Life and Death in Naples

Among the glorious cities of Italy, Naples may be the least attractive to modern tourists—and for good reason. On a packaged itinerary Naples means a mediocre meal near the port where empty streets, blowing litter, and a view of the lumpish Castel Nuovo in the foreground dampen one’s spirits. Good humor will be restored the next day at Pompeii or Capri or Sorrento when travelers depart for those loveable Italian towns where pleasure is predictable and pickpockets, homicidal traffic, and garbage collection are somewhat under control.

There is nothing new about the discomfort and danger that Naples has in store for outsiders—everyone not born there being thus defined. The Decameron has a tale of a callow youth who comes down from Perugia to the Angevin capital and falls into a waking nightmare simply because he had fingered his purseful of golden florins in full view of the marketplace. Nowadays the fannypack has made this impulsive gesture next to impossible, but anxiety is kept at the simmer by locals who constantly warn one to conceal everything snatchable and to return to the hotel before nightfall. Of course, nothing deters a traveler prepared to risk any adversity in hopes of revelation or adventure. Shirley Hazzard, the Australian novelist who has loved the city for sixty years, is one of a long line of distinguished visitors like Boccaccio, Dickens, Goethe, and Byron who have come down to Naples from the north and found the destination worth the trouble.

The Ancient Shore, Shirley Hazzard’s new book of selected essays buttressed with a piece by her husband, Francis Steegmuller, is a love letter to Naples. Like someone who introduces a glamorous but unacceptable, even dangerous, lover to the folks at home, Hazzard acknowledges that on a certain level Naples is logically indefensible. Its sinister quality is at least a part of the attraction. In her novel The Bay of Noon she describes a young English-woman, like herself, who is struck by the odd beauty of her apartment overlooking the bay and Vesuvius. She calls the place uncanny, eccentric, “with something of the sinister that is the authentic element of romance.”

Shirley Hazzard grew up in Sydney, but soon after the war her father moved the family to Japan, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and England. Shirley Hazzard left London for Naples in 1956 to take a job with nato. Like Boccaccio, who was sent there by his father to learn about banking, Hazzard found her assignment profoundly uncongenial. She was a translator of military documents and would later write a novel (People in Glass Houses) satirizing the nato bureaucracy based on that experience. She was in her twenties when she first saw Naples; Boccaccio was barely fifteen. Both were blessed with the luxury of solitude in a strange and complex city. Both were surely endowed with what Hazzard calls “the reading mind and the aroused imagination,” qualities which guaranteed that official assignments would be intolerable; but Naples itself would forever haunt their minds and inform their art. Boccaccio managed to linger in the city for fifteen years until his father forced him to return to Florence. He revisited it twice in later life but was unable to recapture the joy of his youth. Shirley Hazzard stayed with the nato job for only a year, but she still spends some of her time in Capri, well within the orbit of Vesuvius.

The Ancient Shore is a selection of her dispatches on selected topics (the G7 Conference, Vesuvius, the headland of Posillipo) previously published in the New Yorker and elsewhere. They are meditations on the paradox of Naples, its extraordinary beauty rendered uneasy by deceptiveness, its rewards inseparable from its frustrations. She says it is only natural that a city made up of neighborhoods will elude the tourist who typically looks for a centro storico for his bearings. If there is one center to the city, she says, it would be the Spaccanapoli district, the “split of Naples,” but it is...