When I was a kid we used to have Neapolitan ice cream in the fridge. It came in a box and was really messy to open up because you got it all over your fingers. But you got to lick them afterwards—in three flavours no less!
For a long time that’s all I knew of Naples: it made great ice cream. Many poems have been written about Naples. None to my knowledge about its ice cream. This is probably because Italians don’t eat ice cream like that any more (it evolved from Spumano, a 19th century dessert). They now indulge in gelato, a denser, creamier cousin to North America’s frozen confection.
Naples has an uneven reputation. It’s one of those love-it-or-hate-it places. I will always remember reading the first line of Ralph Kirkpatrick’s 1955 book on Domenico Scarlatti: “In 1685, Naples was as populous, as dirty, and as noisy as it is now.” Ouch.
Poets not surprisingly look on Naples slightly differently. Percy Bysshe Shelley called Naples home for a short time in 1818. He wrote two poems about the place. The first is happily titled “Lines written in dejection, near Naples.” He juxtaposes the beauty of the city against his current state, in which he has neither “hope nor health.” I don’t know what was bugging him that day, but it seems that the Naples of 1818 was a bit quieter than Ralph Kirkpatrick would have us believe: its voice is “soft like Solitudes’s.”
The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright,
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon's transparent might,
The breath of the moist earth is light,
Around its unexpanded buds;
Like many a voice of one delight
The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
The city's voice itself, is soft like Solitude's.
Two years later Shelley wrote a poem reminiscing about the great time he had there and praising the townfolk for creating a constitutional monarchy after the revolt of July 1820. One of the striking lines is the second, in which he refers to the sun as the “lidless eye of heaven.” This was an image popular a couple centuries before: Shakespeare famously used it in Sonnet 18 (the “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” one), and Spenser used it before him in The Faerie Queene (I, iii, 4).
Naples! thou Heart of men which ever pantest
Naked, beneath the lidless eye of Heaven!
Elysian City, which to calm enchantest
The mutinous air and sea! they round thee, even
As sleep round Love, are driven!
Metropolis of a ruined Paradise
Long lost, late won, and yet but half regained!
Bright Altar of the bloodless sacrifice
Which armed Victory offers up unstained
To Love, the flower-enchained!
Thou which wert once, and then didst cease to be,
Now art, and henceforth ever shalt be, free,
If Hope, and Truth, and Justice can avail,—
Hail, hail, all hail!One of the earliest poems about Naples was by the poet Statius, who was born there. His Silvae, written in the first century AD, were lengthy songs of praise. 2.2 was for a villa of Pollius Felix. No one has yet written a rhymed translation of these Latin poems, so it’s not much fun to quote. Suffice it to say he thought that Naples was pretty great.
It seems then that the poets love Naples. People who write books are a different matter. Mark Twain, like Raph Kirkpatrick, didn’t think so much of the place when he visited. He wrote that Neapolitans “crowd you -- infest you -- swarm about you, and sweat and smell offensively, and look sneaking and mean, and obsequious.”
I guess when it comes to Naples we praise in verse but complain in prose.
