NAPLES: IN THE COURT OF MIRACLES



(excerpt)



The city stirs, volatile land ruled by myth and the elements.


If Naples were a person, it would look destitute: a weathered old man, resting under a creased cloak of stony rags, stretching its awkward limbs between the mountain and the sea, a shiny brooch, worn with pride and curiously out of place, pinned to its torn and dirty rags.


Just like the volcano at the foot of which it lies, its myriad eyes and manifold paths appear to be veiled in slumber under the nursing warmth of a midday sun. But its entrails are molten, and what courses through its damp body of brick and moss is ebullient and wild, irreverent and as incongruous as its adorned rags.

The narrow streets that unravel like an intricate web of veins and arteries from its tangled heart cut through the debris of different epochs with the same casual familiarity of fingers stretching from the palm of a hand. They all lead towards impossible directions, not only across, but more often upwards and downwards, transcending matter and decency, facilitating journeys that are more appropriate for nighttime and dream along unpaved trails where only spirits are expected to venture, and apparitions. All along these crepuscular paths, without fanfare, the living will defiantly step across those thresholds that are impassable elsewhere, and with great ease travel between life and death, through time and space, spinning at each step and with supreme confidence all the disparate fragments of a secular collective memory into a cacophonous, often humorous tale of hope, memory, freedom and subversion.



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