More Thoughts on Naples

 

Naples is a dump. A glorious dump!

It's as though everybody has sent their leftovers and rubbish to the city. I know they are still going through the end of a dustmen's strike or something like that, but there are full bins and rubbish beside them everywhere.

Take the transport system, which works quite well really. They have standard buses, bendy buses, electric buses, trolley buses, trams, underground trains, surface commuter trains and funiculars. I can't think of anything else that they might want, except for boats. But then they do have ferries to Sorrento, the Amalfi Coast, Capri and other islands, as well as much further afield.

So the city is a transport enthusiasts delight.

They are also building a new SudMetro to close a gap in the underground. According to the signs they started in 2001 and aim to finish in 2012. That makes CrossRail in London look speedy.

I've said that signage and maps are good, but not always.

I wanted to go on the trains at Dante, which is one of the central stations. I thought the station might be Dante, but all it had was a large M. Only when I got on the train was I sure I'd got the right station. But it all adds to life's rich pattern.

Now I said Naples was a glorious dump, but it still has all of the good Italian shops and an awful lot of little ones with a Neapolitan slant and they are all such a contrast to get inside compared to the chaos outside.

But I like the city.

If I ever wanted to learn Italian properly and perhaps combine that with the cooking course I need, then I'd do it in Naples. It would probably be Italian with a harder edge.

This reminds me that perhaps when I was 18 or 19, I was hitching home to Felixstowe from London and got a lift from an sergeant in the Royal Corps of Transport, who was helping to run the TA in Ipswich. His previous posting had been in Marseilles Docks, where an officer, a sergeant and a few squaddies, helped to unload and chaperone the British Troops who used to exercise on the Lodeve plateau.

As befits the Army, they'd sent him on a basic course in French, but he'd really learnt it in the hardest docks in France. With his large size and close cropped hair, he was not a man to be trifled with either.

But one day, when he shared the driving with the officer to Paris for a meeting with the French Ministry of Defence, when he asked in a bar for a drink, the owner thought the Marseilles version of the Mafia had come for their money.

Let's say that it all ended well.