Calcutta in Naples: A Romance

If Americans know anything about Paestum, a seaside town an hour south of Naples, they know the Tomb of the Diver. The burial chamber goes back 25 centuries, to an era when Rome was no more than a cluster of huts. Down south, however, Italy had the Greeks. Their cities included Sybaris, as in sybaritic, and the frescos that adorn the Paestum tomb, now the centerpiece of a small museum, wouldn't look out of place in a Manhattan dance club.

A few Americans know the scene, a going-away party with the besties. On the tomb ceiling, the berry-brown Diver hangs suspended over gray waves; perhaps he's plunging into Eternity. But the walls unfold in celebration, brimming with sensuality enough to make you whistle—and incontestably gay. It's men-only, and young men at that, sowing their wild oats. Some are white and some brown, most topless and one naked, all in terrific shape. The wine is flowing, and it's hard not to think of Plato's Symposium, the dialogues on love. At the Paestum affair, most of the recliners are shared by a couple of bros, and there's a pair who can't keep their hands off each other. One fluffs the other's hair, sea-thickened, while getting his own chest fondled. Their lips draw close …

The tomb came to light in 1968, a recent find by local standards. Since then it's provided greater Naples with a bestseller postcard: a closeup of the two Greeks on the verge of a kiss. I sent one myself in 2005, on a day when the Italian papers carried the news of a court decision over in middle America. Even in Kansas, the court had ruled, homosexuals had the right to marry. I was in Paestum then to introduce the family to my fiancé, herself Midwestern, and this seemed the perfect occasion for that card. We knew just the guy, a friend who'd come out of the closet years before—and had paid a price. This woman and I weren't young either. The marriage would be the second for us both, and we'd both suffered in a sham of an intimate life. On the back of the card we wrote: Over here, folks have known about this stuff for 3,000 years.

________

The turn of the latest millennium has strained many a conventional notion of love, and in general the older the culture, the steeper the challenge. In Naples the centro storico still follows the Greek blueprint. With Aleppo reduced to ruins, the downtown may be the world's oldest in continuous daily use. Still, as the Tomb of the Diver suggests, it's always had a place for homosexuals. In the 21^st century their legal position remains murky, but cross-dressing sex workers still prowl the city's waterfront. Concerning gays, Neapolitans seem content to live and let live. Then there are i neri, the blacks.

Under the shadow of Vesuvius, the most shattering eruption lately has been that of African refugees. New-minted Neapolitans come from all over, of course, including places like Aleppo, but most refugees head north. Down this way, though, a desperate case out of Ghana or Eritrea finds a landscape something like home. There are even water buffalo, grazing the mozzarella ranchlands. Here in the States, news coverage tends to focus on boat people, the risks of the open Mediterranean, but the arrival side suffers its own crisis. The metropolis of the Italian South ranks as the most densely populated city in Europe, and that's just counting the folks on the books. Now, with so many farms and sweatshops in need of cheap labor, the region groans under the weight of its shadow-dwellers, its clandestini. They're everywhere, hawking plastic gimcracks along the sidewalks or handling the scutwork at a hotel, so that the face the city presents is mixed-race—more so than anywhere else in the country.

Of course the immigrants include many with legal status, but a work visa doesn't necessarily make you welcome. Among white [End...