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Well, maybe they just found one and put it up because
it’s a nice design. Not quite. It’s up there for the
same reason that it was painted on the entrance to a
bar not far from the restaurant, a club with the
delightfully oblivious–to–American–idiom name (written
in English) of “Southern Bull” (their translation of toro del sud) The
bull, in this case, is to be understood not as in
“What a bunch of…,” but rather as in “raging," one
fine, prime specimen of which species is superimposed,
snorting, pawing the ground and swollen with pride, on
the flag, itself—a raging bull from the south (of
Italy, of course). (Alas, as of this writing, that bar
has gone bull-belly up. Maybe it has moved.) Also, now
that Naples has climbed out of the sub-basement of the
Italian soccer leagues, enough fans to constitute a
rooting section are showing up again at home games at
the San Paolo soccer stadium
where you will see a number of such flags fluttering
in the breeze. These will have an interesting
variation: the circular logo of the Naples team is
positioned at the center of the cross and inscribed—in
English!—around the perimeter of that logo is the
phrase, “The south shall rise again.” If there was
ever a surrogate symbol for the old Bourbon crest that
waved over Naples for the 130 years before the
unification of Italy, the flag of the Confederate
States of America seems to be it. You don’t need a degree in cross-cultural
anthropology to figure this one out. As losers in
their own war against their own north in 1861,
Neapolitans identify with the defeated south in the US
Civil War. They watch “Gone With the Wind” and know
who the good guys are. Unlike some places in the
southern US today, there is no doubt in Naples as to
whether that flag stays up or comes down. It stays
up—and they ain't just whistlin’ ‘o sole mio. [note: The Neapolitan affection for the Confederate flag also has some other not-so-trivial history behind it. See "Fighting for Two Souths"."
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If you let your
eyes wander along the display of flags mounted over
the entrance to one seaside restaurant in particular,
down at the small port of