Celebrating Europe: An Asian Journey

6. The Leopard's Italy

6 The Leopard’s Italy On a conducted tour of Italy undertaken on the cheap in the summer of 2004, my family and I travelled by coach. We generally stayed in little hotels tucked into city outskirts, where people and places could not be bothered to put on a show for tourists. Our ten-day tour took us to Rome, the Vatican City, Pisa, Milan, Verona, Venice, Florence, Assisi, Pompeii, Sorrento, Naples, and Capri. We did see a bit of Italy. The patrician north swept by on the whiff of an arrogance manufactured in some perfumery of the Roman Empire. But in Florence and Rome, we also saw men and women who seemed to have stepped right out of the canvases of the Masters. Is that Caravaggio’s Narcissus, reduced now to producing sketches for tourists? How obscene it is for a foreigner to come to Italy and be consumed by his own beauty! Look, Italians are so beautiful that the Renaissance came here for a visit and stayed on as art forever. Foolish tourists, be gone. By the time we were in the south, we met people. In Sorrento, for the princely sum of 9.80 euros spent in a provision shop, I got to chat with the matriarch. She spoke in Italian and I replied in English, with a few translations helpfully thrown in by people in the queue. It hardly moved because the matriarch was chatting with me, but nobody The Leopard’s Italy 79 minded. The encounter ended with the lady getting her two daughters in the shop to stop work, change into the best clothes they had at hand, and pose with my family and me. She did not want copies of the photographs: They would not have Singapore in them. She wanted her daughters to look beautiful in our photographs: They are Italians. The queue lengthened in patience. On the way out, my teenage son got a hug and football stickers as presents. I had merely seen the north; at the end of one day in the south, I had lived there for a lifetime. I sat on the balcony of my cheap hotel room, looking hundreds of metres down the cliff at the sea. I ate the pizza that I had bought from the shop down the road. It was the best that I had ever tasted. I opened the bottle of water purchased from the matriarch’s shop. I felt like crying. How does one ever leave Sorrento? Naples was different. Its gaunt and jagged grandeur was laced with danger in the air. Where were the Mafiosi? I looked around me. I was certain that they were there. They were merely not wearing dark glasses and carrying revolvers in their bulging pockets. An elderly gentleman was selling souvenirs. He approached me, not as they approach you in the successful north — purposefully, as if you are there because they are there — but hesitantly, almost apologetically: He was there because I was there. He was an aristocrat of poverty and decay, a chronicler of economies that had travelled to cheaper lands, taking lifestyles and customs with them. These aristocrats knew that their time had passed. I felt really bad for him and bought a blackand -white print of Naples — his vanished Naples. Where had it vanished? 80 Celebrating Europe I looked around for Walter Benjamin’s Naples. He speaks of almost a carnival where private and public spaces merge into a single space of jostling selves. Just as the living room, with its chairs, hearth, and altar, spills onto the street, the loudness of the street “migrates into the living room”, he observes. “What distinguishes Naples from other large cities is something it has in common with the African kraal; each private attitude or act is permeated by streams of communal life,’’ Benjamin writes. “To exist, for the Northern European the most private of affairs, is here, as in the kraal, a collective matter.’’1 Although I did not see the astringent life of that collectivity — the only migrations appeared to be those of tourists such as me who had come to depart — the shopping mall was full of African immigrants selling fake designer bags. A white boy came over and yelled at them. They vanished in seconds. A police car drew up, found nothing, and left. The Africans returned. The kraal was happy. I was not happy. The conducted tour went...