Books & Rough Business

II

7 Tullio Pironti II Via Tribunali is one of the storied decumani of the ancient city center. That is, the street was laid out by the original Greek builders of Naples, and it still follows the straight line they surveyed for it, running east to west with the sun. Beneath its hand-hewn, four-sided paving stones, there hide theatres and temples and storefronts from nearly three thousand years ago. The palazzo at number 175, like a number of the burly grey buildings along Tribunali, was put up by a noble family. The duke of Traetta built the place to impress, with five floors in the old style, all with high ceilings, plus a courtyard and a wide staircase. My own family came along a good deal later, to be sure, and we could claim only one of those five floors, the third. My father owned a bookstore, not a dukedom. Bookstores in Naples tended—as they do still—to cluster nearby, under and around an archway that functioned once as a gate in the city’s walls, the Port‘Alba. So my father’s shop too had some history, housed in a building just the other side of Port‘Alba, designed by the Rococo architect Luigi Vanvitelli—the same gifted Neapolitan who gave the city the sweeping open space called Piazza Dante, which spread out before my father’s bookstore. My own earliest memories include the walk to my father’s store, and perhaps scampering around the piazza a bit. But by the age of five, as the youngest of six children, I spent a lot more time with my mother. We would stand in line at one food store or another, I remember. But what made a greater impression, as Mama and I worked our way up and down the narrow streets of the centro storico, were the pizzerias. Each had a brick oven inside, where the pies cooked over a roaring wood fire. Each, outside the shop door, had set up shelves on which were 8 Books and Rough Business offered all sorts of wonderful fried goods. My greatest temptation was always the stuffed calzone, reeking of local ricotta and well-made dough. Also the pawnshops fascinated me, their windows full of small valuables, objects of silver and gold. I could see these shops were always full of visitors, but I didn’t have any idea how desperate they might be. Likewise I didn’t understand what drew so many players, hardened cases I realize now, to the stalls that sold lottery tickets. I knew only that I lived in a busy place, full of insistence and gab. The only thing that didn’t seem to move were gargoyles here and there, high overhead, with their elbows on the parapets. Then the War swooped down. There’s no forgetting, if you’ve lived through even a single bombing, the sheer number of the approaching planes. At every moment there seem to be more—like gargoyles, yes, gathering above. And as they draw close, sirens begin to lacerate the sky. Ours had been put up on the heights, outside the ancient center, but their wail has a terrible reverberation under the deepening thunder of the Flying Fortresses farther up. Of course these attacks had a “primary target,” the Naples port, a major supply point for the thousands of German troops in Italy. But bombs fall where they will, and rip to shreds whatever they touch. The shelter to which my father took us lay far beneath Via Tribunali, among the vast, unlit spaces in the guts of the city. These loosely linked sub-cellars are known as the sotterraneo, and were first quarried by the same Greeks who laid out the streets above.They and the Romans, later, brought out stone for building and used the caverns that remained for cold storage and for water-channels. These days a few sections of the sotterraneo, still reached off Tribunali, are a tourist attraction. But in the fall of 1943, for my family and our terrified neighbors, it was nothing so enjoyable. Down there, some had set up camp beds, chairs, even portable stoves. More noticeable, however, were the many low-standing plaster statues of saints, Madonnas, or the Holy Family at Nativity. Many a mother had arranged a few of these around their spaces as shrines. Throughout the long hours of bombardment, during daylight hours as well as night, the rumbling overhead was accompanied, underground, by the murmurs of...