main index © Jeff Matthews
2002-2012
Naples Miscellany 22 (mid-June 2009)
 Sabrina, the 32-year-old female
elephant—the only elephant left at the Naples zoo—is in danger of
dying from an intestinal obstruction. Doctors
from the university department
of veterinary medicine and experts from as
far away as Tel Aviv have converged on the zoo
to see if they can save her. It is, according to
reports, very iffy. The zoo, itself, though an
immense improvement over what the place used to
be, still needs to be restructured. Contruction
is supposed to start in September on a major
expansion into the adjacent and largely unused
area at the east end of the large fair grounds
in Fuori Grotta, the Mostra
d'Oltremare. The new entity will be called
Animalia
and will be on the order of those large safari
parks where animals have more room to roam.
- You may know that UNESCO has an impressive
list of what they call World Heritage
sites—places that must be saved at all costs
because of their unique place in the cultural
history of our planet. The historic center of
Naples is on that list and has typically
received financial and administrative aid from
the UN organization. UNESCO now says that it
can't keep dumping aid into a black hole; they
have put off until 2011 any further commitment
on the nature of their contribution until the
Naples city government comes up with a
reasonable "management plan"—that is, what needs
to be saved/restored, how it is going to be done
and how much it is going to cost. The plan was
supposed to be ready in 2006.
 Michelangelo
in Naples. A recently discovered wooden
sculpture of The
Crucified Christ, authenticated as
being from the year 1495 and the work of the
young Michelangelo is on display through July 12
at the new Diocesano museum in the church of Donna Regina
in Naples. The work was first shown to the
public in 2004 in Florence and has since been
exhibited in Rome, Palermo, Trapani and Milan.
The Italian state acquired the small sculpture
from an antique dealer in Turino who had, in
turn, bought it from a private family. Experts
spent ten years authenticating it before putting
it on display. Their judgment was based on a
number things: the geometrically ideal human
proportions of the sculpture (corresponding to
Leonardo’s so-called Vitruvian Man); also, the
sculpture came at a time in Michelangelo's life
in the mid-1490s when he resided at the Santo Spirito
church in Florence and pursued intense studies
of human anatomy at the church's hospital; and
the fact that the sculpture on display is very
similar to ones—verifiably by Michelangelo—done
at the Santo
Spirito. The work is about 43
centimeters (17 inches) high.
- Aziz, a 30-year-old Moroccan man with
psychological problems was finally talked down
off the head of the gigantic statue of Giuseppe
Garibaldi near the train station the other day
where he perched for ten hours, threatening to
jump. He has a history as a wandering vendor of
black market merchandise and earlier had fled
from Sicily to Naples.
- Ah, the
white sands and cool breezes of downtown
Naples! I'll canoe over tomorrow and
see how things are going. Some weeks ago they
dripped tar between the cracks of all the tiny
paving stones (called sampietrini)
down at Piazza del
Gesù Nuovo. With soaring summer
temperatures over the last few days, the tar
started to melt; by 11 a.m. passers-through were
beginning to complain about the goo on their
shoes; by 2 p.m. it was slow-motion city in the
piazza ("Gasp!
Pull left foot up...just a few more
steps...I'm almost... to...the...shade!")
providing future paleontologists with the
pleasure of finding human remains stuck dead in
the stuff, reminders of the Great Neapolitan
Mammal Extinction of 2009. Not to worry, said
town parenting persons; yea, they moved and
caused tons of white soil to be dumped onto the
square, turning it into what looks like a beach.
I like it, actually. Stay tuned.
 Molosiglio is the
small boat harbor directly in front of the
southern façade of the Royal Palace. It has
berthing for about 140 small pleasure craft and
shares some facilities with a small, adjacent
harbor used by the Italian coast guard. A plan
has just been scrapped that would have converted
Molosiglio into a tourist port, meaning—at
least— additional berths for hydrofoil service
to and from the various pleasure ports in the
gulf of Naples such as Sorrento and Capri. The
reason for the thumbs-down is that the place is
already too congested. That is absolutely true.
As it is, the port has a small park in front and
an access driveway already overcrowded with
parked cars since the port also shares space
with one of the largest A.S.L. (Assistenza
Sanitaria Locale) health clinics in the
city.
 Yesterday I got tossed out of what
I thought was a museum. The fragmented mural on
the entrance (photo, right) should have been a
tip-off. "Hey, you! [meaning ME] This is a
school! What are you doing walking around in
here?" Well, the sign in front still reads, Industrial Arts
Museum and the door was wide
open.
The helpful information near the front gate
tells you that the institution was founded in
1882 to fill "...the need to create a link
betwen schools and the labour market...[and to
provide a place]...where the new generation was
to be trained in...pottery, metalworking,
cabinet making and gold work...enabling ongoing
comparison between antique and modern articles
and encouraging pupils to think about
techniques...thus transcending the purpose of a
mere collection." The museum is apparently still
on the premises (if you make an appointment!).
It has 6,000 items grouped into sections such as
archaology, southern pottery and late
19th-century applied arts. I had heard about
this place, never really look for it, and
stumbled upon it by chance. I may make an
appointment, but they ruffled my feathers and I
may not. I'll show them.
- Trashminoes?
Readers may be familiar with Alexey Pajitnov's
hugely popular video game, Tetris:
players manipulate falling blocks (called
"tetrominoes") to create a horizontal line of
blocks without gaps. As the game progresses, the
tetrominoes fall faster, and the game ends when
the stack of tetrominoes reaches the top of the
playing field and no new tetrominoes are able to
enter. Now, a northern Italian website,
bastardidentro.com, has created NAPOLTRIS
(with the R backwards to give it that Russkie
effect). To the strains of a popular tarantella,
you try to manipulate falling bags of garbage
and other refuse (such as discarded tv sets)
before they descend on one of Napoli's many
monuments that form the field of play. A
newspaper this morning was complaining about it
(the game, not the garbage).
- The city government has released what should
satisfy anyone's demand (see UNESCO item above)
for a plan of action to fix up entire portions
of Naples. Between now and the "Culture Forum"
in 2013 (and I have no idea what that is),
Naples will use 250 million euros from the POR
fund (Programma
Operativo Regionale) plus 135 million
from elsewhere for a number of projects. These
include (but are not limited to): finishing the
conversion of the gigantic old Albergo dei Poveri
into something called la Città dei giovani
(City of Youth); redoing the area from Piazza
Mercato to Porta Capuana in the east along the
port, still visibly marked by signs of WWII destruction;
"saving the Acroplis"
by opening an area near the museum for an
"Archaeology Park" (this would entail destroying
one of the worst-looking—but
functional—buildings in city, a gigantic
high-school; maybe that is not such a good
idea); cleaning up the Girolamini area near the
Duomo (I hope that includes finally reopening
the very large church
of the Girolamini); opening the Totò Museum;
reopening the Filangieri
Museum; and distributing Wi-Fi points
throughout the historic center of town.
- Over the past eight months, €700,000 have been
spent along the Posillipo coast to conserve the
areas of Marechiaro,
Gaiola, and Riva Fiorita.
That is not a lot of money compared to the
eventual return from boat tourism along this
very popular stretch of coast. After all,
Marechiaro is so beautiful and romantic that it
inspired the great Neapolitan poet, Salvatore di Giacomo,
to write "quanno
spónta la luna a Marechiaro...pure li
pisce nce fanno a ll'ammore..."—"When
the moon shines on Marechiaro, even the fish
make love."
 Piracy on the coast! Yesterday
(June 19) at 8 p.m. there was still enough
pleasant light and view for a 37-foot
Manò Marine cabin cruiser (of the kind in
this photo) with a crew of two to be idling off
the lower Posillipo coast not far from Villa Rosebery (the
Naples residence of the president of Italy—which
is probably why this episode made nation-wide
news in the first place). It was boarded from
one of those speedy rubber dinghies by two
pirates brandishing firearms. While the
accomplice sped away in the dinghy, Long John
and Captain Hook swiped watches (one was a
Rolex, of course), jewelry, 1300 euros in cash,
credit cards and a cell-phone. They then forced
the two men to don life-jackets and jump in the
water. The bad guys sped off, tossing an
additional life-preserver in the direction of
one of the victims who yelled out that he
couldn't swim. The two in the water were spotted
and rescued by members of a rowing team out for
an evening practice. Still no sign of the boat.
- The Ospedale
del Mare (described
here), the grand new earthquake-proof
hospital in Ponticelli, at the eastern end of
Naples near the sea, was supposed to be finished
in 2008. It is still nowhere near completion and
contractors are threatening to stop work
altogether unless they get paid.
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