A light breeze. The gayest street. From the bay. Up the
Mulberries. A small revolution in Calabria
A light breeze
A brisk wind in the gulf of Salerno came out of a summer morning and wrenched the helm under my grip. We had left the coast and cut across the wide concavity of water on the homeward run. Being asked to take the helm was a small sign of confidence from the owner and master of the Canopus. It had taken more than a week to earn this, and even now the master hovered and grabbed the wheel if I deviated from the course he had set. He was an old racer of yachts and a perfectionist for whom sailing was about precision and control. The canvas was taut, the boat inclined and each new surge of the sea put new pressure on the wheel. Undeviating steadiness meant a constant tussle under the sun-reddened glare of the master, thinking ahead of the wind and the waves, braced for the coming surge and ready to relax again as it passed.
Our yacht was compact outside and roomy below deck. She was fast, sprightly, wonderfully manoeuvrable. It was the summer of 1979 and the Canopus might easily have taken several people around the world under sail in comfort and safety. She had taken us no further than some way south from her home berth in Naples, down along the coast of Calabria with a ragged escort, in boating terms, of a couple of converted fishing boats.
Before this cut across the gulf we had stayed close enough to the shore to connect the pale stone dots of the Saracen towers strung along the cliffs and promontories of Campania and Calabria. Resting a couple of fingers on the wheel, the master held forth on the coastal people who had manned the towers hundreds of summers before. These were summers when Islam’s raiders from Turkey and North Africa would hit the little beaches in lightning raids on Christendom. The eyes in the towers watched to warn their people in the villages down at the sea’s edge when to take to the steep hills behind them. Landing parties burnt houses, slaughtered men, women and animals, carried off the younger and fitter to slavery. To be grabbed by the Turks was to be taken utterly and horribly by surprise. In the coastal South of Italy the phrase still awakens a distant tremor of fear.
The towers were hard to see from land. Only from the sea below could you see how they were linked along the coast as an integrated line of defence. They were solid, purpose-built, irregular, tapering, almost windowless and when the threat receded they were not much good for anything else than temporary shelter or farm storage. They were mostly abandoned now. After four centuries of winter storms and earthquakes they were slowly reverting to nature as piles of whitish local stone on the stony cliffs. Even in the days of the long war they crumbled fast and needed constant rebuilding.
Muslim corsairs had been raiding the coasts of Christendom for a long time. Everyone on the Mediterranean went in for a little opportunistic privateering, as Islam pushed into Sicily and Spain, and Christianity pushed back. There had been a deal of mingling among the peoples of the Mediterranean, and its Christian, Islamic and Jewish cultures were nothing if not porous. It was in the sixteenth century that things changed for everyone, including the people of Naples. Islam was bleeding the Catholic Mediterranean. Young men snatched from Italy’s South found a chance in the more open Ottoman society. They took Turkish names and a few renegades became Islam’s fiercest raiders on Christendom.
The master relieved me of command and brought the Canopus in closer to the shore. We passed Amalfi and Positano, running close to shore below the high ribbon road and the terraced lemon groves and cascades of purple bougainvillea. We rounded Punto Campanella at the final extremity of the Sorrento peninsula. We entered a rather smaller concavity whose coast now swept in an unbroken swoosh from the edge of the water to the looming grey cone of Vesuvius. We were in the bay of Naples.
Ancient Roman Naples had been a privileged and lazily loyal enclave of Greekness and the arts of living. When Rome at last fell, the unfortunate youth who had been its last western emperor was dispatched to die in Naples at the end of the fifth century. As the cynosure of the Mediterranean, strategic, beautiful and rich, Naples was then fought over interminably by Goths and Byzantines, by Lombards and Saracens and later challenged by the upstart maritime republic of Amalfi. For five hundred years of the middle ages the city state of Naples mustered enough purposeful autonomy to flourish on sea trade and good governance as an independent power in the Mediterranean. Five hundred years was a long time, but for Naples it was a parenthesis and an anomaly.
The free dukedom of Naples was overtaken in the end by the region’s larger powers, first drawn into the Norman kingdom of Sicily, and thence into the Swabian empire of the Hohenstaufen Frederick II. Frederick died in 1250 and the end of his line soon followed. The western French from Anjou, after the ugly episode of the Sicilian vespers, made Naples, not Palermo, the capital of the southern kingdom. In the fourteenth century, Angevin Naples was an enormous and cosmopolitan medieval city of nearly fifty thousand people, the city of Giotto and Simone Martini, of Boccaccio and Petrarch, and even at the time it seemed marvellous.
Fifteenth century Naples remained the metropolis of southern Italy and the middle Mediterranean. The huge castles and the great churches built in Naples by the Aragonese and the Angevins before them rise over the detritus of the city today like relics from an age of giants. Don Ferrante, or Ferdinand I, bastard son of the first Aragonese king of Naples and his father’s successor, was a wholly assimilated Neapolitan and something of a portent. He was a major figure in the Italian politics of the later fifteenth century and his Realpolitik was much admired by Machiavelli. His sculpted likenesses, thickening and coarsening over the years, showed the beady intelligent eyes, the sensual and stubborn little mouth, the full cheeks and the thick neck of a recognizably modern southern Italian power broker.
When Ferrante died in 1494 the mesh of Aragonese power in Naples and Italy unravelled overnight. The great power rivalry of France and Spain for control of Naples—and so of the central Mediterranean—was already in place and would continue for hundreds of years. Now France wanted the Angevins back in power and in the summer of 1495 French armies invaded Italy.
Ferrante’s eldest son and successor Alfonso, a brutally successful army man in his father’s service, broke down under pressure as king. Tormented by bad dreams, he abdicated in favour of his own son Little Ferrante, retired to a Sicilian monastery and died within months. The feudal landowners of the South were already defecting to the French. People in Naples, sensing the power shift, remembered they had liked the Angevins of France. Ferrantino and his family retreated to the island of Ischia in the bay as Charles VIII of France rode into Naples at the head of his troops. The people were ecstatic. Neapolitans were good at welcoming foreign armies. Autonomy was long forgotten. They had been dealing with dominant outsiders for the last four hundred years.
The French armies, uninhibited looters and fuckers, had the French disease. The French called it the Neapolitan disease. Things turned ugly fast. The other Italian states joined forces against the French invaders and after three months in Naples Charles prudently returned to France. Ferrantino received a delirious welcome home. Normality returned. Ferrantino married his teenage aunt and the newlyweds were enjoying the cooler air on the slopes of Vesuvius in summer when the young king abruptly sickened. A few days later he was dead at twenty-eight and chaos was come again.
France and Spain signed a secret agreement in 1500 to carve up southern Italy between them. Naples would go to France. The pact broke down and France and Spain were fighting again in Italy. The Turks, having lately helped drive out the French, landed in the South and looked like taking Naples for themselves. The Neapolitans, open as ever to interesting proposals, saw Turkish rule as one of their options. People said they serve the master of the moment, sighing for the one just gone and waiting for the one to come.
A major Islamic enclave close to home on the European mainland was unthinkable to Spain. A short sharp autumn campaign ended when Spanish infantry with pikes defeated French cavalry at the Garigliano River between Rome and Naples. At the end of 1503 Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba rode into Naples and secured, for the present, Spanish interests in the Mediterranean. The Spanish army was met in the streets with wild applause and flowers. Those people were a kind of solution.
Not the solution Naples imagined for itself. Neapolitans had no idea how long those people were going to stay. Two hundred years later they were still there. Naples realized too late the cost of joining an empire. The earlier kings of Naples, French or Spanish, had been foreigners who became Neapolitan and identified their interests with those of the place they lived in. Now the kingdom was a vicerealm and Naples a vassal city governed by a viceroy taking orders from Madrid. Neither the barefoot crowds nor the plumed nobility on their best mounts imagined, at the end of 1503, that they would be seen from Madrid as a military staging post, a source of revenue and manpower to fight Spain’s foreign wars. Spain had locked Naples into a global empire which soon showed signs of being seriously overstretched.
The sixteenth was the century of the sea war between Islam and Catholic Christendom for control of the Mediterranean. The white stone towers we saw from the Canopus were reminders that in those years southern Italy and Sicily—not for the first time in their history or the last—were the theatre of a major power conflict. They were the Spanish homeland’s bulwark in the middle Mediterranean against the naval threat from an Ottoman empire that was reaching its apogee just as Spain’s lurched into bankruptcy.
The bulwark badly needed shoring up and the Spanish worked hard and fast to fortify a long and vulnerable coastline. In Sicily they began building along the specially vulnerable southern and eastern coasts in the fifteen thirties and soon they had a chain of nearly a hundred and fifty watchtowers. In 1567, along the coasts of Campania, Calabria and Apulia, they built more than three hundred towers in a single year. The republic of Genoa and papal Rome joined Spain in assembling rapid deployment forces able to respond fast to signals from the towers, marines who moved fast by water from one exposed place on the coast to another. Islamic corsairs pouncing on a coastal settlement sometimes found the Christian galleys waiting.
Not everyone shared Spain’s intransigence about Islam, not to mention its intolerance of the Jews, Moors, heretics and sexual irregulars who were progressively driven from a homeland obsessed with purity on all fronts. The front against Islam in the Mediterranean was never united. The most serene republic of Venice pursued its own agenda of trade relations with the Islamic nations and was a very desultory participant in the crusades whipped up in Rome and Madrid. France, tussling with Spain for power in Europe, often found it convenient to side with the Ottoman empire. The Ottomans had their own problems: enemies on their eastern borders, setbacks in their overland push into Europe through Hungary, Austria and the Balkans, and endless trouble with North Africa’s Islamic rulers, who sided with Christian Spain and Malta whenever it served their interests. Republican Genoa was loyal to Madrid only because it was Spain’s banker, the channel through which the gold and silver of the Americas passed, and republican Venice’s rival.
The coasts of southern Italy took a great battering from Islam after the Spanish occupied Naples in 1503. The Barbarossa brothers, who began their working lives as seamen in the Aegean islands and finished in command of the Ottoman fleet, entered the major phase of their fearsome careers in 1504, when they took a Sicilian warship and the four hundred Spanish knights and soldiers it was carrying from Spain to Naples. In the next ten years they raided the coasts of Calabria, Sicily and Sardinia again and again, made incursions into Spain itself and its islands, and attacked the coastal towns of Liguria and Provence.
The Sorrento ridge asserts itself once again just off the mainland point, and rounding Punto Campanella the Canopus cut inside a last fierce rocky peak jutting from the water. This was the island of Capri. Its sheer stone cliffs and its miniscule landing places did not save Capri from Hayreddin Barbarossa, last and most formidable of the brothers, who was admiral of the Ottoman fleet in the Mediterranean and viceroy in Algiers when he took Capri in 1534 and destroyed its castle. The Capresi had been living with attacks like this for a long time. It was the Islamic raids of the tenth century that forced the islanders to move their main town from the little beachfront to a citadel high above and build the defensive network of narrow roads and ramparts that defined Capri’s infrastructure ever after.
Barbarossa went on to sack the island of Procida and bombard the port towns in the bay of Naples. Then he headed up the coast and when he landed at Ostia on the mouth of the Tiber the church bells in Rome rang the alarm. He was back in full violence on Capri the next summer and nine years later, on the verge of retirement, he returned to raid the coast of Campania and threaten Rome again. In his swan song raids the following summer he seized towns on Ischia, threatened the port of Pozzuoli and made landings all down the coast to Sicily. The next year Barbarossa retired to Istanbul where he dictated five volumes of memoirs and died in sight of the Bosphorus.
We sailed past the little town of Massa Lubrense, and the master passed me his binoculars so I could pick out the white cube of his summer house among a cluster on the hillside above the jetty and the fishing boats. Everything was still and silent, shimmering in the summer heat. The occasional dot moved across the still water, leaving a thin wake which spread and vanished from the hazy surface. A hand reached up some cold beers from the galley and the master tossed me a can.
Summertime was wartime in those days. In winter the Islamic and the Christian navies retired to their arsenals to repair and rebuild their fleets for the next season. The sea closed down to galleys in winter. The battle for the Mediterranean was fought at sea, not on land, and the ships themselves were a major part of the prize. Whoever controlled the sea controlled communications and transport, controlled the Mediterranean economy.
Barbarossa’s death brought no relief to the southern Italians. Dragut followed, a peasant farmer’s son who had joined Barbarossa in 1520. By the thirties he was a veteran of innumerable raids on Spanish Naples and Sicily, and had won battles against the papal and Venetian fleets. In 1540 he terrorized the Spanish Mediterranean, raiding the coasts of Malta, Sicily and Spain with a fleet of over eighty galleys. Surprised off Corsica while repairing his ships, he was captured by the Genoese and freed from slavery four years later when the Turkish ships blockaded Genoa. In 1547 he sacked Malta and raided Sicily, Apulia, Calabria.
The next summer Dragut took Castellammare di Stabia, the port town below Vesuvius a little ahead of us along the coast the Canopus was cruising. Then he took Pozzuoli and seized a Spanish galley and a Maltese galley in the bay right outside Naples. Both ships were carrying troops and the Maltese galley was loaded with gold, seventy thousand ducats in funds raised in France by the knights of Malta for the war effort against Islam. In the summer of 1552 Dragut took both Sorrento and Massa Lubrense. His depredations gave the Islamic forces control of most of the coast between Naples and Rome. Forty galleys under Andrea Doria sailed south from Genoa to counterattack. In the first clash off Naples Dragut captured seven galleys and their German troops and in August he defeated Andrea Doria’s forces off the island of Ponza. Dragut became the Ottoman viceroy of the Mediterranean Sea.
The following spring he was back in the bay after making deep and devastating incursions into Calabria and Sicily. He landed on Capri and burnt its church and convent. Five years later he sacked Reggio Calabria, landed at Amalfi and Torre del Greco, took Sorrento and Massa. And in the high summer of 1561 he blockaded Naples itself with thirty-five galleys. A couple of summers later he took half a dozen ships off Capri, all loaded with Spanish troops and merchandise, and went on to land at Chiaia, the fishing community outside Naples’s defensive wall. These were a small part of his activities in the Mediterranean.
Four years later Dragut was dead, killed by cannon fire during the long siege of Malta. And at the end of the summer of 1571 the massed Islamic fleet was smashed by the Christian navies at Lepanto. Within a year Turkey had rearmed, but almost imperceptibly the Ottoman naval threat receded. As it did, Spain found itself facing even worse trouble on land.
We were gliding due north now, through a pearly and viscid summer twilight to the boat harbour at Santa Lucia, following the drift of Parthenope, whose siren song had failed to lure Odysseus on to the fatal rocks and whose drowned corpse had floated from the deep water off Capri until it washed ashore in the little hook in the coastline that was now Santa Lucia. The water, with its white plastic bags floating just below the surface like jellyfish, seemed inert and gelatinous, but there were hidden currents in the bay which could change it from foul to limpid overnight, from warm and fecal to a kind of deep upwelling freshness that reminded you how deep and nearly inexhaustible the little Mediterranean still was.
The gayest street
Walking one day in Naples and not long in the city, I found myself at a crossroads. There were two streets going steeply uphill and two heading down. I chose downhill and headed down an urban ravine, narrow enough and bent enough never to quite show where it was headed. At one point it opened out on the left on to a semicircular space noisily crowded with people, a statue in the middle and an elegantly curved red and grey façade at its back. Below the handsome piazza the canyon narrowed again then widened a few yards further downhill.
A monument, cars parked everywhere, kiosks festooned with lemons or newspapers or boiled lungs and tripes, several bars and icecream shops, oddly angled roads, narrow, dark, dirty and uphill on the right, newer, wider, cleaner and downhill on the left. People everywhere, moving randomly as they licked dripping cones, or picking over the little stalls manned by women in black selling indeterminate small objects. Boys perched on the saddles of parked Vespas, older women in shawls sitting behind cardboard cartons or small folding tables on which lay several neatly aligned packets of American cigarettes. Pairs of older men in cashmere jackets, deep in solemn conversation, pulling on dark narrow cheroots and making their way serenely through the tangle of people and debris.
A man with a sun-blackened face squatted by a basket of bright green figs holding a small set of scales, the brass weights rubbed and gleaming from use. Diagonally opposite a cluster of meditative youths stood at the edge of the roadway. They were mostly silent and looking hard at something indefinable or else not looking at anything at all. A Vespa would roar up to a knot of these standers-around for a brief, urgent conversation. Everyone in this slowly seething crowd seemed wearily familiar with everyone else. To walk into that space on that morning at the end of a long summer was to be caught in its frantic dreamlike lethargy. The scene was rich and strange in the dusty air. It was late morning by now, hot and getting sticky.
The elaborate indolence of this place abruptly broke up into hoarsely shouted obscenities and a fight over stall space. Two of the women in black mourning dresses, each built like a sumo wrestler, were punching and kicking, yanking out hanks of hair, hennaed and glossy black, and rolling in the dirt. If this had been a confrontation of men, there would have been two allies holding each arm, much ferocious theatre and no body contact. But these were women, and trying to do serious injury.
This was Piazza Carità and a lulling calm above the rapids. Below it, down into the dark-walled canyon, a tide of channelled bodies swept on past great banks housed in art nouveau or art deco and intersected once or twice by a sliver of cobalt sea. The sleek grey Fascist granite of the Banco di Napoli 1539–1939 went on forever. An older and more resistant Naples loomed almost out of sight. Dark and narrow alleys ran steeply uphill on the right, obscured by swags of laundry, little cracks bleeding into the human torrent, almost unnoticeable though the openings were marked by watchful figures, each standing over three packs of cigarettes—Marlboro, Camel and the local killer MS—on an upended box. On the left past the banks was a huge and echoing birdcage whose marble floor and high-vaulted steel-ribbed glass roof hundreds of feet above made the scurrying and stationary figures look like tiny wind-up automata. A shoeshine throne and more cigarettes and elderly men in conversation clustered at the opening.
A few yards more and the torrent debouched into a silent sunny space filled with cars and orange buses, a couple of equestrian bronze statues rising above them. A low semicircular colonnade enclosed the buses under a promontory’s steep ridge of yellow and red buildings. The descent was walled on the left by the red and grey façade of a vast palace, with giant imperial statues set into niches. Beyond it a smear of grass, some palm trees, the emperor Augustus in bronze, arm raised toward Africa—another Fascist touch—a shore that swept to the hazy purple hump of Vesuvius, Capri jutting from the sea like a distant thorn as the road dropped to a foul and glittering sea.
Later I descended Toledo—which was the street’s name— at all hours, in all seasons, in all weathers and this arrival, spilling out of the urban hive on to the open spread of the Mediterranean, never failed to take my breath away. Toledo ran down a vanished river’s course to the sea with the gathered rush of its tributaries, narrow, deep, precipitous, irresistible, the only course to follow on your way down to the bay.
In its day the street changed the look of Naples and the dynamic of the city’s life. Via Toledo began in the sixteenth century not as a force of human gravity but as part of an imperial planner’s military scheme. It was built and named after himself by the viceroy Pedro de Toledo in 1536, charged by Madrid with bringing Naples up to scratch as Spain’s Mediterranean power base. Toledo conceived it as a link in his enlarged and strengthened system of city defence. It let troops move swiftly between the Castel Sant’Elmo on the hill and the Castelnuovo down by the water. The splendid and scary Sant’Elmo fortress loomed over the city, visible from its every part and never out of mind. On the sea front stood the Castelnuovo, massive, buttressed, turretted, moated, symmetrical, and a mile away, thrust out over the water, the seriously military brutalism of the Castel dell’Ovo flanked it in readiness to repel navies, garrison troops and incarcerate enemies of the state. The Castel Capuano by the city’s eastern gate had once housed the rulers of Naples, but after the Angevins built their new castle in the fourteenth century it housed the law courts and the common prison. The four castles defined the image of power in Naples.
Via Toledo was also for show. Spain had found its new Mediterranean capital a very rundown city whose whole infrastructure badly needed making over. It was desperately crowded. Water supply, sewerage, traffic flow, housing were no longer adequate to the pressures of daily use. Naples could no longer accommodate its own inhabitants, let alone represent Spanish power in the Mediterranean. The considerations were more than practical, and from a higher point of view the glories of nature were not enough. Spanish imperial magnificence required a man-made pomp and a political scenography which only buildings of great size and splendour and roads and piazzas could provide. Ottoman Istanbul was a formidable rival. In that sense Toledo’s road led not to the sea or the waterfront forts but to the royal palace. The sea was a scenic extra.
Toledo was teeming and deafening from the word go, the place where you saw and were seen in Naples for the next four hundred years. For Stendhal arriving in 1817 it was an incomparable delight, the most crowded and the gayest street in the universe. For the occupying Allied armies in 1943, Toledo was where, under a birdcage dome bombed glassless, the starving people of Naples got to know their most recent foreign armies of occupation. Some of the new invaders were the sons of the belle epoque’s hungry emigrants, and now they heard the patter of sandals, the click of hobnails, the squunch of children’s bare soles as they begged, pimped, screamed, tugged, cried and offered.
In the seventies Toledo at the end of summer was busy all day. Toward the end of the afternoon and on until well after dark its pedestrian movement might have made you think a football stadium was emptying around the corner. The crowd thinned out after eight, when people withdrew to eat, and surged back later as a leisurely and almost stately foot traffic that kept up until after midnight, as people of all ages sauntered home, licked gelati, bought contraband cigarettes, conferred intensely. The great gallery, thunderous with trafficking at dusk, began to echo emptily as night deepened. Piazza Carità at the top of the run was busy with idleness more or less around the clock.
Hot fuggy nights at summer’s end and people never off the streets. Around the castle Vespas and baby Fiats swirled in the dark. You could see the haze of vapour like dandelion heads around the street lights. Knots of people and others strolling singly ranged the steep lawns and the terraces planted with rows of oleanders. On the grass by the bus stop they bought nuts or nougat or cold crescents of coconut or paper cones of pumpkin seeds from an emaciated seller with a thin moustache and a face like polished wood, who had laid out his treats alongside beer and soft drinks in tubs of melting ice.
These pleasures were for people on foot, or boys on a Vespa. Cars would pull up by a lighted bar for gelati, iced coffees, iced teas, amari. From the sloping lawns and the oleander terraces around the castle you didn’t need a car or a scooter to reach Piazza Vittoria, Piazza San Ferdinando, the Litoranea—a tiny garden on an inlet of the sea between the old customs house and the wall below the royal palace—and Santa Lucia. Santa Lucia and its waterfront and the packed warren behind it were their own maritime territory, distinct and apart. Beyond, the gardens of the Villa Comunale were announced by mythological nudes from the eighteenth century. They enclosed an elegant wrought-iron band rotunda and the marine research station and stretched along the bay toward Mergellina and Posillipo. During the day children of the bourgeoisie bought balloons, rode miniature trains and played there on the gravel under supervision, and at night husbands rented out their wives.
In the daytime couples posed against the castle walls for wedding photographs, the bridal image’s clouds of vaporous white tulle framed by stone battlements and merging into the hazy blue outline of a dormant Vesuvius floating in the distance. Then the darkest early hours of a Sunday morning were broken by what sounded like a rifle shot in the next room. Or the crack of doom. From the creaking hollow of a decrepit double bed I saw the doors of the ancient wardrobe swing open in the dark. A faint drumming began and quickly got harder. It was the first patter of a deluge that seeped into the room as palpable dampness. Rain permeated the worn sheets and raised a smell of ancient straw from the thin mattress. The wire mesh grated with new rust. The greyness lightened after a while and the drumming slowed to ordinary rain and then to a drizzle, and by the time daylight asserted itself through the clouds it had more or less stopped.
The water on the ground hadn’t. The narrow downhill alleys were cascading into Toledo like waterfalls and Toledo itself was a raging filthy torrent, wooden fruit boxes and old suitcases and newspapers and broken umbrellas bouncing down it to the sea. Later in the day the weather cleared a bit, the river subsided and finally drained off altogether and Monday was fine. But it never got hot again and the staleness was gone. The streets emptied of sun-darkened faces at night and the few you encountered were white masks staring out of the darkness. As autumn cooled into winter, the nocturnal movement diminished further, but Toledo toward the end of the day always swelled into a human torrent that never dwindled until long after nightfall.
From the bay
In his family home on the hill overlooking the bay, from whose terrace the photographers from Life had shot the last eruption of Vesuvius in 1944, the master had several paintings by Monsù Desiderio. One of them showed the bay and the city imagined from the sky over the sea rather than seen from the hillside over the bay. As if seen by a high-flying bird or from an early seventeenth century aircraft.
I hadn’t heard of Monsù Desiderio or seen anything like these weird black and gold gothic registerings, at once exquisitely precise and eerily unreal. Monsù Desiderio turned out to have been two people, both Frenchmen from Metz and almost exactly the same age. One had come south to Naples in the first years of the seventeenth century when he was hardly more than a boy. The other, summoned by letter or lured by curiosity and wanting to know what his younger friend was up to, followed a couple of years later. Each worked on his own and sometimes, as a topographical specialist, contributed background to another painter’s work. They also worked together from time to time, and given their common nationality, age and home town and their shared expertise in the vast and minute, it was hardly surprising that after their deaths art world memories in Naples grew a little vague and that the two melded for three hundred years into a single Frenchman called Monsù Desiderio.
The elder by two years was Didier Barra, an innkeeper’s son who was born in 1590 or soon after and left home in his teens. He was gone from Metz by 1608. He was drawn to vast views, which he kept sober and exact by drawing on the rapidly evolving skills of mapmakers. The younger friend, who came to Italy first, when he must have been fifteen or less, was François de Nomé. He had Didier’s fascination with detail but a wilder mind that was drawn to the architectonic. The tiny human figures who peopled de Nomé’s hallucinatory constructions at street level were usually done by someone else. He painted a lot of fantastical imaginary buildings of great complexity and must have seen Bruegel’s Tower of Babel as a child. As a man he saw the Palazzo Donn’Anna on the rocks at Posillipo, commissioned from Cosimo Fanzago by the viceroy Medina for his Neapolitan wife Anna Carafa. When the viceroy was abruptly recalled in 1644, the palace was abandoned unfinished, a great spectral comb rising out of the water and open to the sky, the sea washing into its courtyard. It was no wonder both painters were drawn to Naples and the bay.
Their panoramic landscapes eerily anticipated views from planes or photographs from satellites. They had a sense of the world’s curved surface, of the wispy continuities in cloud patterns seen from afar, an acute awareness of how haze overtakes any view as distance increases, a knowledge of how a sharp eye and an informed mind can on a clear day pick up the most amazing quantity of detail. Monsù Desiderio must have climbed Vesuvius many times, and the extinct crater of Epomeo in the centre of the island of Ischia, and looked directly down on the city from the promontory of Castel Sant’Elmo, and cruised inside the curve of the coastline as we had lately done, making sketches from a small open boat.
The master’s painting of Naples seen looking inland from the air over the bay looked like a Didier but was in fact painted by François. The master in any case continued to talk of Monsù Desiderio as if they were one. It was a scary painting, mostly black, but flecked with tiny highlights and threaded with silver and gold. It looked like the negative of a landscape photo. Sky and sea were black, except for a dazzling slash of light, about a third of the sky, where the impenetrable clouds had rolled back to show the sun; and for an exquisite silvery streak on the black water where the sea mirrored the gash of sunlight.
A fleet of delicate warships was entering the port with miniscule pennants fluttering—each marked by a single brush hair—and the sails of the last still hoisted, made scimitars by the wind that was blowing back the covering of cloud. You could see the Castel dell’Ovo on the water at the end of its causeway and the Castelnuovo on the water’s edge. Castel Capuano was just out of view on the right. The buildings receding from the waterline were picked out in white on black with maniacal autistic detail. Above the city in the centre stood the Castel Sant’Elmo on its hilltop, behind it on the right the darkened lower slopes of Vesuvius, to the left the smoking sulphur pit of Pozzuoli, caught in the blinding sun. It was François de Nomé’s last known painting.
Nearly all of the buildings in this painting of 1647 were still recognizably there three hundred and more years later. In a different light—a hazy dawn—and from a lower perspective, I saw the same scene from the deck of the night ferry from Palermo. The ferry pulled into the bay around daybreak, and the land grew lighter as the boat drew nearer. The sky lightened behind the looming volcano to the east. We passed the islands, ships at anchor, began to make out the individual villas and palaces in the row along the water under the hill of Posillipo. We tracked the arm of a long and decrepit concrete breakwater with a little red lighthouse at its elbow, reaching out to sea past rusting cranes and what looked like abandoned hulks at anchor.
Palermo the afternoon before had been vivid, windswept, the sea cobalt and the peaks savage against the sky, and now in the bay of Naples everything was softened and pearly, sea, land and sky more vaguely delimited. In both cases the look was delusive. The wild beauty of Palermo and the sensual softness of Naples nursed twin horrors. It was the spring of 1982 and that summer in both cities a great killing would follow.
The vapours in the haze of moist and exquisitely polluted air softened the hard edges where sky and sea and coast all met, muted the dark looming profile of the volcano, refigured the bleak outline of the ugliest postwar buildings into a suggestive pale gold agglomeration. The silvery pinkish half-light turned rusting hulks and ugly freighters romantic as the ferry slid past and the water’s foulness was unknowable below its silky surface. There were hardly any fishing boats. Inactivity on the waterfront was heavy with a pregnant stillness.
The thousands of tiny glittering panes in the windows in the royal palace looked out over the bay from the dark red walls under the roof garden, its red brick and massive granite coining above the stone walls rising from the road at sea level. This royal palace was a vast rebuilding of the smaller palace shown by Monsù Desiderio, redone to the scale and style of a golden age of absolutism, of a time when threats, internal and external, seemed to have evaporated in the Mediterranean sun. The model was Versailles, the sibling palaces were a few miles away at Capodimonte and Caserta and pleasure, beauty and bon goût prevailed in all of them. The palace in Naples was joined by a tunnel for royal entrances to the San Carlo theatre, an acoustic jewel of cream and gilt and red velvet which later held Stendhal and fifteen hundred others in delighted intimacy.
The ferry docked under the Castelnuovo, massive and formidable in its fifteenth century reworking, walls pocked by ancient cannon balls, and the five great round and battlemented grey stone towers at its corners, still isolated from the city by the deep moat cut into the rising ground around its bastions. Unseen from the boat, the triumphal arch and frieze in white marble over the drawbridge celebrated the entrance into Naples of the Angevins’ successors from Aragon in 1442.
Most of the great buildings in Monsù Desiderio’s painting were already in place when the Aragonese arrived. You recognized everything in the Tavola Strozzi, the panorama of Naples from the bay done in the middle of the fifteenth century—solid, careful, exact, the water filled with small working boats, docks crowded with stevedores and businessmen, a flight of large birds gliding past the promontory of the Castel Sant’Elmo, the hillside above the city still green and dotted with mulberry trees for the silkworms, water, hill and sky in interpenetrating shades and streaks of light blue and green, utterly unlike Monsù Desiderio’s hallucinated darkness of two centuries later. A hundred thousand people lived in Naples when the Tavola Strozzi was done.
The amphitheatre city was terraced above the water. The dust and the tufo—the volcanic detritus compacted into a soft and porous yellow rock like Sydney sandstone and cut up into the building blocks of Naples—made a whitish gold haze when the first sun struck them from behind the shoulder of the volcano. The crumbling houses stacked in semicircles were still in shadow when Castel Sant’Elmo caught the sun first, towering gold above the rest, a great six-pointed bastion the stone of whose sheer walls was gouged from its own interior.
The Castel Sant’Elmo was what you saw of Spanish Naples from the harbour. The Spanish had massively rebuilt the fort on this highest hill. When the French were at the gates of Naples in 1528, Spain’s military realized how crucial the hilltop was to Naples, because from there you could hit the whole city, and made Sant’Elmo the main link in the new system of defensive walls, which enclosed the city and joined Sant’Elmo with the Castelnuovo on the waterfront. Whoever controlled Sant’Elmo could cover inland approaches at the city’s back and also fire with great precision into the streets of Naples below, as the Spanish artillery did when Neapolitans grew turbulent in 1547. The military garrison was bolstered spiritually and architecturally by the Carthusian monks of San Martino, whose contiguous paler walls embraced no less ground, were only infinitesimally lower than the military’s and looked hardly less threatening to people huddled further down the slopes.
The ferry had already passed the Castel dell’Ovo on the left, before the breakwater intervened. It too loomed in the Strozzi panel and in Monsù Desiderio’s view, jutting out to sea on the left of the little point of Santa Lucia. Its cubist oblongs of windowless raw tufo were already glowing goldish in the sun, looking like a natural growth from the tiny island of Megaris buried beneath it, where Lucullus had his villa and the last Roman emperor of the West expired in 476. From the shore or from the sky the castle projected formidably and unforgettably. From the sea it seemed part of the coastline.
Behind the Castelnuovo, above surrounding roofs, to the right of the palace and theatre rose the glittering compound eye of the dome over the Galleria Umberto on Toledo, built in the Francophile eighteen nineties, when Neapolitan songs greeted the gay arrivals of early mass tourism, who shared the waterfront with the departing huddled masses of the great emigration, as southern Italy bled into the Americas.
The only decent buildings put up in Naples in the twentieth century, like the Banco di Napoli and the stupendous post office, were the work of the Fascists. Another was the stazione marittima, alongside which the ferry now docked. Almost alone it survived the destruction of the port by British and American bombs and the demolitions of the retreating German army in 1943. Its brilliant maritime white was lightheartedly art deco rather than Fascist neoclassical. It evoked the glamour of transatlantic crossings in the big liners of l’entre deux guerres and lent a touch of international drama to a day ferry trip to Capri or Ischia or Procida. Or a night ferry ride to Palermo.
The monuments of Naples failed to impose their grandeur on the people who lived among them. The buildings that looked so powerful from an approaching boat or a horse at the city gates were a part of the landscape to the locals, impersonal as rocks. Outcrops to skirt or take shelter by. They were foreign ground, occupied by foreign soldiers, foreign prelates, foreign bureaucrats, foreign judges. The great palazzi filling up the narrow rectangle of the city centre in the sixteenth century were built by the outsiders who ran the economy or baronial families lately in from the country. Neapolitans entered them as servants, tradesmen, prisoners, postulants or ceremonial guests. The castles and palaces and churches marking out the city were a material residue, the petrification of power in time. Naples itself lived in the interstices and that life was harder to see and even harder to find recorded.
Up the Mulberries
It was autumn when I first went up the Quarters and it always felt like autumn there. Hillside elevation and high building on a tight grid of narrow alleys kept them slightly cooler in summer, slightly warmer in winter. The streets were dark even on sunny days, except for those minutes when a blinding knifeblade of light cut into an alley. The smell in the streets was strangely clean. It was mineral, ammoniacal, salty, smoky, with traces of red wine, fresh fish, orange peel, new bread, vinegar, burnt pizza and dirt sluiced downhill with soap and water.
The Quarters began one step off Toledo and yet they were hidden from the world of banks and expensive clothes. You were walking down Toledo and on your right, every few yards a narrow opening rose steeply into the unknown. Even if you stopped and peered—most times you passed them without even noticing the alleys leading off, they were so narrow, so cluttered by the stuff for sale on the corners during the day—and even when the light was good enough, all you saw were anonymous old walls obscured by cars and washing. They were so unchanged, so unreconstructed that if you looked under the dirt you could still see OFF LIMITS roughly stencilled on a corner wall as a warning or a lure for the occupying troops of 1943.
In 1978 the street sellers were still locals, and in every season you saw the same person at the same corner, selling from an upturned carton or a little folding table. The merchandise during the day was the contraband cigarettes which sustained the economy of Naples in the first half century of the Italian republic. And teeshirts, toys, clocks and watches, sunglasses, handbags, newspapers and magazines.
At night everything vanished except the cigarettes, imbedded deep in the layers of the shawls worn by the women who sat on the corners. In the dark the old cigarette women wound in shawls looked even more like guerrilla sentinels, fires burning by their feet in winter, guarding the lower approaches to the encampment on the hill. Each corner had a sentry on duty, a still watcher who missed nothing in the human flow. The cigarette women were on the lookout for finance police cars on the prowl. When the cry ’a finanz’, ’a finanz’ went up, the cigarettes—the cartons wedged in dark interstices—were gone long before the grey cars arrived. But they also kept a watch on nocturnal visits to the Quarters. At night the Quarters were off limits to the police and carabinieri as they had been to the Allied military a generation before.
Narrow, steep and dark, filled with watchful eyes and rocketing scooters, the alleys leading uphill off Toledo were deeply intimidating to any visitor. They discouraged casual reconnoitring. These steep gradients were intersected by long and narrow horizontal streets running along the contours of the hillside like sheep tracks. The first of these was called Vico Lungo Gelso. The hillside was green when Toledo engineered his road below it, and Long Mulberry Tree Lane ran through mulberry trees, red and white, for the silkworms that supplied one of the few productive activities in Naples.
Rising steeply to where the walls of the Castel Sant’Elmo and the San Martino charterhouse rose out of the rock, the hillside belonged to the monks of San Martino, who rented the wild and uncultivated slope for almost nothing to the local aristocrat who then terraced it and made money from the silkworms. The groves of mulberry trees also made the slopes a delightful resort for outdoor sex. Making love outdoors under the mulberry trees, the Neapolitans . . . went in for a lot of wildness and grossness. The whole thing was so very much in the open that the hillside became synonymous with shameless good times. Are we up the Mulberries or something? people would say when sexual behaviour in public places started getting out of hand.
The Spanish administration needed somewhere to garrison the occupying troops, and the Mulberries were right above the royal palace, the Castelnuovo and the port and close enough to the Castel dell’Ovo. And they were on Toledo’s new artery built to speed the transit of troops between these places and the city’s other two strategic strongholds, the Castel Sant’Elmo immediately above and the Castel Capuano at the eastern gate. The count saw there was a killing to be made up the Mulberries. He sublet the land to the Spanish, who laid out the narrower parallel streets running along the hill above and behind the new road. Steep little connecting lanes were squeezed between the palazzi and soon the whole area was built up almost to the fortress and the monastery, where the ground got too steep to level and build on.
The income from sericulture was nothing to what the count now made as a developer and entrepreneur. The Spanish administration kept building and building until the remaining orchard blocks were gone and internal courtyard gardens filled in and the inhabitants were the most densely packed in the most densely peopled city in Europe. The warren of a sixteenth century developer’s housing became the Spanish Quarters. Europe’s first urban grid plan was realized on this steep and unlikely terrain. Before the Quarters, cities just grew.
And as the pleasant greenery and amateur sex of the Mulberries metamorphosed into the darkly looming Spanish Quarters, the hillside’s concentration of foreign soldiery invited an equal concentration of workers in the sexual service industries. The huge and beautiful garden vanished and the sex went indoors. Recreation became business. When the Mulberries became the Spanish Quarters, love for sale was its economic staple. Prostitution in Naples, once busiest down on the waterfront, was concentrated and industrialized in the Spanish Quarters, and there it stayed for four hundred years, long after the last Spanish troops had embarked and sailed away. A woman from the Quarters was a prostitute unless she could show reason to believe otherwise. Other sexual identities and activities weren’t even discussed.
Filled with riotous foreign soldiery and the locals who serviced their needs, the Quarters were never one of the most desirable residential areas in Naples. The soldiers lodged in private houses or shacked up with their girlfriends in a neighbourhood already full of lascivious women. There was no military discipline and fights . . . often broke out between [the Spanish] and the Neapolitans . . . there were a lot of killings. The violence was private and collective and it never ended. Soldiers abused women, lived off their earnings, offended their families and were knifed in the dark by the men of Naples. Every morning bodies turned up in the alleys. After a hundred years of this the Spanish in 1651 moved their military out and quartered them in a purpose-designed barracks elsewhere. The Quarters’ name and destiny stayed forever.
Beyond the soldiers, two forces converged to turn the Quarters into a ghetto. Heavy Spanish moralism was changing a socially easygoing city. The students and their girls themselves and the pimps and protectors ended up in the only place that would have them. The militantly counter-reformed church reinforced the Spaniards’ new regime of decorum, suspicion and anonymous denunciation. The public dress and behaviour of all women was fiercely policed. Kissing in public, like carrying a weapon at night, was a major offence. Prostitutes were segregated. The civil and religious pincer grip was being felt even before the Council of Trent laid down the guidelines.
In 1547 Toledo pushed his Spanish Naples project to the point of inviting the Spanish Inquisition, which was far more fearsomely intrusive than the Roman, into the jurisdiction of Naples. After nearly fifteen years of summary justice from Toledo the people of Naples exploded. Even the aristocrats were involved. Fighting in the streets went on for months, the cannon of Sant’Elmo bombarded the city below and at the end of it there were at least a thousand dead, most of them Spanish soldiers from the Quarters. At which point Toledo, saying that he too had been against the idea all along, backed down.
A small revolution in Calabria
The streets of Spanish Naples were crowded, as the seventeenth century began and the occupation neared its first hundred years, with temporarily resident foreign entrepreneurs, diplomats, financiers, visiting clergy and military under deployment. Its stones creaked under the family coaches of newly urbanized baronial latifundistas, clattered under the hooves of the southern barons’ and the Spanish courtiers’ Arabian thoroughbreds. The narrow ways were obstructed by the barons’ squads of armed enforcers and busily trodden by their servants, retainers, slaves, suppliers. Public spaces rustled with the habits and vestments of clergy of every degree and order. The ground was tramped by the boots of the occupying army and padded by the bare feet of refugees from rural poverty and brutality all over southern Italy. Naples swarmed with children, beggars and street criminals.
Peasants, fishermen, market gardeners, tavern keepers, prostitutes, idlers and contrabbandieri gathered in the unplanned agglomerations outside the city’s fortified walls. And as the Spanish imperium lurched from bankruptcy to bankruptcy, military crisis to military crisis, in one of the dank confinements kept in the Castel Sant’Elmo for the vicerealm’s most dangerous subversives, another city was taking shape inside the head of a prisoner who had no serious hope of ever seeing the real one again.
Tommaso Campanella was twenty years younger than Giordano Bruno. They were two of the most brilliant minds and resourceful men of their age in Europe. Most likely they never met, though in the autumn of 1594 the younger man joined Bruno in the Inquisition’s prison labyrinth in Rome. After six months or so of interrogation and torture, Campanella was released into house arrest. Bruno continued fighting for his life for another five years, until they burnt him alive at the beginning of 1600. By then Campanella was in jail again elsewhere, now held by the Spanish in the Castelnuovo. He remained a prisoner of Spain in the various fortress dungeons of Naples, tireless, cunning, indestructible, for another twenty-six years. A month after his release from the Castelnuovo in 1626 Campanella was seized in Naples by agents of the Inquisition, kidnapped and smuggled to Rome in chains, under a false identity to get him past the Spanish authorities, back to the prison of the Inquisition he had left thirty-one years before.
Unlike Bruno, Campanella remained a convinced and devout Christian all his life. But over seven decades he was so original, inventive and so mightily prolific a writer in Latin and vernacular, prose and verse, on philosophical matters that Rome’s inquisitors were at once deeply alarmed by the dangerousness of his ideas and unable to get any kind of firm grasp on quite what those ideas were. For the Spanish in the South the problem was more straightforward and no less urgent. Campanella was the leader of a failed communist revolution.
He was born on a summer evening in 1568, to an illiterate shoemaker and a mother who died too young to leave a memory, in a hovel outside Stilo in Calabria. Then as now Calabria was one of the wildest and remotest and poorest parts of the Italian peninsula. Whatever it was that produced and fed his passionate and hungry intelligence in his first years, Tommaso Campanella had the physical toughness and the mental wiliness of a poor boy from the sticks. These kept him going more than seventy years—most of them spent in vile prison cells—like the country magic which had saved his life as a sick child.
Taking orders was the only way a poor boy could get an education, and like Bruno before him Campanella chose the Dominicans for their compelling eloquence. Maybe he knew too of their unruly independence of secular and religious authority, and their incomparable library in Naples. He read books by Telesio, another Calabrian and Europe’s first scientific thinker—Francis Bacon called Telesio the first of the moderns—and was electrified by his studies of the natural world. He went to Cosenza to meet Telesio, now almost eighty, and arrived in time to attend his funeral and fix a poem to the coffin.
Campanella was twenty-one before he got to Naples and went to San Domenico—the great church, the convent, the school, the library. After a while small troubles with religious authority began. He published a book defending Telesio. Someone accused him of housing a familiar demon under the nail of his little finger and not taking excommunication seriously. He was shut in the convent jail. How come you know so much, if you’ve never had an education? they asked. He answered, quoting Jerome, I’ve burnt more oil reading than you’ve drunk wine.
They ordered him back to Calabria immediately. He was twenty-four and it was like a death sentence. He headed north, as Bruno had. In Rome he met cardinal Del Monte, Florence’s man in Rome, experimental scientist and patron of original minds, who a couple of years later discovered the unknown painter Michelangelo Merisi from Caravaggio. Del Monte was wary of the brilliant but impetuous youth from Calabria with his head full of Telesio, Neoplatonism and magic and wrote thus to Florence where Campanella was headed. When Campanella reached Florence he failed to find the position he was hoping for and moved on to Bologna, where someone stole his manuscripts and sent them to the Inquisition. Then he went to Padua. Desperately poor, he studied medicine there and made friends with Galileo. This Del Monte protégé was four years older than Campanella and starting a brilliant career. They stayed friends for life, and when the Inquisition closed in on Galileo decades later, Campanella wrote—from prison—a book defending him.
In nearby Venice in 1593, a few months after Bruno had been arrested there, he met up with Giovambattista Della Porta, whom he had known and argued with in Naples. Della Porta was a playwright, scientist, inventor, psychologist, a man of innumerable interests. A few years before in his bestselling book Natural Magic he had anticipated the optical principles of the telescope and set out the image projection system of the camera obscura. Merisi would use a camera obscura in the experiments in painting from life he made as a member of Del Monte’s household over the next few years. Della Porta was temporarily in Venice because in Naples the Inquisition was looking into his work and Venice was relatively safe. Galileo in Padua was also inside the Venetian republic and under its protection.
In Rome that summer the Inquisition was going through Campanella’s writings and not liking what it read. He was arrested in Padua in early 1594 and tortured on minor charges. The Inquisition, having just put Telesio’s works on the Index of forbidden books and having read Campanella’s On the Meaning of Things, insisted on having Campanella tried in Rome. That autumn he was in their prison in Rome and later he was tortured there. The place filled him with horror as a frightful and ineluctable trap for free minds, as the devouring monster . . . cave of Polyphemus . . . Cretan labyrinth . . . secret tyranny’s sacred fortress. After torture he solemnly and publicly retracted the offending ideas and was released into house arrest.
In Naples a condemned criminal from his home town of Stilo, playing for time, wildly accused Campanella of heresy and Campanella was arrested again. Eventually he was acquitted but his work was banned and he was forbidden to write. He was ordered back to Calabria again and this time he went. After dragging out his time in Naples as long as he could, renewing old contacts, teaching, writing, he took a boat south and in the summer of 1598 set foot in Calabria for the first time in a decade. He was thirty years old, back in Stilo and condemned to silence. All his efforts to make a way in the greater world of the mind had come to nothing.
For a while everything was quiet. But under the placid surface of its brutalized and priest-ridden feudal poverty, Calabria was seething. The undefended coastal towns on the Ionian Sea below Stilo were under constant attack by the Ottoman fleet, Turkish privateers and the Barbary corsairs operating out of Algiers. Inland was worse. Bandits had the run of vast tracts of wild terrain. They raided too, extorted, kidnapped and made travel a risk of life. Feudal landowners had absolute power on their estates. In the shadow of the latifundisti and far from the power in Naples, local government in the towns was paralyzed by feuding factions.
The return of Tommaso Campanella had a strange effect on the people of his home town and on himself. He was patently one of them, a powerfully built countryman who knew them all, spoke their dialect, understood their life and their nature. But to local people bound to their own narrow round he was now a man who brought news of the great world, read books, wrote them even, a man of the church. That he had come home defeated and disgraced hardly registered, not when they heard him making sense of their condition, felt how strongly he shared their anger and how vividly he imagined better things.
And Campanella felt himself drawn back into the natural magic of the country people’s world, the clear consciousness of his childhood, and yet able to see things with an outsider’s analytic eye. He was now a man who knew Naples, Rome, Venice, the seats of religious and secular power, the homes of money and ideas. He had lived in the homes of the powerful, spoken with cardinals, known some of the age’s best minds. He had also seen the worst of the church, the ignorance and bigotry in its convents, the Inquisition’s perverse and arbitrary cruelty. He had elaborated as he went along ideas for reforming the social and religious orders, in texts mostly now lost or abandoned in his travels, destroyed or suppressed by the Inquisition. Now people were listening to him and he saw a chance not just to understand the world but to change it.
Tommaso Campanella was himself under the powerful millennial influence of the coming year of 1600. Over the more recent years of the counter-reformation’s crushing orthodoxy, there had been more and more vague but intense thinking among the church’s freer minds about a great impending change, and the talk had become focused on the year 1600. Already the thought that a radical renewal was imminent had fatally lured Bruno back to Italy. When Campanella preached in Stilo through the spring of 1599, again and again he announced a revolutionary change about to come. He watched the stars in the night sky from the promontory over the sea where Stilo stood, believed that the conjuncture was arriving. Prophetic books confirmed what he saw in the skies and the charts, and he talked to people about what he saw and read. He knew a lot of people beside the country peasants—minor gentry, anti-Spanish landowners, dissident clerics, freethinking lawyers, frustrated provincial bureaucrats, factors and estate managers who knew what the barons were taking from the land.
Campanella’s charisma put him at the centre of their vast web of discontents. He gave them a plan and a goal and more grounds for belief than they could begin to assimilate. He spent the early summer moving around the district, convincing, conferring, enrolling. Back in Stilo he held the threads together through letters in code. When the stifling dog days of summer came, communist revolution was on the agenda in Calabria. Even the marauding Turkish navy was enlisted and stood by to intervene. The aim was to overthrow Spanish rule, redistribute the land and institute a popular theocratic republic under the leadership of fra’ Tommaso Campanella, who would make new law and return every man to natural freedom.
What happened was disaster. The web of conspirators was too loose, strung out too far. In that culture of generalized mistrust and anonymous denunciation, it was inevitable that someone would report the imminent rebellion. As happened. Two marginal conspirators in Catanzaro, losing their nerve or looking for reward, reported the plan in mid August to the Spanish administrator. Word sped to Naples and the viceroy acted with a dispatch much admired in the capital’s diplomatic community. A week later two Spanish infantry battalions landed in Calabria and the revolution collapsed in defections and betrayals. Two denounced as leaders were dragged behind horses through the streets of Catanzaro, then tortured with irons, strangled and strung up by the foot; two days later they were hacked to pieces and their heads hung in iron cages over the town gates. Others paid out huge sums to escape arrest. Campanella himself took to the land, dressed as a peasant and sheltered by friends in houses and farm sheds until a neighbour betrayed him.
Everyone said he was the leader, so he was saved for a show of due process. After preliminary hearings in Calabria he was taken back to Naples with a hundred and fifty others. The galleys returned to port with four hanged prisoners suspended from the mast, and before the prisoners were disembarked, shackled in pairs and shuffling in file, two more were torn apart in the water by the four galleys under the eyes of the big crowd of onlookers gathered on the wharf.
Campanella was put in the Castelnuovo with the others. As the instigator and leader of the failed revolution he faced an inevitable fate. Rome and Naples squabbled viciously over rights to the prisoner. Spain refused to surrender him to the Inquisition. The lay prisoners were tried and tortured first. Campanella’s interrogation began in January of 1600. After the first session he was sent for softening up for a week in the castle’s underground crocodile pit, then brought out for several days of torture.
Under torture, he talked, and copiously, but mostly about signs, visions and prophecies of a new order. He denied leading a revolt against Spain. At the beginning of April he was found raving and nearly asphyxiated in his smoke-filled cell, his straw mattress on fire. He went on raving through torture and interrogation all that spring. The judges thought he was faking. Spies hid in the prison at night to overhear his talk with the other prisoners and write it down. Winter came and ten authoritative witnesses had declared him mad. The judges remained sceptical. He wrote a visionary account of Spain as the first Christian world power. In the early summer of 1601, after more than a year of mad behaviour, Campanella was called for a final and definitive torture session to decide whether or not he was faking. The question was crucial. If a mad person were put to death his soul would be lost and those responsible would suffer eternal torment.
For thirty-six hours he went through an alternating sequence of tortures designed to keep him conscious while feeling unspeakable physical pain. He was suspended by his dislocated limbs before the judges’ bench and when he fainted the functionaries lowered him by pulleys to sit on a pointed stake. Then they slotted his joints back into place for the next session. And so on. By the end the sleepless judges were physical and nervous wrecks. Campanella was still mad. The judges gave up. Campanella was dragged to the judicial bench and his hand guided to put his mark on the document that definitively and irrevocably found him mad. He was hauled back to his cell nearly dead. When they got there he mumbled to one of the jailers holding him up, They thought I was some fucking moron going to talk. They dumped him on his straw.
He had lost a lot of blood and for most of the rest of the year he lay on his straw near death. Being mad, he was now an embarrassment and an irrelevance for the authorities and they let him lie there. But the tough and exuberant country boy from Calabria hadn’t come through this trial to give them the quiet relief of a death in custody. He had things to do. Having defeated death, he now needed to get out of jail. He had things to write, ideas he wanted people to know about. A series of Political Aphorisms led the following year to the best-known thing Campanella would ever write. From his cell in 1602 he described an imaginary city governed by love and reason, whose people had all things common . . . and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.