Europe > Italy > Campania > Naples > Articles > Under the Volcano

Daniella reached for the second bottle of champagne. "Don't worry," she said, "this party is not for you. It's just something we like to do at New Year."

We'd been in Naples half an hour. We'd got no further than the travel agent and already a semi-circle of Neapolitans was gathered around us. The whole street in fact - the man from the key-cutters next door, the gift-shop proprietor, the woman from the solarium across the road, and others who were all contributing to the rising pitch of Neapolitan banter.

"When they are talking together," said a Milanese man beside me. "I cannot understand one word of their language." He was on his way to the airport. He was going back to Milan - back to the north, to the measured European north. He looked exhausted.

"What do you want to see in Naples?" Daniella was still holding the bottle. "We have everything to see." I mentioned Vesuvius. "Vesuvius? You go up by driving, and then you walk." "But it's active?"

"Active yes, but sleeping now. We are waiting for him every day. One day he will wake." She pressed her thumbs into the champagne cork and for a moment everyone was hushed, wincing as they watched it. "Like this..."

The cork sprang out, bounced off the ceiling, struck a tourist poster of London's Tower Bridge and came to rest in the leaves of a poinsettia. Daniella wrestled with the erupting bottle. The office filled again with noise and laughter. The Milanese sighed, shook his head and checked his watch for the fourth time.

Naples has always charmed and exasperated northerners with its paradoxes - the unbothered sloth, the explosive energy, the poverty and vitality, the effusive charm and the overt criminality. Once the wealthiest and most fashionable city on the Mediterranean, for more than a century now it has been a by-word for destitution and mafia-led corruption. It has been shunned by visitors who speed through it on the way to Capri or Sorrento or Pompeii. But in the mid-nineties a charismatic new mayor, Bassolino, did much to revive it. He cleaned out the back-streets, opening up long-hidden churches, stamped on the Mafia. Everyone agrees there is a lot more to do, but for now he has made Naples the most exciting of all Italian cities to visit, in the first flush of its re-emergence: dynamic, unselfconscious, and as distinctive as it has always been.

Nothing is more distinctive than the chaotic spectacle of Neapolitan street-life. For several days we lost ourselves in the labyrinth of the old centre. Here old Neapolitan aristocrats live cheek-by-jowl with the city's poor. At ground level run souk-like rows of market stalls. Women lean over the balconies lowering baskets; street traders put in them mussels or fresh mullets or cigarettes. Everyone shouts. Cars and Vespas squeeze up and down. In most places the streets are so narrow, the buildings so high, that they are more like deep crevasses, their sides criss-crossed with washing.

And amidst all this bedlam are sudden oases of calm. Step through any gateway and you may find yourself in a quiet courtyard, or a majolica-tiled cloister full of birdsong, or the baroque interior of a church. Even on the street itself are votive shrines set into the wall, lovingly adorned with plastic flowers or swags of neon lights. Some are dedicated to the Madonna, some to the souls in purgatory, but one in particular caught my eye. Framed between miniature columns was a relic glued to the stucco, and a legend beneath it which read: Sacred Hair from the Head of Diego Maradona.

There are those in Naples who date the city's renaissance not to Bassolino's election in 1994 but to the day in 1987 when Diego Maradona helped the city win the Italian league. It was certainly a key moment. When the team returned that season with the cup, Naples did what it does best and celebrated, for days. Sadly the biggest planned event came to nothing: to stage a firework display, in the colours of the team, that would come bursting up out of the crater of Mount Vesuvius.

Some ten miles south of the city, Mount Vesuvius haunts every aspect of Neapolitan life. Its benign silhouette squats against the southern sky like some fat Buddha. But it is not benign. One seismologist told me: "In public we play down the risk, but personally I consider it a very dangerous mountain. Here, you understand, is Europe's most densely-populated city beneath one of its only active volcanoes."

After a few days in the bunched-up centre of Naples it was a relief to get out. It was a beautiful morning. The Bay of Naples curled around a steely blue sea; in the distance was the hazy shape of Capri. Driving up the side of Vesuvius, through the switchback bends, the houses thinned and gave way to pine forest; then the pine forest thinned and gave way to scrub. By the time we left the car some three hundred feet below the summit, nothing was alive on the slopes.

Vesuvius is exactly the shape a volcano ought to be. The main summit is conical and smooth-sided; the top is sliced off like an egg. Approaching it, there was just the sound of clinker crunching beneath our feet. And the wind: with each step towards the rim, the wind increased. It spun around the cone like a centrifuge; it buffetted our ears; it dragged tears across our cheeks. All at once the slope flattened and then fell away into the crater itself. The wind blew still harder and the far side of the crater opened up, dropping sheer through countless layers of lava. In one or two places sulphurous smoke seeped out of fissures. We stared down into the caldera, into the half-empty bowl and saw four hundred feet below a muddy froth of long-cooled detritus.

Before coming to Naples, I'd talked to an elderly Neapolitan exile in London. "You cannot know Naples," he explained, "until you have looked down into the crater of Vesuvius."

I'm still not sure what he meant. (The love of danger? The fatalism? The happy-go-lucky attitude?). But Vesuvius did at least help to explain one Neapolitan trait: the passion for fireworks and anything that explodes. This is the city after all that awarded its autocratic King Ferdinand II the fond epiphet "Bomba" for his love of artillery. Emma Hamilton wrote of an elaborate firework display here in which the figure of St Anthony was ignited through the tail of his pig. Another one featured Pulcinella - origin of our own Mr Punch - with a rocket jammed up his arse, and then exploding.

Once a year, the equipment that monitors Vesuvius's activity picks up one particular non-seismic event: Naples's New Year fireworks. On the 30th December we arranged to meet Tulio in a cafe. Tulio was a chemist who worked in the city's port. "Tomorrow we have to send all ships with a dangerous cargo out to the open sea. There are many stray fireworks."

Tulio himself was a quiet-spoken, gentle man who came from a long line of firework-lovers. He spoke wistfully of the war when his father was able to run out between air raids and plunder unexploded bombs. "Nowadays it is not so easy to find materials."

His great uncle was a police chief who started the tradition when he bought "Pyrotechnics for Beginners". Tulio was presented with the book on his twelfth birthday - along with a kilo of potassium nitrate. The previous New Year he had taken a long saved-for firework up Mont Blanc. This year he and his friends had again pooled their money for a private display. "But if you walk in the city be careful of the furniture." "The furniture?" "People throw old furniture from the window at New Year. They think it brings good luck."

The next day dawned crisp and cloudless. The Bay of Naples was smooth. All morning the city echoed with the sound of botti scuri - the daylight firework designed for noise alone. As darkness fell, the botti scuri were replaced by a more visual weaponry. In the Spanish Quarter, tables lined the streets selling "Bengal-bombs", "Colourful Parachutes" and "All Happys". In every street crackers stuttered and spat, Roman candles spilled their molten streams over the cobbles, and rockets sought out that little crack of space that Neapolitans call the sky.

It was about seven when we heard the first siren. Into that back-street labyrinth came two fire-engines. Cars reversed before them, Vespas were driven into the front rooms of flats. The engines stopped briefly to douse a pile of rubbish - then they were off again, on another call. All evening they hurtled to and fro through the quarters, into the piazzas, up and down the alleys, flashing across junctions. And as the private fireworks ran out, so the people began to chase the fire-engines. Those who stayed behind sought out the old and unused things of their flats, and pitched them out of the window.

Close to midnight on the Piazza del Plebiscito, the public fireworks began. Not just fireworks but an entire, two-hour spettacoli, a pagan fire-fest in which a giant spider and dragon paraded through the square and red-garbed demons leapt before them with fire spitting from their tridents and pyrotechnics fizzing out of their backs as they danced.

By three it was all over. We walked down towards the sea. The city was winding down. Burnt-out fireworks littered the cobbles; broken bed-frames and cupboards lay beside them. One or two chairs, the odd plate, still clattered from the balconies. Above the harbour we paused and looked south. The sky was clear and pale with stars. Isolated explosions flickered briefly over the water and died. Beyond, black and silent, was Vesuvius.

The next day we went to lunch with a friend of a friend. Our hostess had spent a few years living in Guildford. "Your countryside," she said, "it is very beautiful, but if I may say so, it is too quiet. I had to leave in the end, it made me too anxious." Naples must have been a great relief.

"But tell me," she continued. "What has interested you most in our city?" "Vesuvius."

"Vesuvius! Why do you British always go on about Vesuvius?" "Well," I said, "there are no volcanoes in Surrey."

Articles

• More from Philip Marsden