Naples

One of my American expatriate friends asks me if Nick, whom she met on his visit to Paris, is going to die down Italy, where he’s been for the last two weeks. My response? If he does, it’s not going to be because of Covid-19, it’s going to be because I knifed him for posting so many pictures of the food he’s been eating. And he’s not just posting pictures, oh no no no. He’s also DMing me so I get a double-dose of envy. The sadist.

I hadn’t planned on visiting Italy during my time in France - I had already been there; lived there, in fact, for about four years, and as such, had seen quite a large part of the country. I wanted to explore and discover new places. But after drooling over pictures of pasta and sunshine, I thought…let’s just see how much things cost. I didn’t have to do a full three day trip like I’ve been doing - I’m just going to get pasta. If I eventually realize my dream of eating at The French Laundry, it wouldn’t be the most expensive meal I would have. After popping onto Omio and AirBnB, I see it’ll cost less than the Guerlain face oil I bathe my face in every morning. Roomie warns me not to go; Coronavirus was just starting to really take a hold of the northern region of the country. She doesn’t want me to get stuck somewhere I have to remain in quarantine. Naples wasn’t under restriction yet and I wasn’t that worried about it. I was still able to travel. And this was the only time I could go: the next week, I planned on going to Bordeaux, then my mother would come for a visit and we’d go to Israel, then my best friends would be in town, then I was jetting off to Vienna. It was cheap and now was the time.

Two days later, I'm feeling the onset of an anxiety attack - there had been a delay on the RER to Orly and was running through the airport. I need to get better fitting pants. I beg one of airport staffers to let me cut the line as my flight is boarding in five minutes. Orly is a new airport for me; I normally fly out of Charles de Gaulle, so I’m running around without any clue as to where I’m going. I arrive at the gate and at the end of a very long line. It’s three minutes past when the door was supposed to close and they haven’t even started boarding. I wait in line for 45 minutes as we shuffle from upstairs to downstairs to a bus to walk up airstairs. The plane is surprisingly empty. I have an entire row to myself. All travelers know what a luxury that is. I think it’s comical that even with my legs propped up, I barely span all three seats.

I spend the flight trying to gage how I’m feeling. It’s nothing negative; I’m just returning to the place I first felt homesick for. I think most other military brats will understand this feeling of not being rooted. You move so often, you don’t really get attached to a place. I spent my junior and senior years of high school and then a year and a half of college in Naples, after a semester in Maine. My mother, brother, and I had arrived two weeks after the school year had started, coming from Virginia after a very difficult two years (being yanked out of school to be told my mother might be going to New York to help with search and rescue after September 11th, the sniper shootings had taken place in the towns surrounding us and including the gas station Mom would fill her car up at, a stabbing at my brother’s school, me not having any friends so I sat at the pregnant girls’ table, being unable to comprehend why the Confederate flag had more prominence than the American flag, the very real racial tension between the white and black kids at my school). We stayed in the TLA, a giant hotel that overlooked Naples American High School, shaped like a W, and I would start each morning with an espresso served in a tiny porcelain cup and a graffa, a fluffy doughnut covered in sugar. It was the first school I had gone to (my third high school and I think ninth overall) where everyone else moved constantly. Summer reading wasn’t a thing because students either left at the end of the previous school year or arrived at the start of the next one. There were only a small handful of kids who had been there since the start of their high school years - they got their own page in the yearbook because they were unusual. And our class was tiny - everyone knew who every one else was, even if you weirdly didn’t hang out with them. Most high schools have their cliques and specific lunch tables, but I hung out with the thespians, cheerleaders, swimmers, soccer players, artists. Everyone of us were a bit of everything and were all there temporarily so we had to set up shop and make connections wherever we could. And when you made connections, the places you went for sleepovers had such beautiful Italian names: Pinetamare, Parco Lago Allorca, Aversa, Gricignano (of course, those were the kids whose parents chose not to live on the economy and instead, stayed on base). Me? I lived first in a housing community (a parco) in Marcianise that would give you a view of Caserta Palace as you drove towards base, and then a parco in Teverola with a mozzarella seller on the corner.

What I loved most about living in Naples was how easy it was to recognize you were back once you’ve been away. And I was away nearly every weekend, out for soccer matches, swim meets, thespian trips, birthday celebrations. We would be driving down the autostrada, surrounded by verdant green farms, clean and pristine, the Apennine mountains in the distance. Then, almost all of a sudden, there would trash everywhere on the side of the road. There’s a saying I heard while I was there: “If Italy were a beautiful woman, Naples would be the armpit.” Naples is…trashy. And I don’t mean that disparagingly. It’s very gritty, dirty. It smells of cow farms and tobacco. It was something you quickly got used to, after the initial shock. I ended up finding it endearing and characteristic of this place that also had some of the best food I’ve ever had, the friendliest locals I’ve ever met, and the best fireworks I’ve ever been under. Naples, to me, was the PigPen of the country. Messy with a cloud of dirt and amiable, covered with the dust of ancient civilizations.

As we were coming in for our landing, I look out at the window at Vesuvius looming in the near distance, and the litter. Unlike landing in Los Angeles where I felt suffocated by the smog and grime even in the circulating air of the plane cabin, coming into Naples put the biggest smile on my face. As our wheels hit the runway, I see the salmon and cream-colored buildings of Capodachino, the Navy Base my mother had spent four years at. I hadn’t told her I was coming and she woke up to a photo I had sent, sending back a crying emoji and the words, “I MISS ITALIA!” Coming in to pass through the tiny airport, a man held back his two girls, saying they should let the lady with the baby go first. I was situated behind her and her little one as guards stopped to take the baby’s temperature. Out of all the passengers that disembarked, the baby was the only one to be stopped. That was it. That was the great prevention tactic I had to deal with coming into what would become the epicenter of Europe’s Coronavirus outbreak.

I walk out into the sunshine - such a weird sensation after spending months in the chilly, slate-colored skies of a New England fall and Parisian winter - and caught a bus to downtown Naples. I remember driving this same route when my family had first moved to Italy and how foreign it all seemed. Despite being born in Spain and living in Scotland, I didn’t really have a knowledge of being outside America. Roadsigns were in an unfamiliar language, the structure of the buildings lining the autostrada were different. And of course, the trash on the side of the road. But now, thirteen years later, it all comes rushing back. That’s the Ikea we went to when it first opened. This is the bend in the road where my mom and I died laughing at a joke on RadioUno neither of us understood. This is the station where I caught the train to Rome with Jaz. I’m pretty sure that gated complex is where the commissary and exchange were before they were moved to the Support Site. But I was staying in a place I didn’t have too much context for: Universita. I’m sure I’ve been down there before, but walking from the port where I was dropped off it was all new to me. Every building was tagged in different scripts, tight-knit and not letting the sun in. And it was loud - the sounds of Neopolitan friends having passionate conversations, their hands conveying more than the language, the old rundown Vespas speeding along the road, trucks being unloaded, a church bell ringing in the distance. It quieted once I stepped into the building I’d be staying, a maze of which I had to navigate to get to the flat, stepping out briefly into a courtyard of yellow houses, rattan dividers, and ferns placed in colorful pots. The view from my window was balconies and so much hanging laundry, white and moving listlessly in a soft breeze.

First things first, I need arancini and at least one croquette. I grab both from a roadside shop, heated up in a microwave. One of my favorite things about not really being able to understand what’s going on is the surprises that wait for you to be discovered. I just point at a tall, pyramid-shaped food and a fat disk and hope I was getting what I wanted and that neither had fish. They're heavy and hardly able to fit in one hand. But I wander down the street, holding both and peer into the restaurants and shops along my route to a place I could sit down. I find a pillar in the Piazza del Gesu Nuovo, a large asphalt square with a tall, intricately carved stone monument. The pyramid I eat first, feeling like an Anime cartoon eating such an oddly shaped food. It's a croquette, with a crispy crust that gives way to gooey cheese and mashed potatoes that warm every little part of me. If you’re searching for happiness, look to fried mashed potatoes. If you’re looking for the poster-child of an American tourist, look at the woman with big curly hair holding food in one hand while eating from the other. The arancini is creamy, like risotto, but sturdy with a nice al-dente bite from the rice and a bright pop of peas. This, this right here is quintessential goodness: watching life unfold while savoring something yummy. The square has kids playing soccer, cops on horses talking to a couple of locals, a vendor holding out bottles of water for sale while a man fills up a bottle from a fountain. I finish and head on my way. My destination is the Castel Sant’Elmo, only two and a half kilometers away. Easy, doable.

I have forgotten how the bus ride to the castle went because it was uphill the entire way. At first, I'm moving between the street and narrow sidewalk, squished between buildings that looked like they’d meet overhead. Then I'm scaling wide stone stairs for twenty minutes, stopping every few moments to catch my breath and a glimpse of the beautiful villas around me. Each switchback reveals a gated garden or a view of Vesuvius or a line of drying shirts or sunset orange roofs. I finally make it to the top, winded, but on familiar ground. Yes, this is where the bus unloaded all the seniors on my graduation day 15 years ago. I had stopped at that cafe for a graffa and orange juice while teachers were yelling at us to keep moving and get inside. Walking through the entrance was like walking through time; what my eyes saw hadn’t changed in fifteen years, as it hadn’t changed for centuries and likely wouldn’t change save the destruction of the earth. It's an imposing fortress, and I expose my throat as I gaze upward. I remember looking at photos of this place a few years ago, trying to recreate the feeling I had when I was last there. It wasn’t super successful then and it wasn’t now; likely because graduation day was such a blur. But I am filled with the alien feeling of nostalgia and a fondness for those two years I went to school here. Back then, I had my entire life mapped out: I’d go to Boston University on a Naval ROTC scholarship, graduate at least cum laude, serve in the Navy four years before become a reservist, and then start acting. College would be paid for, I’d have a job after, life would be easy. And it would all start on that day, running around a castle, delivering a speech, taking pictures. Now, I realized I don’t remember that day and life did not go according to my plan. It never does and yet, so far, so good. At eighteen, I wanted to be the best at everything and would always fall short. I thought that by the time I was 30, I’d be married, have a family, a dog, an Oscar. I didn’t think about what kind of woman, or friend, or person I would be. I didn’t think about my place in the world and the work I would do, except that I would be telling stories. It was all very tangible, the things I wanted back then. And now, even though I still want the marriage and the kids and the dog, I’m most upset about the not having an Oscar, mainly because it means I haven’t been making movies. All of that other stuff, though, I’m almost glad I don’t have them because I have myself, who I’ve discovered myself to be. I love who and where I am, because here, craning my neck to see how high the castle rises, I am a wanderer who is seeing the world.

And after making my way to the roof, I can see the bay of Naples, the crescent curve from Sorrento to Posilippo, the whole land covered in the palette of rosy red, butter cream, pastel pink, and mint green of the buildings next to the deep azure water. Way off in the distance, I can see the spa islands of Ischia to the west and Capri to the east. The clouds settle right at the top of Vesuvius and she looks like she's smoking. There's a small art museum that I wander through, a weird panache of modern sculptural paintings and still lifes of an old Naples. Outside, I make my way around a giant Spartan helmet and a clock with long swords for hands. Walking around in the open air and almost blinding sunshine is refreshing and I can feel my whole body breathe on an almost cellular level. Home is such a foreign concept for me, one that I don’t want or need or crave and maybe actually even run away from, but I could feel this was the closest I would get. And it was nice for a bit.

I walk down into the city and to the Museum Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, with its titanic statues of Roman gods and goddesses, an exhibition on underwater excavation of artifacts where I trip over cracks in the marble, and a room full of phalluses and paintings of sex positions that came with a disclaimer that anyone under a certain age couldn’t enter. The last series of art I pass by and stop to admire are graffiti portraits of bad-ass women: artists, policy shakers, authors, all painted with a Superman "S" on their chest, cheeky and iconic.

(Portrait of Marlene Dietrich by street artist Lediesis)

I spend the next hour researching restaurants from my AirBnB. This was the whole reason I came down here; so I need it to be some place spectacular. Here’s a tip: Don’t research when you’re hungry because it clouds your judgement, reduces your patience and amplifies your need to just make a decision. That’s what happened with me. I am so overwhelmed with the options and the desire to eat something mindblowingly scrumptious that I freeze. Or feel the onslaught of a massive hunger headache; I can’t remember. Every single restaurant I want to go to doesn't open until later, according to the internet, and I need to eat NOW. Suffice to say, the restaurant I pick is open and seems to have a lot of good reviews. It's right around the corner from where I'm staying so it seems perfect.

When I try to step into the restaurant, the door is locked. There are three or four people sitting around the tables inside the tiny little space, but I just figure they really must be closed. I move myself off to the side to begin my search again when the door opens. The gentleman motions me forward and I ask, “Aperto?” He nods and leads me up some narrow stairs to the dining room, small with about six tables and one window decorated with fake flowers overlooking an alley. I'm seated at the table in the corner and completely by myself; there are no other customers. It's 8 o'clock. A thick red menu (in English) with plastic sleeves and a copy of a handwritten wine list is set in front of me. I order and wait, very unsure what to do with myself. A local white wine comes first and is absolute garbage. I think I'm drinking Windex. I’m not a wine connoisseur by any means, but I know when things are not what they should be, and it wasn’t even the cheapest wine on the menu. My friend sends me an exasperated text, asking, “How you gonna be in Italy and buy bad wine?” It's not my fault! The insalata caprese is served on a bed of wilted iceberg lettuce with dried herbs. The mozzarella is incredible but the tomatoes aren’t; they taste like grocery store tomatoes that have been at the bottom of the pile for a couple of days. The lettuce lends an unpleasant bitter taste and I want to cry because this is not a hard dish to make. The pasta, overcooked spaghetti drowning in a thin, bland tomato sauce, is simple but loses the opportunity to be rustic and delicious. My final plate arrives: veal scallopini. It’s a bit stodgy and tough. It’s as if someone thought about making veal Milanese and realized halfway through its fry that it should be breaded but didn’t do anything to fix it. And it's served on a leaf of iceberg lettuce. Again. I'm so confused. Are the people who left reviews all tourists? This is not Italian food. This is leftovers an Italian waved his hands over as they were talking about another trash issue. I know this is going to sound super foodie-snobbish, but I am so unused to mediocre and terrible food. Even the stuff I mess up, I’m fine with. This…is deeply upsetting. I had come all this way and this is what I get? A poor attempt at sustenance? I am so incredibly unsatisfied and displeased that I can't finish any of the plates that are set before me. I’m perplexed: the great joy of Italian cooking is the simplicity and dedication to bringing out the best flavors of the produce and meat. This is a failed attempt at something easy and a shameful passing off of edible dishes to unsuspecting and unrefined palettes. (It’s been three months and I’m still offended on behalf of Italian cuisine.)

The sense of disappointment dissipates when I walk into a lounge tucked away in an alley down the street; its dark and swanky but cool with an almost speakeasy vibe. Apparently, there’s a downstairs, but I just sit at the bar talking as best as I could to the bartenders and older local men that were tossing jokes back and forth. I’d catch snippets of their conversations and when they find out I am American, all they want to talk about is the president so I shrug and say I didn’t vote for him and offer my apologies. I have my first Aperol Spritz - vibrant orange, bubbly, fizzy, and incredibly delicious. It’s citrusy and bright and the bitters lend a smooth, deep finish. From vermouth and mojitos in Barcelona to Sauternes in Normandy and now this spritz in Naples, the last month has been primo on drinking near the beach.

The next morning, I sidle up to a black and white tiled counter with a full espresso machine and a wall full of white porcelain cups. I’m at Cafe Leopaldo for a graffa and cappucino. I already have the shakes from lack of sleep and food (real, good food), but it’s totally worth it, knowing the twitch in my eye is from two sips of sugary coffee that recalls the experience of doing what I did every morning before school. The sensation of sugar on my fingers from the doughnut is such an amazingly familiar one and my teeth bite into the fluffiest donut I’ve ever had. It’s like eating spun dough, light as thought with the crispy crunchy sugar crystals that coat and tumble around in my mouth. This completely wipes away the aftertaste of last night’s dinner and I can’t help but smile. This is what Italian living is: a baristo moving about, quick with the reflex of making drink after drink, a man leaning over a newspaper, a couple ordering two espressos and talking with another server. There are tables and chairs, but the locals all fall against the bar. It’s easy and slow but active and lovely. I try hard not to stare while I’m inscribing the scene on my mind and sense I’m just coming off as shifty.

There’s been a party at the Monastero di Santa Chiara - confetti covers the stone driveway as I enter and head towards the cloisters. It’s a modern and fun beckoning to such an old and venerated building. Inside, it’s got a color palette that’s just as beautiful, but softer and less neon. A massive open courtyard lies ready to receive the Neapolitan sun and incredibly painted porticos offer shade. Tiled frescoes in bright Campagna yellow and green line the walk way and vined arbors fill the courtyard. I want to reach out and touch the old paint, feel its erosion beneath my fingers. Outside, its noisy with the sounds of the city, but in here, birdsong is all I hear. I pop into the library and relish being near such old books, seeing the handwritten pages by monks hundreds of years ago. I end my tour in a dark room with a bright light shining on the presepi, a diorama of the nativity. These miniature scenes are essential Neapolitan and it’s always so interesting to see the work that has gone into creating stories is such tiny detail, even if it’s an over-romanticized depiction.

I walk to the Castel dell’Ovo, passing through the Galleria Umberto and then by the domed building of the Piazza del Plebiscito. Turns out, the castle is closed for maintenance and again, I have to just go with the flow so I walk along the water to Lungomare Santa Lucia Napoli, a little piazza with a statue lauding some ancient hero. But the main draw of this place is its view of the bay. White plastic tables and chairs are lined up against a rail between two kiosks selling drinks and snacks. I find an open chair, prop my feet up, and survey the scene. Below, a fisherman sells polippo from his boat, his customers eagerly lining up at the water’s edge. I can see the purpley-pinkish flesh of the octopi from up here, where I have a clear view of this tiny harbor, the stone breakers, and that glorious volcano that reminds me that I’m back here. It’s warm and sunny - distinctly Mediterranean. Sun I haven’t felt on my face for more than a decade. I didn’t realize how much I missed this place - grimy, trashy, noisy, until I realized I didn’t care about those things. I’m trying to take stock of how I’m feeling, ignoring the hunger now gnawing at my stomach. I feel…at ease, at my leisure. There’s a settling without roots, like my feet are firmly planted. I want to stay right here forever, feeling satiated and warm. It doesn’t feel as familiar as I would’ve thought, probably because I never actually spent that much time in the city. It doesn’t necessarily make me feel like I’m back home. But I really enjoy it here, here by the water in the Italian sun, surrounded by the sounds of Naples, a man singing, mopeds beeping, seagulls calling. A sense of certainty and belonging on this water fills me. Is it here in Naples? Maybe Mykonos. Barcelona. We’ll see about the Cote d’Azur when I visit in June. Just being near this water, breathing in this salty air, soaking up this sun, seeing the edge of the earth on this sea - I know this is where I belong.

Eventually, my need to eat moves me from my perch and I find a restaurant with outdoor seating. Pizza & Motori. A Smartcar is parked on a podium just inside near the bar area but I hunker down at the sturdy table on the sidewalk and dive into my first dish - prosciutto con melone. This makes the entire trip worth it. The salty, chewy fat of the cured meat compliments and enhances the refreshing sweetness of the cantaloupe. My young adulthood comes rushing in and with it, the memories of my experience here: watching the sunrise from my friend Micah’s roof the morning after prom while everyone else was sleeping their hangovers off, spending the weekend at the beach with Roomie and Tracy, telling my friends that Mike, our really cute soccer coach, held my hand as he wrapped my finger after I fractured it at practice and Jamie saying he carried her when she was knocked out by a teammate’s knee, learning “Long live the cow” in French on the bus to swim, coming into downtown Naples for the first time at night on a USO tour and learning about Sofia Loren, running circles around Josh because I had drunk an energy drink that had a man pissing fire on the side of the road in its advertisement, weekly dinners with my mom and brother at La Biblioteca where I always ordered the same thing, stopping at autostradas to buy bags of raspberry jellies, smelling the noxious fumes of Solfatara as we drove to the commissary before it was at the Support Site, my Italian professor making fun of the way people from Milan talked, hiking Mount Vesuvius, and laughing at the pornographic images painted in the brothel at Pompeii with Corey. These feelings of delight and nostalgia are so wonderfully compounded when I eat my spaghetti carbonara. If there is one perfect dish, it’s this one. Perfectly al dente noodles are coated in a creamy, eggy, cheesy sauce and bites of salty, crispy pancetta create the most simplistic yet dynamic juxtaposition of textures. I move myself around the table, chasing the moving warmth of the sun as it moves across the sky and continue to eat, even as the pasta gets cold. This is the type of food people shed tears over because it is just so delicious.

The remainder of the afternoon is spent traipsing around, grabbing an Aperol spritz back at Lungamare before meandering around Castel Nuovo, then listening to a man sing opera in a piazza and crying after receiving disappointing news at the base of a fountain inside the former Royal Palace, wishing the hopeful romantic in me would just freaking die already. For a good long while, I’m so incredibly sad, despondent, so much more than I would’ve realized. It seems, like this city, much hasn’t changed within me other than the fact that I notice and am aware nothing has changed. Of course, that means everything has changed. When I send myself a postcard, I document one particular memory: “Experiencing sadness and happiness next to each other because it means I’m feeling”.

Late that night, back in my Parisian flat, I’m standing over the sink eating flaky cannoli and lobster tails I grabbed from a pasticceria before I left for the airport. I unpack and look at the lucky bullhorn I’ve bought, the one that looks like a chili pepper, and the pucinello mask that I’ll hang on my Christmas tree this year. As if I'll need a reminder. I haven’t been documenting as much as I think I should be because I’m soaking up all these wonderful and incredibly important experiences that have imprinted themselves on me. Looking back, I will know that, indeed, everything has changed.