In August, like most tourists to Naples, I was there en route to somewhere else. But as I had four days to spend in the city, I decided that since I was engrossed in reading the final volume of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, The Story of the Lost Child, I would turn the stopover into my own informal Ferrante fangirl tour. It was 90 degrees out and the sun shone uncompromisingly, but I laced up my sneakers, packed a water bottle, and left my husband and air-conditioned hotel room behind.
I’m not sure what I was looking for. I guess I was intrigued to see what the city might say to me that could enrich my reading of the novels. The first three volumes focus on intimately chronicling the lives of Elena (or Lenù) Greco and Raffaella (Lila) Cerullo from girlhood to old age in post-war Italy, and the difficulties they encounter as women in a man’s world, the violence of everyday life in their rough neighborhood in Naples, abusive parents and partners, the quiet devastations of marriage and motherhood. But Naples pulses beneath the surface of each of the novels, like the trucks thundering under the stradone, the road that serves as the border between Lila and Elena’s neighborhood and the city beyond. On the basis of the first few volumes I’d have said that the city was there to underline the division between the girls’ humble origins on the periphery of the city and the glittering promise of success represented by the more chic quarters of the city, the Piazza dei Martiri, the Vomero, Posillipo, Mergellina.
Strangely enough, as I read in the wildly different, dramatic spaces of the city—downtown, on the funicular, on the Vomero, at the beach—I was surprised to find the book itself, especially as it drew to a close, was more and more about the city. In fact, it took center stage in the last 30 pages or so. It’s through the city that Elena is able to piece together some sense of independence, whether it’s in her walks as an adolescent, or in leaving her cheating lover, in the last volume, and to come into her own as a writer, drawing on Naples to produce some of her best, most mature work. (This development feels extremely meta.) But for Lila, too, the city plays a central role in her self-image, and it’s the city she turns to after the loss that occurs in the middle of the volume.
I realized, as I read, and walked, and walked, and read, that they aren’t called the Neapolitan novels for nothing. It’s the city itself that mediates between the strongest divisions Elena uses to make sense of her life—between leaving and staying, neighborhood and city, Elena and Lila.
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Setting off from my hotel on the Via Constantinopoli, in the historic center, I think: what a tangle this city is. An assault on all of the senses at once, a challenge to the brain to decipher all that raw material.
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The textures of the buildings are made up of layers of posters pasted up, then torn away, pasted up and torn away, covered over with the many contributions of graffiti artists, some tags, some stencils, some stickers, all projected onto walls in various states of entropy, the stucco crumbling away to reveal brick beneath, gum and grime and whatever else stuck in the cracks. Pipes line the faces of the buildings—water pipes, gas pipes, various unidentifiable ducts; the wiring, exposed, runs across buildings, leaping across gaps from one to the next.
Then there is the city’s laundry, the bright colors and patterns of its clothing and linens, hanging from its windows and strung across its alleyways; I even saw a pair of shoes drying outside someone’s front door. Scooters zoom by, cars honk, trucks trundle, people yell, phones ring and beep and buzz amid the general hum of a crowded city on a hot day. The poor tourists I walk past, those who are headed for or just coming back from the Mediterranean calm and blue of the Amalfi coast, stand on line for hours at Bill Clinton’s favorite pizzeria (everywhere in Naples makes this claim), eager to throw themselves into a cheese-and-carbohydrate stupor to muffle the onslaught.
“Ah, there is no city that gives off so much noise and such a din as Naples,” writes Ferrante.
In the second novel, The Story of a New Name, Elena’s father takes her beyond the neighborhood, to the street we’re staying in, the Via Constantinopoli, and, just off of it, the bookstalls of Port’Alba, a kind of back alley accessed through a dark archway, very atmospheric. The pizzeria there, Pizzeria Port’Alba, is meant to be the oldest in the world; its original owners apparently kept the pizza warm in small tin stoves they balanced on their heads. (I’m not sure how true this is but Wikipedia confirms it.) This historic part of Naples is not the part of town Elena and Lila know well, and Elena feels “overwhelmed,” Ferrante writes, “by the names, the noise of the traffic, the voices, the colors, the festive atmosphere, the effort of keeping everything in mind so that I could talk about it later with Lila (…) Was it possible that only our neighborhood was filled with conflicts and violence, while the rest of the city was radiant, benevolent?”
The city promises something to them, as children. In My Brilliant Friend, the girls run away together to the sea, which they have never seen, but get caught in a rainstorm that forces them to retreat. The escapade turns out to have been engineered by Lila as a way of keeping Elena close: of course when they return home to their parents, Elena receives a beating for disobeying, and disappearing. But her punishment does not keep her from going off to middle school to study the classics, while Lila has been made to quit school at fifth grade so she can go out to work. “They’re still letting you go?” Lila asks. Elena realizes that by coaxing her out of bounds, Lila was trying to ensure they would always remain in the neighborhood together.
As I walk past the boxes and boxes of used paperbacks lining the Via Port’Alba, all available for a euro each, I fight back the urge to bring home a few, though I don't read Italian, not really, and I have no sense of which books I ought to read, which names I should know, what I ought to know about them. For a moment I understand how Elena felt, confronted with a tradition she couldn’t decipher.
I emerge into the Piazza Dante, which is full of cafes, the closest of which is playing techno music. A little kid kicks a soccer ball against a wall, while a tinny bell in the nearby church sounds noon. I peer at the women I see sitting at plastic tables under umbrellas, shaded from the sun, sipping strong ristretto coffee in spite of the heat, and imagine that Elena Ferrante—famously, infuriatingly anonymous—could be any of these women. That one over there, with the blond hair. Or that one, very tan, with the chunky gold charm bracelet. Would Ferrante wear a charm bracelet? I want so desperately for her to be right under my nose, walking past me on the street, but something tells me if she still lives in Naples, she doesn’t spend her mornings gossiping in the Piazza Dante.
What interests Lila most is finding explanations for the violence that has haunted their lives. In this sense, the turn to the city is a chance to sum up the quartet as a whole.
None of the points of origin of these books are made explicit; not their author, and not the neighborhood that looms so large in Elena and Lila’s lives. When I first decided to come to Naples, I looked through the books and tried to correlate them with the map, attempting to locate their rione, or neighborhood. We are told there is a busy street, under which there runs a tunnel, and, nearby, some railway tracks. Elena frequently mentions trips to the central station at Piazza Garibaldi as if it were not an easy destination but not an unusual one, either. In the first volume she references a Church of the Holy Family, but I found no such church on Google Maps. Elena describes the town as crouching at the foot of Vesuvius, but that could just be a way of thinking of all of Naples.
Maybe it doesn’t matter where precisely the neighborhood is. Maybe it’s an idea more than a specific place, anywhere that’s rough and unforgiving, from which it’s difficult to escape. Even when Elena seems to have gotten away, having left Naples to study at university in Pisa, gone on to become a successful author, and married the son of an important professor, settling with him in Florence and bearing him two daughters, the neighborhood keeps its hold on her until the last page.
