As noted elsewhere
(see portal on Underground
Naples), Naples is honeycombed with hundreds of
manmade tunnels and caves. There are also a lot of
simple unplanned holes in the ground in the form of
cave-ins and sink-holes. These often occur beneath the
streets and buildings at higher elevations. The city
is largely built on a hill, and you can only dig and
put up so many new buildings and lay down so many new
miles of track for subway lines before the hill starts
to sag and crumble in protest. Four such holes opened
last week along the street called Vico San Carlo alle
Mortelle just below the major road of Corso Vittorio
Emanuele II in the Chiaia section of Naples. Five
buildings were evacuated, causing the displacement of
297 persons. One of the sink-holes opened within the church
of San Carlo alle
Mortelle (photo, right). There were no
injuries, perhaps due to the fact that the cave-ins
happened in the middle of the night when people were
inside and asleep. The road, itself, bears heavy
traffic in the morning and afternoon rush hours. Well,
bore traffic;
the street has been closed.
Identical acronyms
are confusing. I happily report that ANCEM (Associazione Napoli
Capitale Europea della Musica/Association
Naples Music Capital of Europe) will continue its
concert season until Christmas with five concerts in
the centrally located Palatina Chapel of the Maschio Angioino instead of
in the Mostra d'Oltremare (Overseas
fair Grounds) in Fuorigrotta. I also report that I
didn't know what the acronym ANCEM stood for. The
first expansion I came across was Associazione Nazionale
Contro gli Errori Medici--National
Association Against Medical Errors. I thought, hmmmm, Music Against
Medical Malpractice! That sounded just weird
enough to interest me. Alas...
It's one thing
on the streets, but a number of Neapolitan hospitals
(!) report the presence of itinerant vendors wandering
the corridors and peddling everything from sandwiches
to coffee to newspapers and--particularly
egregious--cigarettes to patients in the ward for
respiratory ailments! That case came to light
yesterday when the private rent-a-cops that guard these institutions busted a
kindly 64-year-old gentleman and found hundreds of
packs of black-market (no tax stamps) lung-busters in
his 24-hour bag.
In a city
already awash with ongoing major construction of
underground train tracks and surface stations to go
with them, someone at city hall has seriously proposed
the construction of a suspension cable lift (as in
chairs or cabins that you ride up to the tops of
mountains!) that would connect the National
Archaeological Museum at the bottom with the museum at
Capodimonte at the top. That ride would climb about a
mile and be suspended along the way by a series of
massive pillars built in the Sanità
section of the city. Residents along the
proposed route are against the idea, and skeptics at
city hall recall a similar experience many years ago:
When the Mostra d'Oltremare
(Overseas Fair Grounds) opened in the 1930s, it was at
one end of a spectacular suspension
lift that ran above Fuorigrotta and to a station
high up on the scenic Posillipo ridge. It was a great
ride, but fell victim to urbanization. The lift was
closed in 1961 to permit buildings to go up around the
suspension pillars, themselves The buildings went up
very fast, well before anyone could figure out what to
do with the pillars. The pillars are still there!
Some windows in the upper floors of nearby buildings
open directly onto these concrete mastodons. The
pillars cannot be removed without the use of
explosives, so it's safer (and uglier)
to leave them in place. The same thing would surely
happen with this new one to Capodimonte, say critics.
When the cops crack
down on street vendors who have set up small stalls
around the city, the vendors are usually illegal and
fly-by-night; that is, they'll open again tomorrow at
another location. This time, however, the vendors are
legitimately in business; they are the owners of the
many Christmas shops along via San Gregorio
Armeno that deal in the trappings of
the presepe,
the manger display so iconic of Christmas in Naples.
Most of the vendors have for many years used outside
stalls and tables in front of their shops to display
their wares. Someone decided that the stalls were not
in keeping with paragraph something-or-other of
subsection blah-blah of the Uniform Code of Manger
Displays (or something) and they have all been
removed. The street is now as clean as a whistle. That
means no tourists, either, for--lo and behold (seems
to fit, here)--people like the outside displays! They like to wander up
the street and browse and shop! A group of shop owners
is now presenting their case to the appropriate
administrative numskull responsible for this disaster.
Verily, I say unto you, the displays will be back for
the Christmas rush. (Believe it or not, it is gearing
up already.) update below
CRESME stands
for Centro ricerche
economiche sociali di mercato per l'edilizia e il
territorio [Center for social and economic
research on construction and real estate]. It has just
released an eye-opening report (for those whose eyes
were for some reason still closed to these problems):
the province of Naples (of which the city of Naples is
the capital), one of the five provinces in the
Campania region of Italy, is at great risk in case of
of earthquake or flood. In case of earthquake, 1,651
school buildings and 33 hospitals in the province are
at significant risk. In case of flood, 354 schools and
4 hospitals are at risk. The report comes on the heels
of the recent flood disaster in Messina at the
beginning of October and is not that far removed in
time (1998) from the Sarno floods in the province of
Naples that killed 137 persons.
Logo of the 1st
IAC,
held in Paris
in 1950
Word comes that
Naples will host the 63rd International
Astronautical Congress in 2012. (Indeed, people have
been thinking about space travel for quite a while;
the first congress was in Paris in 1950. That
single-stage rocket ship in the logo on the right
looks suspiciously like a V-2!) That might help to
make up for the loss to Barcelona in the bid for the
2007 America's Cup regatta. It has even encouraged
the Naples City Parenting Persons to reach for the
stars in another way: they have announced a plan to
be one of the Italian cities that will bid for the
2020 summer Olympic Games. Stay tuned.
An infamous scene
from Francesco Rosi's 1963 film Le mani sulla città
[Hands on the City] shows a bunch of corrupt
politicians and land speculators feasting on a cake
model of the Bay of Naples, devouring everything in
sight. It happens in real life, too! In Giugliano,
near Naples, 38 people are under investigation
--judges, contractors and possibly some real bona
fide criminals-- for having thrown up 98 housing
units and a hotel along an
historic section of the famed Appian Way. It was all
to be part of Parco
l'Obelisco, a planned tourist village. Investigation continues, bank
accounts have been seized and all of the housing has
been sequestered. Round up the usual suspects.
By law,
throughout Europe all public buildings and most
private buildings where the public might gather
(cinemas, for example) now have to provide access
for the handicapped. I haven't
counted the number of wheelchair ramps in European
major cities, but I take note of them in Naples. The
local papers report that a young man, Emmanuel, can
now go to high school like any other kid after only
one year and nine months of hassle to get one
elevator that works and to build one wheelchair
ramp, items that are legally required in the first
place. This is not some outback one-room school
house; it's a major high school (S. Maria di
Costantinopoli) near Piazza Dante in the
heart of the city. (Also see this link form
May 2015)
Via San Gregorio Armeno.
That was quick. The city hall has caved in (not
literally, although that, too, is devoutly to be
wished). In the dispute over the presence of outdoor
stalls and stands to display Christmas wares (above) the shop owners have won.
Heavy traffic
on the Rome-Naples autostrada the other night caused
film star Sophia Loren to miss her son Carlo Ponti's
debut as conductor of the San Carlo orchestra, in
concert at the RAI auditorium in Fuori Grotta near
Naples. The show must go on and it did: a
little-known work by the young Puccini,Capriccio sinfonico;
Brahms' Symphony #2; and the Schumann A minor cello
concerto, featuring American cellist, Alisa
Weilerstein.
The southernmost
of the three major tunnels (i.e., the one nearest
Sorrento) on the road along the Sorrentine peninsula
has just closed (late October) and will remain
closed until March 31, 2010. Work is underway to
link the Vico Equense-Seiano tunnel to the new
Scrajo-Pozzano tunnel. All of this will eventually
create a five-kilometer by-pass around the crowded
bathing establishments along the coast and
facilitate traffic on the Sorrentine coast road. In
the meantime, however, the first weekend of closure
was a disaster for anyone in any semblance of a
hurry; traffic has to be rerouted through the local
coastal town of Vico Equense (which the now closed tunnel by-passed), leaving drivers
inching along for hours through the narrow streets
of the town and leaving residents of that town awash
in a sea of traffic. It gets better; this year won't
do it. Look forward to another closure next October
sometime. (See update from
March 2013.) (See grand opening update, July
2014 and here.)
The Naples
football (soccer) team is currently mired in
the middle of the A-League (still better than the
B-League!) With nine games under their belt, they
have won 4, lost 4 and tied one, an identical record
as Genoa; thus, the two teams are tied for 10th
place (out of 20 teams). (Glass-half-full optimists
note that the two teams are also tied for 9th
place.)
Yesterday,
Sunday, November 1, was All-Saints Day. People
generally go to the various cemeteries in town to
visit their dearly departed. You drive there and try
to find a place to park and try to find some flowers
along the way. The throng is incredible. It got so
bad yesterday that the police had to step in. They
ticketed 79 illegal car park attendants and actually
arrested one of them who was charging people five
euros to "watch their car." The cops also
confiscated 3500 bouquets of flowers from itinerant
vendors in the area. (This is vaguely related to the
general entry on the "flower
people" of Naples.) What do the cops do with
3500 bouquets of flowers? Distribute them to
churches, according to this morning's paper.
You don't need
Bernoulli's Principle to know which way the
wind is blowin'. Recent letters to the editor in the
papers have complained about Capodichino airport
and planes landing from the south-west, over the
heavily-populated Vomero section of Naples. It's
dangerous and it's noisy, they say, and flights come
in until one in the morning. True, true and true.
They didn't use to do that and the airport
authorities don't care about real people, they say.
Wrong and wrong. The physics of flight require
planes to take off and land into the wind; it
increases relative air-speed over the wings,
providing more lift, which is just what you want
when you are trying to maneuver a giant tin can
through the two most dangerous stages of
flight--take-offs and landings. The run-way at the
Naples airport runs exactly NE to SW. Most of the
time, the prevailing wind blows in from the
sea--that is, from the SW; thus, planes usually take
off into that wind and climb out steep over the city
to avoid disturbing the folks below as much as
possible. They then land from the NW over the less
populated areas of Naples to the north-west of the
airport. But
recent winds have been from the north and
north-west, requiring take-offs in the other
direction, which bother no one, but landings in from
the sea over the city can indeed be disturbing. The
angle of descent on final approach has to be a
gentle as possible for the good folks in the cabin;
thus, you have flights coming in low over the city.
Some day the winds will change and things will be
back to normal.
The
Royal Apartments in the Royal Palace in Naples
are always a pleasure to wander through. I was
pleased to see some big-time restoration going on:
there is a workshop on the history and restoration
of tapestry set up. Also, there is somewhat of a
permanent workshop on the art restoration and furnishings as
part of a degree program for students of Suor Orsola university.
I was fortunate to catch a few of them at work. They
were in the midst of a one-year hands-on practicum
as part of a degree in Conservazione dei beni mobili e artistici.
When I was there, they were working on the restoration of a
number of large, ornate doors. Most of the students
are young women intent on pursuing a career in art
restoration.