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It rained last night. The palazzo which houses the internet point seems to have suffered. This morning, the entrance was full of rubble which had fallen from the walls. The firemen arrived and sealed it off, while taking a hammer to most of the exterior walls and knocking off all the render, presumably to stop it falling on the heads of others. It won’t help the general state of preservation of the place. One good reason why it is probably safer to rent than buy in the historic centre.

Christmas obviously started the day after Ognissanti. There are no more holidays before the big one, except the feast of the Immaculate Conception by which time you should have your tree up. In Via San Gregorio Armeno, the shops are full to bursting with Xmas goodies. As is the street itself. There just aren’t enough shops now, so new cabins are being erected in every available space at a rate of knots. Since last night another 5 have appeared, and more are on the way. There seems to be no hint of a planning application or permit, just lots of lusty youths with wood and corrugated iron, assembling temporary shelters for the huge amounts of presepi that have been built and stored over the year.

I sat outside a bar on the Via Tribunali this afternoon and engaged myself in scientific endeavour. For ten minutes I counted all the scooters that passed, an astonishing 134. Of these forty six had a single rider. The remaining 88 had a total of 203 passengers and seven dogs. The youngest driver was probably three years old, but at least he had his father sitting behind him, ready to grab the handlebars should his son and heir fail to negotiate the milling throng while carrying two scaffolding poles and a gas canister. The youngest of the unaccompanied riders was all of 7. These ‘scugnizzi’ generally ride around in pairs so as to create twice as much havoc, though I find the early teenaged girls the most annoying, as they ‘beep’ constantly, and are more interested in grooming each other and sending text messages on their telefonini than actually getting from a to b. Most tellingly of all not one of the 249 people aboard these bikes had a crash helmet, a fact which didn’t worry the police one jot. Here in Spaccanapoli there is yet a different code from other parts of the city. .

Imagine if you will, the westerns that crowded the television airwaves in your youth. Cowboys who could only exist when astride a horse. In fact the only time we saw them walk was when they strode, bandy legged, into a saloon. (They always seemed to leave flying, via a window.) Now apply the same to Neapolitans and their scooters This piece of machinery is as fundamental to life here as a horse was in the Old West. In the same way as it is impossible to imagine a cowboy wearing a sensible hard hat in case he was thrown from his steed, so is it unimaginable to think of Neapolitans threatening their carefully cultivated ‘bella figura’ with something so graceless and styleless as a crash helmet. As the Lone Ranger would rear up on Silver’s hind legs when answering a call for help, so the motorbike police here slam down their radios and execute a perfect wheelie on their bikes as they scream away to answer an emergency. Five hundred years the Neapolitans were renowned for their horses and horsemanship, so much so that a bridled horse was an integral part of the coat of arms. Nowadays it would be a Vespa.