NAPLES

Which?	My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (2011)
What?	Southern Italian city of dirt and danger for two young girls coming of age

THE CLOSE-PACKED, dirty-white apartment blocks compress the stinking heat. It’s a thick fug of frying panzerotto, ripening tomatoes, trash and urine, two-stroke engine oil, fish on the turn, neglect. Residents of the windowless ground-floor flats stand on their doorsteps, peeling vegetables, smoking cigarettes and gossiping in an impenetrable, passive-aggressive, sing-song dialect that rattles along with the passing trains. In spit-’n’-sawdust bars, disperazione – the hopeless – drink to escape. But somewhere a bell rings and children run from the schoolyard with their friends and their book bags and, perhaps, their minds on a brighter future …

A darkness enveloped 1950s Naples. And it wasn’t just the ever-present threat of nearby Mount Vesuvius, which had blown rather dramatically in 1944. It was a street-level wretchedness; the ugly stains of poverty and socioeconomic squalor, plus a simmering violence that – like the volcano – could erupt at any time. The southern city had been poor before the Second World War but afterwards lay in tatters: Naples was bombed around 200 times, more than any other Italian city. The rich could buy their way out. But most Neapolitans had to scrape by in the grime left behind.

It’s into this sphere of dirt and danger that Elena Ferrante throws Elena ‘Lenù’ Greco and Lila Cerullo, heroines of the author’s four Neapolitan Novels. The first book, My Brilliant Friend, follows these two bright young girls as they come of age in the middle of the century, in a dingy city suburb where life prospects are bleak.

Just as pseudonymous Ferrante does not give her real name (the author’s identity remains a mystery), nor does she name the ‘neighbourhood’ at the heart of her novels. But it’s widely believed to be the Rione Luzzatti, a working-class area just east of the Centrale station and bordered by the Napoli Poggioreale prison. Still bossed by the camorra (Naples mafia), this rione has a reputation for grime and crime, and isn’t for wandering into alone. But there’s a Neapolitan authenticity to these scuffed alleyways of Fascist-era blocks, barred windows and graffiti smears. Indeed, Luzzatti feels little changed from the 1950s, offering the dedicated Ferrante pilgrim a glimpse back into Lenù and Lila’s world.

The wide Via Taddeo da Sessa is most likely the novel’s infamous stradone, the wall-like main road that demarcates the edge of the girls’ existence. It can be followed all the way to the murky ‘tunnel with three entrances’ on Via Gianturco, down which Lenù and Lila make their first attempt at escape, hoping to walk to the coast: despite living in a port city, just a few miles from the sea, they have never seen it for themselves. Within the heart of Rione Luzzatti you can almost conjure the novel’s characters: a baker – like Signor Spagnuolo – creating oozy cream puffs and crisp sfogliatelle; a modern Enzo selling fruit, not from a cart these days but from the bonnet of his car; a ‘mad widow’ type, like Melina Capuccio, shrieking over the street-strung laundry.

In counterpoint to this earthy grit is more affluent Naples, specifically the sea-facing Chiaia neighbourhood: shiny, manicured, populated by women who seem to ‘breathe a different air’. On occasion Lenù and Lila dip into this rarified realm, which Ferrante maps with far more precision. It’s possible to follow the pair – and the wealthy, elegant people – down pedestrianised Via Chiaia, past Via Filangieri’s high-end tailors’ shops to Piazza dei Martiri’s patriotic monument and into the leafy park of Villa Comunale. Walking here was, says Lenù, ‘like a border crossing; a dense crowd and a sort of humiliating difference’.

Ending on Via Caracciolo, ahead lies the sea – ‘But what a sea!’ – with Vesuvius brewing across the water; potentially a whole new world in the distance. And yet. Behind is all of seething, seedy, splendid, seductive Naples, with its power to pull people back.