 | From the New York Times Travel Section: Benjamin Taylor's NAPLES DECLARED: A Walk Around the Bay (Marian Wood/Putnam, $26.95) pays homage to a beautiful yet hard-edge city. From its early days as a colony of ancient Greece, Taylor traces Naples's successive incarnations as a Roman summer retreat, a Norman dominion and an incubator of Renaissance geniuses like Caravaggio. Later it became a battleground between 18th-century royalists and republicans, a city struggling under Nazi occupation and a modern-day haven for the southern Italian Mafia, the Camorra.
Taylor's tour is a bit static, bogged down by a few too many visits to monuments, palaces, fortresses and other spots that evoke the city's turbulent past. But his encounters with quirky Neapolitans — a die-hard Communist still seething over his party's 1948 electoral defeat by the Christian Democrats, a Buddhist taxi driver who enlightens Taylor over dinner at a dive cafe — inject some spontaneity into the proceedings. And he serves up some morbidly entertaining nuggets of Neapolitan history. One concerns Francesco Caracciolo, a naval commander under the Bourbon kings who rebelled and helped found a brief, unsuccessful republic. After his capture and execution by the Bourbons' ally, Lord Nelson, Caracciolo's corpse was dumped into the bay. "In the surreal aftermath," Taylor writes, "Caracciolo's body, though weighted at the feet, resurfaced . . . and seemed to all who saw him, including the newly returned king, to be making his way back to Naples. Terrified, Ferdinand ordered a Christian burial." No wonder Henry James described the city as "at the best wild and weird and sinister."
Looming above it all is Mount Vesuvius, whose periodic eruptions seem to be reflected in Naples's political instability and outbursts of violence. Yet the glory of the city outweighs its ghastly aspects. On a recent visit, Taylor admires "Vesuvius clear of clouds, the lanterns of a few fishing boats flickering in the harbor, some scraps of song floating up from Mergellina, and Capri's lights dimly visible at the vanishing point." |
