Napoli: The Asylum

 Napoli: You Asylum

Fish Quay on steroids...

Fresh fish at 3€ the kilo.

Deranged.

Insane.

Laughing.

Car horns.

Hysteria.

Is it a drag queen or is it a lady sitting down eating a fried pizza, looking like a crazy Russian doll, waiting for her prey? She sits, her eyes dart around at the endless tail of traffic that cries, beeping at every corner like a dying animal, withering in pain.

She sits, green and black skunk-like scarf , wrapped around her neck, with a stern, fertive, glance that beckons the Italian stalions. Like a praying mantis, she devours the fried dough and ravishes the rocket and parma on top. 

Car horns beep more, papers roll up as waiters clean tables and scrunch up the table cloths and toss straight to the bin. People gesticulate with their hands in a foreign unknown sign language only the Napolitanos could comprehend. 

The Chinese tourists stand outside Pizzería Da Michele, unsure if they'll ever eat pizza again. The queue is despair. 

It is a pure chaos.

Impossible is the concept when trying to become sophisticated in Naples, since the only thing the city itself attempts to be is sophisticated in its own chaos. 

More car horns beep beep beep in a non-sensical insanity and pedestrians jaywalk across the road haphardly, jostling to stay in one piece. They do that only because the normal pedestrian crossings do not work; the rule book here was rewritten too many times, almost as if it had never even existed before.

It is noisy and loud. It is gregarios and mad. It is in your face. It is gritty. It is tacky. And it is tired. And It is dirty. More gesticulations and everything feels scrubby and worn-out by the intensity of it all. Graffiti is everywhere and It is crude and raw and visceral; ugly. Like a dog that marks its territory lifting its legs to spray urine. With spray cans, the artists of the city, do the same, tagging their territories. 

Everyone seems to be in a hurry here. It is fiery like the volcano that overshadows the city. Vesuvius is sometimes out of view but it has an omnipresence - the dwellers seem to live life on an extreme level few places I have visited since its energy bubbles below the surface. As if time is borrowed; everything becomes exagerrated and experienced to its full intensity. 

As a result there is no order. It is a city of lights and noise and a free-for-all derangement that is here every minute, every hour and every day of all the seasons of the year. 

It never stops. 

Naples is the city that attempts to gentrify and renew yet its soul permeates through and even the new, fresh and innocent seems to become enveloped quickly into the madness and begins to show signs of rust. 

Napoli, Italy

Saturday 9th December 2023