Naples Miscellany 10 (mid-January, 2008)
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What
is this strange power I have over garbage?!
They picked up the mountain of rubbish in front of
my building this morning for the first time in six
days. I have no idea if that reflects a general
bettering of the condition in the city at large or
whether a bolt of good luck just happened to hit
where I live. Whatever. I’ll take it. Strange,
though —I had a dream last night about that. I saw a
big empty space out in front, sidewalks clear, and
the rubbish bins empty, all clean as a whistle (a
grimy whistle, to be sure. I mean, you don’t want to
put your lips anywhere near it, but as metaphors go,
I’ll take that, too.) Skeptics will call my dream
coincidence; after all, garbage was on my mind and
they had to pick it up sooner or later, right?
Mystics will say I had a prescient dream. I choose
to think that my dream actually caused the event.
The Germans call this Traumkraft.
(They really don’t, but it's a lot better than Blitzkrieg or Lebensraum.)
- Perhaps connected. I see that they are going to have to cull thousands of mozzarella-producing buffalo from the herds in Campania due to disease. Just in case they are looking for a convenient place to stack the carcasses, I’d better get some serious dreaming done tonight. (Also see update.)
- There used to be a joke that someone in the Vatican had the job of putting pin-holes in condoms in keeping with the Roman Catholic stand against birth-control. Well, it’s not that bad. It’s worse. Containers full of defective condoms have just been seized at the port of Naples. Technically, no one really knows if they are defective; they were all made in China but bore counterfeit labels indicating that they were made in Italy. Still, it sounds like a plot to me.
- If you keep your glance above eye-level as you walk around the streets, you might step in some…no, I mean you might notice that there is a small army at work constantly plastering new ads over old ones on the many bill-boards set up by the city for that purpose. The billboards are set between metal supports and have to be worked on from ladders; workmen may have to climb as high as 12 to 15 feet to get the job done. Legitimate ads are licensed by the city, and part of the job of the guys on ladders is to go around the city taking down ads that have been put up without permission. It now turns out that almost no one in that corps of municipal employees works within the official and well-established safety guidelines; that is, they don’t wear helmets or safety belts.
- Jan. 23—They've just
found an unexploded
200-pound bomb from WW2 in the excavations
for the new subway station at the port. Square
blocks, including most of the passenger port, the
city hall, hotels, and apartment buildings have been
evacuated and will remain closed and empty for a
week while they "observe" the bomb and call in a
squad with a robot to remove it. (If you are
interested in just how a WW2 bomb got there in the
first place, see "Air
raids on Naples in WWII.")
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