities are shallow, some are deep. It’s not a value judgment, and it doesn’t have much of a bearing on how much I like a town. But it’s there. Paris is a shallow city. Despite not knowing French and only spending two weeks there, I can tell you I know Paris. Maybe not all the nooks and crannies, not all the shortcuts, but I know the city. London is pretty deep, but mostly I’d define it as broad. Still, while I don’t feel like I know London, I definitely feel like I could one day, and probably not in the very distant future.

New York is different. It’s deep, but in a very different way than a city like Naples. New York is almost defined by its transiency. This is especially true of Manhattan. Even before colonization it was transient: the local natives would set up shop in the summer, do some hunting, and then leave in the winter. It’s a very rare thing to find a person who has been born, grew up, lived their adult life, and died all on the island of Manhattan.

More than any other city I know of, knowing New York is a choice: it’s all there if you want to put in the work, but it’s going to be a heck of a lot of work. And the work never ends. New York changes so fast that you’re constantly playing catch up. And it changes so fast that I’ve always held that it’s really the relative newcomer that knows the city the best at any given moment - old timers are always looking at it through the distorted lens of a city that’s no longer there.

Naples has none of this history of transience. Well, it does but only in one direction - out. As one the main emigrant cities of the world over the last 150 years or so, Naples is now undergoing an interesting transition. I have yet to look up the statistics on this, but I would not be surprised if lately more people have been entering Naples from other countries rather than leaving it for abroad.

I would by no means call Naples cosmopolitan. But it’s not entirely homogeneous either. In addition to the staples of pretty much any European city nowadays - West Africans street merchants, Australian hostel managers - there’s a few other communities in Naples: Albanians, Sri Lankans (mostly refugees from the renewed fighting), and Eastern Europeans - more so now that Bulgaria and Romania have ascended to the European Union. I would have liked to be able to have stayed a little longer and talked with a few more locals about the impact this has had on such an insular city.

In addition, I couldn’t pass. This is weird for me. I almost always pass as a local (at least before I open my mouth) in pretty much any city where it’s plausible someone of my particular appearance might live. I’m not quite sure why this is other than the fact that I tend to feel comfortable in cities and maybe project that comfortableness. Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Madrid, I blended right in. I got asked directions twice my first day in Rome. Not in Naples.

I had the same feeling of comfortableness. It wasn’t tourist season (not like there’s that many tourists anyway). My basic outfit of jeans, sneakers, and my leather jacket wasn’t particularly out of place. But nobody ever mistook me for anything but an outsider. Nobody even started speaking Italian to me. It was obvious to me that I was standing out in some way. This didn’t happen anywhere else in Italy - or even anywhere else in Europe for that matter. It didn’t even really happen to me in Rio where they can spot a tourist a mile away (I’ve been told it’s in the walk). It wasn’t me - it was the city.

I left feeling like we couldn’t really crack Naples. I was frustrated, but somewhat resigned. In some cities that feeling of frustration is much worse, because you know if you had stayed a little longer, prepared a little better, took a few more chances, you could have had it. Not Naples. I think I could have stayed forever and not really gotten that much farther. It’s just too deep.