one more round Vesuvius

You squeeze into Napoli more than anything else, between the looming volcanic Mount Vesuvius on one side and the '80s glass cyber-punk towers of Centro Direzionale on the other. You cannot see the bay from here, and therefore are deprived of breath, rumbling past construction sights and urban decay, or 'urban archeology' as Neapolitans like to call it, with a profound sense of history. Stazione Napoli Centrale. Brace yourself.

Sitting over sublime puffy-crust Neapolitan pizza at Trianon in the quartiere Forcella with a plastic cup of Nastro Azzuro beer to wash down those filetti di pomodoro strait from the slopes of Vesuvius. I now understood the longing I felt before, felt all along. Just wanting to abandon it all, reason and rationality, to climb inside the perfect style that makes you stare and enter the eyes that grab you, to the vacuous void that lies within.

Standing outside Porta Nolana a short while later, in broad daylight as the market moved around us spewing squid guts into the stolen handbags and street-kid cigarettes, we saw some young men smashing bottles of champagne against a dirty wall -- must be a sacred spot. Then, a few steps down in front of a stall with DVDs of old Sherlock Holmes stories and horror flicks -- wooooshh!!! Fuochi! Multi-colored tongues of fire shooting strait up in the middle of the market. Right on the battlefront of the Camorra war -- Happy New Year! At the moment, we never wanted to leave...

But it was not meant to be -- no rooms. Unless we wanted to sleep on the streets, which is is really bad idea on New Years eve in Naples since the custom is for everyone to throw everything old out their apartment windows into the street -- sinks, TVs, bathtubs, you name it. One hour later we were on a train back to pretty-boy Rome, like an uptight whore with its vacant soul behind a cheesily suggestive pair of eyes. It is in Napoli, actually, that you are safe.

I melted…again

There are few thunderstorms in Rome, but when they come, they take you by surprise like a nuclear bomb. There I was, alone on the outskirts, in the borgate -- the ugly half-slum suburbs, in a cheap fenced-in garden apartment. Empty, alone. It was about midday when it struck. Boom -- the walls resounded. I just knew that all of Rome had been nuked in one stroke -- couldn’t assume that sound at 11:30 am could mean anything else. The whole earth was shaking and held out for several seconds. Then silence. There was no telephone, no television, only the fast-approaching rain to tell me what was going on.

Every once in awhile, I still hear it. Sometimes it comes in the middle of the night and wakes me, lulling me back to sleep with the hum of the rain. Then, half asleep, I am re-aroused by subsequent sonic booms growing further and further distant. Here and now, in this moment, I long for that earth-shattering-ness, that cacophonous reminder of something real but which cannot be seen, only heard (sentito) and felt (sentito) -- sensed. Hung over, I have the heat, the chills, the need for a hot bath where there is only a small, mouldy stall shower. Some thunder would do me good right now, sucking me into the vortex and out of this coal-blackness.

Nonna always said, learn to love the longing, it is the best thing yet -- and it’s true; after the longing comes something much darker, uglier, more frightening. Like entropy itself, it is always moving, pushing urgently toward something ahead in the shadows, unseen and just out of reach but near enough to make the hairs prick up on the back on your neck. This is the fun part, she says, yet I can’t help feeling that here we are all crashing down together, this ship of fools, in our own personal electric storms of longing without peace, save for maybe a few seconds each day when we re-create the glory of Rome all on our own, before the tugging begins all over again and we know intimately that this place is no longer the center of the universe.

Seems a bit carrot-and-stick, but then so ultimately does life.