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NAPLES

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NAPLES

The great travellers of the past never failed to include Naples in their journey. They were attracted to it by the certainty of finding a world and a sort of people qite out of the ordinary. Even today, in a Europe subjected to the levelling action of progress, Naples still remains unique, a kind of country within a country, with its own particular customs and uses, different from the rest of Italy, all the more striking and exciting from the contrast with the attempts at modernisation which, for reasons too complicated to explain, are unsuccessful in adapting themselves to the environment as they mostly do elsewhere. Naples owes this continuation of its instinctive vitality to the extrovert character of its inhabitants who can be said without exaggeration to belong to a peculiar class of the human species which can be labelled as “Neapolitan Man”. A member of this species, who outside Naples displays a great capacity of adaptation to new surroundings and concealment of his origin, in his native city behaves in public as if he were in the privacy of his home with an enormous expenditure of energy in the performance of magnificent gestures which often seem to have no meaning beyond the pleasure he himself may derive from them. In this sense Pulcinella, the famous stock character of popular comedy (our Punch), is a typical Neapolitan. He can never achieve really comic or really dramatic effects but always remains within the limits of the grotesque or the farcical with his quips and jests and the wild exaggerated behaviour that marks him as a “puppet”, so much so that even when he is the victim of injustice and should claim our sympathy, his sufferings only make him ridiculous and an object of derision. His self-inflicted wounds are in reality a form of self-protection for saving his dignity and self-respect. If it were not so, it would be impossible to explain how it is that a people so inclined to misuse the talents nature has endowed them with should have produced Thomas Aquinas, Giovanni Battista Vico and Benedetto Croce, the three greatest Italian philosophers, and the heroic martyrs in the struggle for independence and the unification of Italy. Usually forbearing and easily contented, the Neapolitan is capable of sudden outbursts of revolt. Sensual and carnally-minded, he can yet compose the tenderest love songs in honour of the spirit of woman. With his imagination, full of the most exquisite foods, he prefers to eat simple dishes composed of flour, water and salt like spaghetti and pizza, made prodigious by the art with which they are flavoured by tomato and basil. This contradiction is present everywhere in Naples. Built on the sea, it turns its back to it and looks inland. Where light and sunshine should abound, there are dark alleyways and subterranean dwellings. Religious to a point verging on idolatry, the inhabitants can yet behave without any regard for moral scruples. And all this can be intimately felt and observed because life flows along unhampered even around the great city buildings. In Forcella, La Duchesca or Spaccanapoli you will find the same atmosphere, the same lights and colours, smells and odours, the same busy trafficking as to be found in any market or bazaar along the farthest shores of the Mediterranean. Invention and novelty are the order of the day. Only in Naples it is possible for a tourist to light upon something new, which he himself has discovered - an object, a gesture, a word - and has escaped the notice of others and is not to be found in any guide book or traveller's account.



It is advisable to check also the availability of the apartments in Sorrento and the apartments in Positano.
 
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