LAND OF CONTRASTS

           

We’ve been in Sorrento, Italy, the past several days, using it as a base to explore Naples and Pompeii, and the town of Sorrento itself.  We got a lovely hotel outside of town, in the hills overlooking the Bay of Naples.  The hotel has a pretty outdoor pool, and marble floors that are gleamingly white and cool to the touch, and patios with gorgeous views of the water and nearby mountains.  And it is beside a narrow, winding two-lane road that has ear-shatteringly noisy traffic and is a threat to life and limb. 

When we sit out on our pretty balcony to gaze out to sea, we have to shout at each other to be heard as city buses, tour buses, motorcycles, cars and taxis, trucks and the occasional horse-drawn cart goes by.  The city buses honk to warn oncoming vehicles as they tend to slide into the oncoming lane of traffic; the motorcyclists yell at the cars and the cars beep back; trucks rattle; and tour buses with recorded music blaring out of the windows go by, and the whole thing results in an unholy din.  After an hour on the balcony I feel like my ears are bleeding.

            The hotel is perched on top of this road, and when you leave the front door, you walk down 4 steps and you are literally in, not near or parallel to or adjacent to, the road.  There are no sidewalks, and the only little rim of a shoulder is across the street, so we wait for a lull in the traffic and sprint across the road, praying that we’ll make it. It’s an invigorating way to begin a day and a real invigorating way to end it after a late dinner and a bottle of wine.

            But this is the land of contrasts, and the elegant hotel adjacent to Hot Rod Heaven is a metaphor for much larger contrasts.  Naples ushers you into this region, and Sorrento straddles its mid-section and between the two runs a local train filled with a mix of tourists and locals using its spray-painted and rattling cars.  From Naples to Sorrento is an hour and ten minutes on the train, with stops along the way for commuter towns as well as the archaeological gems of Herculaneum and Pompeii.   While only 70 minutes separates Naples and Sorrento, the cities might as well be in two completely separate universes.

            Sorrento has elevated self-promotion into an art form.  It has taken advantage of its limited assets and finagled them into an extraordinary tourist industry. It’s like a somewhat attractive woman who began with nice breasts and decent legs and added dieting, hair implants, a tummy tuck and lazer eye surgery to transform herself into a real looker.  Sorrento took its basic assets -- an attractive main street and some cool, labyrinthine side streets, good Bay views, and access to great historical treasures – and married them with an ability to transform lemons into the limoncella liquor that picks you up, kisses you on both cheeks, tells you it loves you, and then kicks your ass down the stairs, all with a frosty lemon tang.  Wa la:  instant tourist mecca.   The town exists for no other purpose than to serve, like an Italian Jeeves The Butler saying “Very good, sir” to tourists of every stripe and nationality.  Sorrento is a big, open-air shopping mall, selling lemon-themed pottery, food, drink, linens, housewares – anything on which a lemon can be prettily displayed.  Consequently, it is jam-packed, knee-deep, chock-a-block, cheek-by-jowel filled with tourists who come by boat, by train, by bus, by car, to be cheerfully served.

            Hop the train in Sorrento and chug along for 70 minutes and you emerge in Naples.  Naples is a mad, impoverished bag woman to Sorrento’s carefully coiffed and prettily dressed matron. 

We spent a day at the Archaeological Museum of Naples, wandering through its unparalleled collection of antique statuary, stunning mosaics, gorgeous frescoes and multitudinous items that were “removed” (i.e., ripped-off) from Pompeii and Herculaneum.  The collection is another study in contrasts:  world-class art of breathtaking value displayed in a haphazard fashion with extremely limited signage and absolutely no maintenance.  We’re talking major dust bunnies here:  the statues are covered with a film of dust that appears to be as old as the statues are.  I wanted to pass a hat and go outside and hire a char woman to come in and tidy up the priceless works of art.  Because there were any number of people just outside of the art museum who would have jumped at the chance of paid employment.  Naples is drowning in unemployment : nearly one out of three of its residents are job-less.  The poverty is jaw-dropping.  We walked from the museum back to the train station, a good brisk 25 minute walk, and we passed street after dismal street of crumbling apartment buildings with graffiti-emblazoned walls.  Even the porticoes and walls of churches – Mama Mia! – were not exempt from the spray-can’s orange and blue revenge.   People loitered on the street, watching us tromp by with our day packs on, feeling like a Rip-Me-Off-Now! sign was pasted to our backs. 

As we neared the train station we came into a big central square.  Garbage was piled in mounds on it, not just the odd over-turned bin’s worth of garbage but weeks’ worth of garbage, piled into heaps.  Inside the station a fist fight broke out, two men thrashing each other, yelling, drawing a crowd and eventually, train employees who waded into the fray, grabbing one guy, holding the other, everyone shouting and continuing to throw punches.  Welcome to Napoli!  Everybody sing together:  When the trash is thigh-high and you’re punched in the eye, that’s amore . . .

We climbed back onto the commuter train headed to Sorrento.  Everybody sing together:  Be our guest, be our guest, we will serve you without rest, an ice-cold limoncella shot will add a lovely bit of zest . . . .

As we were bouncing along on the rattly train filled with chattering Italian school kids, tired locals and sun-burned tourists, a series of musicians boarded and left the train.  First on was a quartet that included a guy lugging a full-size bass violin.  You don’t often see that on a subway!  The group did some nice Gipsy-Kings-meet-Italy numbers, passed the tambourine for donations, and then left a few stops later.  Next up was a saxophone player accompanied by bongo drums.  Not as good as the “Italian Kings” but not bad.  They lasted a stop or two and then split.  The last musician was a short, sad-faced man playing an electric keyboard, accompanied by a little boy of three or four.  The boy shyly passed through the carriage holding out a small leather purse for donations. Behind him strolled his sad-faced father playing, of all things, Beethoven’s Ode To Joy.  On a second-hand electric keyboard.  On a graffiti-laced rattletrap train.  Going from Naples to Sorrento, one extreme to another.  The mournful man banging out an electric version of Beethoven’s classic Ode To Joy. 

Salude! from the land of contrasts.