main index © Jeff Matthews
2002-2012
Naples Miscellany 10
(mid-January, 2008)
Links
to all Naples Miscellany pages
 What
is this strange power I have over garbage?!
They picked up the mountain of rubbish in front of
my building this morning for the first time in six
days. I have no idea if that reflects a general
bettering of the condition in the city at large or
whether a bolt of good luck just happened to hit
where I live. Whatever—I’ll take it. Strange,
though—I had a dream last night about that. I saw
a big empty space out in front, sidewalks clear,
and the rubbish bins empty, all clean as a whistle
(a grimy whistle, to be sure. I mean, you don’t
want to put your lips anywhere near, but as
metaphors go, I’ll take that, too.) Skeptics will
call my dream coincidence; after all, garbage was
on my mind and they had to pick it up sooner or
later, right? Mystics will say I had a prescient
dream. I choose to think that my dream actually
caused the event. The Germans call this Traumkraft. (They really don’t, but
it's a lot better than Blitzkrieg or Lebensraum.)
- Perhaps connected—I
see that they are going to have to cull thousands
of mozzarella-producing
buffalo from the herds in Campania due to
disease. Just in case they are looking for a
convenient place to stack the carcasses, I’d
better get some serious dreaming done tonight.
(Also see update.)
- There used to be a
joke that someone in the Vatican had the
job of putting pin-holes in condoms in keeping
with the Roman Catholic stand against
birth-control. Well, it’s not that bad. It’s
worse. Containers full of defective condoms have
just been seized at the port of Naples.
Technically, no one really knows if they are
defective; they were all made in China but bore
counterfeit labels indicating that they were made
in Italy. Still, it sounds like a plot to me.
- If you keep your
glance above eye-level as you walk around
the streets, you might step in some…no, I mean you
might notice that there is a small army at work
constantly plastering new ads over old ones on the
many bill-boards set up by the city for that
purpose. The billboards are set between metal
supports and have to be worked on from ladders;
workmen may have to climb as high as 12 to 15 feet
to get the job done. Legitimate ads are licensed
by the city, and part of the job of the guys on
ladders is to go around the city taking down ads
that have been put up without permission. It now
turns out that almost no one in that corps of
municipal employees works within the official and
well-established safety guidelines; that is, they
don’t wear helmets or safety belts.
- Jan. 23—Breaking
update: They've just found
an unexploded
200-pound bomb from WW2 in the excavations
for the new subway station at the port. Square
blocks, including most of the passenger port, the
city hall, hotels, and apartment buildings have been
evacuated and will remain closed and empty for a
week while they "observe" the bomb and call in a
squad with a robot to remove it. (If you are
interested in just how a WW2 bomb got there in the
first place, see "Air
raids on Naples in WWII.")
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