This new edition of what had become a rare book is a literary by-product of the 1973 cholera outbreak at Naples. Matilde Serao’s impassioned articles, published during the 1884 cholera epidemic in which almost 8,000 Neapolitans died, were first collected in a volume, with epilogue by the author, in 1905. In September 1973, within three weeks of the reappearance of cholera in the city, the book was reissued in the present paperback form, with an up-to-the-minute introduction by Gianni Infusino. The first printing sold out through individual orders before reaching the bookshops; the second was on the stands within days. And its new Neapolitan readers doubtless discovered in it the most knowledgeable and eloquent account of their city’s past, present, and—one fears—future condition.
The book is, however, more—or other—than that. The parallel, an obvious one and frequently drawn, between Zola and Serao is here inevitable and valid. The literary meeting of outraged social conscience with a poetic vitality of image is not only rare but rarely complementary. In this case, an unerring literary instinct takes the work beyond the category of humanitarian appeals, where it would occupy a noble and foremost place, and into the range where all awareness is extended and which must therefore be called “art.” The intensity of the narrative—doubtless subjected, in its time, to the indefatigable male adjective “shrill”—not only deepens urgency and poignancy but animates the whole with unquenchable life.
Matilde Serao was born before the Risorgimento and died after Mussolini came to power. Novelist, essayist, journalist, founder and editor of newspapers, she produced a large body of writings—including a number of novels, of which the singular
Il Paese di Cuccagna is probably her masterpiece.
Il Ventre di Napoli was the highly informed
cri de coeur she addressed to a corrupt and indifferent officialdom, which—having in the 1880s, as in the 1970s, abandoned the city to privation and decrepitude—thundered rhetorically of illusory reforms when catastrophe struck. “
Bisogna sventrare Napoli”—“Naples must be disemboweled”—was the official slogan from which Matilde Serao took her title. Her book does not deal with the effects of cholera but with the conditions in which the epidemic originated: the “belly of Naples,” the bowels and entrails of the great city that to Leopardi was both “mistress of mortals”
1 and “Rat’s nest”
2; which Malaparte considered “a Pompeii that was never buried,” not a town but a fragment of “the ancient pre-Christian world—which has survived intact on the surface of modern times.”
3The book is history, also, and anthropology. A thousand arresting details of popular life and custom appear almost incidentally in its teeming canvas of survival. To say that the author writes feelingly of the torment of separate souls within the purgatory she exposes to us is to mock the fiery humanity of her work. While she condemns the empty sentimentalizing of extremity as “picturesque”—“
a diavolo la poesia e il dramma!”—her own writing is a revelation in the authentically picturesque, in the truly poetic and dramatic.
4 In this brief book a society is rendered in all its strangeness, its wretchedness, its humiliations, its indomitable human graces. And the author marvels that civilization should have been preserved, mysteriously, in a people whom adversity and vice might have brutalized—but who, instead, love color and form and decoration, whose music is suffused with “invincible nostalgia,” who have retained a sense of nature and of celebration, who, living in the dark, still love the light.
5Ninety years after publication, these chapters assail the reader with their application to present conditions—an ultimate vindication both foreseen and dreaded by the author. From Monte di Dio 10 Quartiere Vicaria, “the great sinful streets,” as Clough called them,
6 the putrid alleyways, the very buildings themselves might today be named in almost identical context: the same squalor, the same decomposing glories—bedeviled now by cars, or blasted with the unredressed bombardments of 1943 but astonishingly, incontestably, the same. Unaltered, too, the evils of an administration, now hugely magnified in size, of whose monumental negligence it could already be demanded, almost a century ago: “To what purpose, then, are all these senior and junior employees, this immense bureaucratic machinery that costs us so dear?”
7The concluding third of the book, written twenty years after the epidemic, attacks as farce and fiasco the vaunted risanamento of Naples, when the boulevard of the Rettifilo was driven through a warren of ancient slums, carrying all before it—including the poor, for whom no provision was made in the new, expensive constructions that lined the route, and who reinterred themselves as best they could in the squalor, surviving undisturbed on every intersecting byway. For the symbolic Rettifilo itself—an avenue that no one could now regard as other than a prospect of unalleviated dreariness—Matilde Serao attempts a word of contemporary praise, but her perceptions are too much for her; and against that bleak new monotony, she sounds another warning, which will again go unheeded and will bring another sigh from modern readers who have helplessly watched the postwar inundation of Neapolitan jerry-building and the concomitant decay of an incomparable patrimony of art and antiquities:
Alas, this is an evil common to so many other beautiful Italian cities where, side by side with ancient splendors and the supreme refinements of taste, modern architects have raised monuments to their own utter ignorance and total lack of aesthetic sensibility.
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This is a powerful book, and its author faced the bitter possibility that it might prove completely ineffectual. The weight of sheer official irresponsibility and venality ranged against her, compounded with the fatalism of the afflicted themselves, were understood by Matilde Serao as thoroughly as all the other elements of which she wrote. The reemergence of the book, however, and its phenomenal appositeness, testify to the endurance not only of affliction but of human indignation, also, and of potential remedy. Beyond the multiplicity of specific reforms she advocates, her “solution” (although she would not have employed so immature a term) remains fundamental:
To eradicate material and moral corruption, to restore health and conscience to these poor people, to teach them how to live—they know how to die, as you have witnessed—to convince them that their existence matters to us, it is not enough to disembowel Naples; Naples must virtually be re-created.
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