I love Naples. In that city I am still very young. I learn to knead pasta and cook it under the orders of my napuletana nonna. I discover that god can smell sulfur in the crater of an unusually snowy Vomer. I help and comfort my friends from all over Europe when they get robbed in the street for the first time. Also the second. I go unnoticed. The Neapolitans baptize me as il greco, although some disagree and insist that the name I deserve is il turco. Does not matter. Mediterranean all. My appearance blends in with the landscape and that makes me unattractive to petty thieves. I see a guard piss on a wall adorned with 1st century BC Roman paintings in the ruins of Ercolano.
I sing the Tammurriata Nera with more will than success and I eat fried pizza walking along San Biagio dei Livrai, the street of the nativity scenes. I fall in love in Capri, like the rich. And above all I go to the San Paolo stadium, now renamed Diego Armando Maradona, to watch soccer. To mingle with the raggazzi of the curve and to shout the goals of a bad season, 92-93, in which Napoli finished eleventh. Maradona had already left. But that year he made his debut, still nobody, Cannavaro and we sang the occasional goal by Gianfranco Zola. Worse times would come later. Second division, third. But he had already left me. And eyes that do not see, heart that does not feel.
The city, mine, is like the terracotta Pulcinella that has been with me for 30 years. A stoic place, beaten so many times and many others clinging to hope, not optimism. Naples is the open veins. The ability to adapt, suffer and enjoy what life sees fit to grant you. Resigned, conformed, wise. And sad, very sad sometimes. As those born there say, in Naples you cry when you arrive and when you leave. The first time due to bewilderment and the second time anticipating longing.
Naples finally takes out his chest with his third scudetto. Maradona no longer reigns alone and it will be necessary to make room in the Olympus of Campania because the city has gone mad and already has new heroes. Even the poets Virgil and Leopardi must be celebrating in their tombs in Piedigrotta. From the other shore of our sea comes the cry that the Italian south has kept in its throat for thirty-three years. Because that city is the navel of what we are also. The metaphor, I would like it mine, is from the piece by the Neapolitan writer Erri de Luca and there it goes in its entirety: “Naples is the navel of the Mediterranean. If you take a line from Marseille to Athens, from Trieste to Tripoli, from Istanbul to Barcelona, you cross Naples. It is in the middle of the Mediterranean like the month of May in the middle of the year”. Congratulations, brothers. And in nothing we return the same cry of joy.
