If you ask anyone that's been to Italy, I wasn't supposed to go to Naples. That it's the birthplace of pizza and neighbor to the ruins of Pompeii are distant seconds to its rampant crime, or its status as the stronghold of the still existent mafia. But my other options were a lot of beautiful places that don't make sense for a guy to visit on his own, especially in the gloom of October, and I have an over-arching tendency not to follow directions.
I often confuse people, particularly locals, by what I stop to photograph. They pass with furrowed brows, jaws ajar, looking from me to what I'm shooting, and usually repeat this a few more times with increasing curiosity. Even more entertaining, which happens pretty frequently, they'll stop to take a photo as well, then stare at the screen of their digital camera, their confusion heightened by a frustrated failure to understand, before walking off in defeat.
Something like this happened as I walked around the Portici district of Naples, as four children of about 10 outside a dingy church I was taking pictures of saw me and instantly broke in to hurried conversation. They quickly rode their bicycles over to where I stood, surrounding me, and asked in Italian who exactly I was and where I was from. I answered, and just as I thought they were about to City-of-God me, the main boy asked excitedly if I could tell him what his name, Alessandro, would translate to in English. I did the same for Francisco, Giuseppe, and Paolo, and left them with huge smiles as they took turns introducing themselves to one another with their new identities in exaggerated American accents.
Wandering downtown in my everyday backpacking uniform of a white v-neck and jeans, I was caught in one of the most torrential rainstorms of my life. After one block, my shirt was essentially transparent, weighed about 4 pounds from all the infused rain, and (along with my scraggly beard and unkempt hair) gave me a visage closer to that of one of Italy's mangy stray dogs than its fashionable, bundled-up citizens. Not really to dry me off, but to at least cauterize the faucet running off my face and shoulders, I was kindly offered pocket tissues in a church, butcher paper in a market, and finally stumbled in to one of Naples' most heralded pizzerias: a hole in the wall with 4 tables and cooks that slide the pies into the ovens while smoking out of the side of their mouths. After taking my order, the waiter gave me the look of fatherly empathy I'd grown accustomed to over the past hour and a half before disappearing upstairs for a few minutes. He re-emerged with one of his own used t-shirts for me to change in to. Something I'll keep forever that encapsulates so much more than any cheesy souvenir ever would, or that any photograph could convey. I'm thousands of miles from anyone that knew I existed before 2 months ago, let alone cared about my well-being. But looking at that shirt, or remembering the outstretched arms of the woman in the church, the grocer with his thin sheets of yellow paper.... that fact is easily forgotten.
I walked back out in to the cramped alleyway, rainwater spread atop the black stone of the street like icing. The revenant sun was bouncing off of it... a welcome warmth, a reflective shine so bright that nobody could see a thing, and the rainstorm a memory only present because my shoes were still soaked. But Naples reminded me in one afternoon everything I need to know to survive.
If you can weather the storm, the sunlight will positively blind you.
Naples, Pompeii, and Florence:
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