italiafile

I would bet good money that the electricity consumption of Naples doubles in the weeks leading up to Christmas. In the centre every street is bedecked with lights; every shop is twinkling, flashing, chasing and slow fading . It makes the West End of London look as though its in deep mourning during Advent. The Neapolitans have also grasped the concept of the Christmas tree to their collective bosom, and they are everywhere. Decorated to the hilt, festooned with lights, the old Neapolitan proverb of ‘more is more’ holds true.
In the Galleria Umberto a huge Christmas tree has been erected and covered in requests to Babbo Natale, or Father Christmas as he is known in the English speaking world. I was fully expecting these hand written notes to reveal childrens’ desires for Christmas, but apart from a little letter asking Babbo to bring his father back for the festive season, all of the rest of the entreaties were from adults, pleading their cases. ‘Dear Babbo, please bring me a man for Christmas’ was the recurring theme. Some were more specific: ‘babbo, I would like Luca Tomaso for Christmas, love from Adriana in Torre del Greco’. These were interspersed with prayers for recovery from illness, souls to rest in peace and children to love their parents. It made a fascinating half hour of reading, and judging by the crowd, everyone else thought so too, apart from perhaps Luca Tomaso who would no doubt run for the hills when he saw who was after him. One of the Neapolitan sports is to steal this 20 foot high tree. They have succeeded three out of the last four years. The year they failed they opted to burn it instead. Quite how a large betubbed Xmas tree is able to vanich into thin air with no-one seeing it being divested of its twinkly lights is a mystery. But then so are many things in Naples.

Churches throughout the city throw open their doors for all and sundry to venture in and gaze upon the historical presepi. One, in the Via Toledo, not only tells the Christmas story, but also progressed through most of the New Testament in different tableaux. The crucifixion was lit by a blue spotlight and a strobe, so not terribly historical, especially as between that and the next scene depicting Christ ascending to heaven, ran a woman holding the Turin Shroud.

On one of my shopping forays to the outer parts of the city I was thrilled to discover a shop with a stupid name. It’s strange how such a little thing can make or break a whole day, but I have set myself targets and it is now incumbent on me to meet them. Here in a side street in Vomero is a purveyor of training shoes and sports footwear. Like many other shops of this type it looks for a simple English name which epitomises its stock. Further along the same street are branches of ‘Footlocker’ and ‘Shoesport’, so in an attempt to come up with something different the owners had plumped for the redoubtable ‘Athletes Foot’. It quite made my morning. It’s the best one I’ve found since I passed a highly indifferent clothes shop calling itself ‘ Personalities and their interpretations’ . The stock was so plain as to be interpreting the personality of a trainspotter in a branch of Milletts.

Considering Christmas, like most holidays in Naples, is more concerned with food than presents, (a real feast day), the Neapolitans are doing their level best to empty all the shops of their stock. Presents here tend to wait for La Befana, on the 6th January, the hoary old tale being one of an old woman who gives good children sweets and bad ones, coal. Apparently this old crone, la Befana, who looks remarkably similar to old English woodcuts of witches, played host to the Magi one night as they made their way to visit the baby Jesus.


I had to pay my Electricity bill this morning. I chose to while away an hour standing in a queue at the post office. As the much heralded ‘orderly queuing system’ was working, apart from the insistent few who come in, march to a window and ask to be served ahead of the queuing masses and are shouted down by the staff as well as the public, I stood in a single line which snaked its way round the auditorium like space of the central post office. There is a second, shorter queue designated solely for pensioners, which means only the young and ablebodied have to waste most of their morning waiting to pay their electricity bill. This post office is another monumental piece of fascist architecture, and has just been restored. The exterior is now a white marble, with modernistic windows and a vast flight of steps in black marble. The slightest drop of rain and they become a skating rink, which is unfortunate for the pensioners trying to get inside to collect their pensions. The building itself is a semicircle, though you would only be sure of this if you took up a light aircraft and looked down on the edifice. It is huge, the façade now bears a working illuminated art deco clock, and the original inscription: Built in 1936. XIV year of the era of fascism’, which isn’t to everyones taste. There has been an argument raging in the press as to whether such an acknowledgement to Italy’s past should be removed, and for once I can see both sides of the argument, especially as Naples elected another Mussolini to parliament not so long ago. The restoration work has yet to start inside. There is a foyer with a huge piece of heroic sculpture, and three halls; banking, postage and telecommunications. Each of these has around 30 cashiers windows, which still allow an inordinate amount of floorspace for people to queue. Each of these halls is about 40 feet high, and lit appallingly. The banking hall has a mosaic ceiling of thermal tiles, and a number of filthy air extractors. Standing below them in the summer you can almost see the legionella bacteria falling onto the unhappy bankers below. What natural light there is comes from windows made from an early glass brick, the precursor of most of the warehouse conversions in London.
It seems that the Post Office might want to sell off this particular building, and the council would dearly like to get its hands on it. It must be one of the biggest buildings in Naples, and is as central as you could hope for, but even so, the council don’t want it for themselves. They have plans for this white marble elephant, and want it to become the Pompidou Centre of the Mezzogiorno. It would be ideally suited to such a role, but I am doubtful whether Naples has enough exhibits to fill it without emptying all the other museums.

The piazza it occupies is bordered by other office blocks built around the same time. The Questura, the Provincia, and the Association for the Mutilated and Wounded. Not the most prepossessing title for an insurance company but in huge art deco lettering it certainly catches the eye.

The queue moved at an invalided snail’s pace. Around me tempers were lost and regained, until the fateful moment I was only two away from my chance to rush towards a cashier waving my electricity bill. At this moment, it being 11:30, all the cashiers put up ‘closed’ signs in their windows and left their desks. One brave man left in vision behind the toughened glass shouted ‘Sciopero’ and fled. After waiting for an hour, with no forewarning, the staff had gone on strike. I was expecting a riot. Behind me a groundswell of murmuring became raised angry voices, which subsided after only a few seconds. Italians recognise the right to withhold labour, it seems, and all of them turned and quietly left the building. Only one, a woman drowning in fur, was volubly furious but she was swept along in the tide and deposited outside with the rest of us, to slip and skate down the marble steps. I bet this didn’t happen in the 14th year of the era of fascism.

Row today about tea. A Neapolitan said it made you fat. I pointed out that it was the six spoonfuls of sugar he put in that made him fat. He was not convinced. Apparently hot stained water is fattening.