Lost and rediscovered books paint a spectacular picture of Naples

A country’s publishing scene, as Bobi Bazlen used to say, is best judged by visiting its street stalls. Among those in Port’Alba and Piazza Dante, amongst the small independent bookshops that cling to the past so as not to let it slip away, one can begin the journey back in time in search of those volumes that tell the story of Naples for those who wish to understand it better. These books are often missing from the vast spaces dedicated to them in chain bookshops, in a city that churns out a wealth of new titles about itself, mixing the classic with the superfluous, the essential with the run-of-the-mill, and affected localism with serious non-fiction – as is only to be expected. As for the rest, it’s a matter of taste: reading need not be bound by dogma, and if you find it more entertaining to imagine Matilde Serao as a detective than to read one of her articles or books, you are perfectly free to do so. ‘Where there’s taste, there’s no waste’: by the end, you’ll uncover the murderers and new, imaginative copycats; just long enough to sketch out a plot, and even Giambattista Vico, King Nasone or the short-lived Joachim Murat will be tempted to become detectives (if they’ve already been ‘tagged’ for a noir novel, it’s no surprise – publishing executives are always one step ahead).

Despite everything, however, for the happy few, it would be a shame to deny oneself certain treasures on paper, some celebrated but many forgotten, which illuminate the paths, carving out unexpected routes through the city that is most generous in revealing itself and most astute in concealing itself – assuming one does not prefer to reduce it to the dichotomy between sfogliatella and Kalashnikov, to sort out right and wrong and declare ‘this was Naples’ without giving it a second thought.

You really ought to have read the tetralogy "My Brilliant Friend" and, before that, "Gomorrah", so as not to miss those aspects of his world through which Naples has been portrayed. One ought to re-read Raffaele La Capria’s "Ferito a morte" from time to time, along with the other pages he dedicated to the city (many, very many), to gain an even deeper understanding, for great writing always invites re-reading: each time it is different, yet it feels like the first. And there is no better season to revisit La Capria than a summer of fine days, pairing the novel with a viewing of "Leoni al sole" – a masterpiece of melancholic vitality co-written with Vittorio Caprioli to celebrate the fleeting season of Neapolitan ‘vitelloni’ in a Positano reminiscent of Capri. That bourgeoisie knew how to tell its own story because it knew how to live, even with a certain madness of which Pelos La Capria, Dudù’s brother, was the embodiment. What’s more, they knew how to read: the late critic Francesco Durante recalled the ‘crowd of professionals and even politicians, each of whom had read at least a thousand books and could recall their content, or their ‘temperature’’: lawyers, notaries, accountants such as Antonio Franchini’s father, a passionate collector whom his son recalled in an inner monologue as follows: “You used to catalogue them all together, without distinction: precious books, listed in bibliophiles’ catalogues, and paperbacks yellowed by the summer sun on newsagents’ display stands. Now they’re all in these boxes, united by the anxiety of someone who has cleared away those shelves where they once had their permanent home.”

A great novel about Naples’ high society, which was a psychological study but also reflected the political reality of the time, is "Una spirale di nebbia" by Michele Prisco. It won the 1966 Strega Prize, five years after "La Capria". The general public has forgotten it, but it can now be easily rediscovered thanks to the recent reprint by the Milanese publisher Utopia: this will be an opportunity to gain a better understanding of those years and a certain mindset, to engage with a text as unhurried as the television dramas of yesteryear, dense with subordinate clauses, written in a vocabulary accessible to the average reader of the time, but which now seems impenetrable. If, on the fourth line of the first page, upon encountering ‘cereo madore’, someone were to close the book, they could console themselves with the latest novels on the market and regain their self-esteem. The more tenacious, however, will find themselves drawn into the story, which frames a highly dubious hunting accident (no spoilers here) against the backdrop of the political clash between the voracious Christian Democrat bourgeoisie of Campania and the Communist opposition, set against the backdrop of the beaches of Posillipo and the nightclubs of Ischia Porto. The film "Le mani sulla città" was made three years earlier; organised crime had become narrative material whilst the Camorra was still remembered as a thing of the distant past: it was the era of the guappi in the mould of Luigi Campolongo, the ‘mayor of the Rione Sanità’, who ‘bowed down to science and religion’, as Giuseppe Marotta wrote, and ‘said “at your service” to Benedetto Croce and Saint Januarius’ but were already, even then, on the verge of extinction. Supplanted by those who ‘kill without warning and flee’. These are excerpts from "Il teatrino del Pallonetto", published posthumously because the author had died with his pen in his hand in 1963, the year Francesco Rosi’s exposé film was released. It is worth seeking out this forgotten book or unearthing a copy of "Gli alunni del sole", which would inspire Luciano De Crescenzo years later to write "Così parlò Bellavista". Other works by Marotta have been reprinted by the publisher Polidoro and depict a city very different from today’s; yet reading them is by no means a waste of time, for the very same reasons that justify a visit to museums or to underground Naples, and also because Marotta writes beautifully (though woe betide anyone who ‘marottes’): even taken in the smallest daily dose, it is comparable to a teaspoon of magnesium for combating exhaustion. He declared: “My city was, is, and will be in every age, a book of all fairy tales”. Those who know the tales of the past are better equipped to interpret the chronicles of the present. It is not mere nostalgia.

Erri De Luca, a writer who is very different in terms of age, poetic style and cultural background, has either steeped fairy tales in reality or stripped them of it. "Montedidio", published in 2001 but set in the era of "Il Pallonetto di Marotta" and "Ferito a morte", distils, through the eyes of a teenager discovering love, the very essence of a working-class, hard-working city, still haunted by the memory of the war, stripped of clichés and folklore yet still enchanting, where the character of Rav Daniel – alias Rafaniello, an angelic, Neapolitanised Jewish cobbler, also explains why De Luca’s recent statements on the conflict in Gaza should come as no surprise.

Ultimately, every story is always a matter of perspectives, of eyes or spectacles, as in the extraordinary tale of the short-sighted little girl that opens Anna Maria Ortese’s 1953 novel "Il mare non bagna Napoli" (if any book were compulsory reading, perhaps it would be this one).

Categorical statements should be used sparingly, but it is certain that to grasp the meaning of Partenope one must access its irrational codes, and that it helps to have them interpreted by those who, before us, have deciphered them or at least intuited them: therefore, although she was still in her early days, Ortese, a decade before "Il Monaciello di Napoli", captured the essence of the domestic sprite that still operates in the collective imagination, even though she already feared the demolition of the ‘belief in the unreal that was such a large part of our lives’. Scepticism, as with the fairies in "Peter Pan", wiped out the "monacielli"; those who survived the sceptics ‘left, I don’t know when, and never returned’. Fortunately, this turned out to be a pessimistic mistake: encounters with monacielli and ‘spirits’ have remained possible. They ‘can be everyday companions, friends in the flesh – albeit transparent and never “catchable” – to children and the most vulnerable, bewildered and solitary creatures. Orphans, for example. The abandoned. The forgotten, ‘by God and by everyone’, as the saying goes”: the words of the actor and playwright Enzo Moscato, who died in 2024, and whose published works are extremely scarce. One should add to one’s shopping basket "Archeologia del sangue" (1948–1961), a partial and impressionistic autobiography published by Cronopio.

For those who have not seen or do not recall Eduardo De Filippo’s "Le voci di dentro", Ruggero Cappuccio’s explanation in his visionary novel of sixteen years ago, "Fuoco su Napoli", in which he imagined the disastrous apocalypse of the Phlegraean Fields, is illuminating: “A people with a great history always carries with it the memory of many noises and many ghosts. It is not right to betray them. And it is not right to forget them’. The fear expressed by Anna Maria Ortese is reiterated and rephrased in the rhetorical questions posed by a grandmother to her granddaughter: ‘Is a ghost that appears more unsettling, or one that disappears? I wonder, for a human being or for a people, is the materialisation of their ghosts more disconcerting, or is their disappearance more disconcerting?’. Therefore, even though the pre-Freudian, dream-like key of the Smorfia is used less and less, Erri De Luca still invokes it in the spiritual bingo of "La doppia vita dei numeri". Because, he points out, “ghosts cannot be abolished”. Beneath the crust of globalised modernity and the plasticisation of tourism, the elements of an irrationality are fermenting – an irrationality that has become wilder precisely because it is less channelled into family and collective rituals, which were necessary even when they gave rise to the worrying sociopathy of the Lotto. For further historical insight, it is not difficult to obtain a reprint of Il paese di Cuccagna by Matilde Serao, which, according to Prisco, was “truly a testament to the pact of love forged between the writer and the city”.

That passion which ‘often leads to ruin’, and the cabal into which ‘even a touch of the devil’s tail’ creeps, provided the material for the Neapolitan-set noir serial by the Milanese author Emilio De Marchi, "Il cappello del prete" (The Priest’s Hat), published in book form in 1888 and adapted into a 1970 TV miniseries directed by Sandro Bolchi (the audiobook is also available on RaiPlay Sound). However, the undisputed father of the genre—undervalued by his contemporaries and somewhat overlooked by posterity—was Francesco Mastriani, with Il mio cadavere (1851), whose spirit, we presume, still wanders, poor but intrigued, amongst the dozens of houses he lived in and the hundreds of alleyways he frequented and transposed into his serialised novels. The prose is dated and demands patience, yet the courage of those who tackle I vermi and I misteri di Napoli – which the Florentine Gherardo Casini republished in the 1960s and 1980s – will be rewarded with that extra tenth of insight that any reading deemed outdated guarantees.

It is often an outsider’s gaze, unclouded by the cataracts of habit, that reveals the sharp edges of the city that its inhabitants have smoothed away. Ramón Gómez de la Serna, a native of Madrid, was able to recount the unsettling activities of certain ghosts, which have persisted through the centuries, in "La mujer de ámbar", a purgatorial novella in which the spirit of Lucia rises from the shadows (the skull of the same name, adorned with a bridal veil, still inspires fervent devotion in the crypt of the church of Santa Maria delle Anime del Purgatorio ad Arco, on Via Tribunali). Published in Italian only in 2017 by Marlin, La donna d’ambra is already hard to come by and was the result of the author’s long stay in Naples, where, in the 1920s, he contributed to the daily newspaper Il Mezzogiorno and decimated its readership with the ‘indecently daring’ instalments of Il dottore inverosimile (Dall’Oglio reprinted this surreal operetta in 1951 and 1964). Some of the finest storytellers from the terrible times of the Second World War are also ‘foreigners’. Anyone visiting the air-raid shelter beneath Piazza San Gaetano should not overlook "La pelle" by Curzio Malaparte and "Napoli ’44" by Norman Lewis – respectively a great novel and an interesting diary – which have enjoyed greater success than a work that is equally deserving: Vesuvius by Emmanuel Roblès, a Frenchman from Algeria who was in Naples as a war correspondent and published this novel in 1961 – a work of great value for its setting and style, yet almost impossible to find. Those who are lucky may be able to track down the Italian translation, published in paperback in 1994 by Tullio Pironti, a champion of independent publishing who was the genius loci of Piazza Dante in his bookshop until his death in 2021.

However, an indispensable account of the war remains "Satyricon in Naples ’44: Between Santa Chiara and San Gregorio Armeno" by the master Roberto De Simone. It brings to life the city besieged by bombs and the miracles of the saints, criss-crossed by American jeeps and music, through the story of a naive yet witty young boy who only resolved to recount those days once he had grown old. The book was published just before Christmas 2014 by Einaudi, but to read it now – whilst awaiting a hoped-for reprint – one must either use a Kindle or pay a collector’s price (a second-hand copy is selling for 56 euros on Amazon and Ibs).

It seems to be the fate of beautiful yet uncelebrated books to become elusive, to retreat into parallel realms, to be overwhelmed by the mountains of new volumes – almost as if to enhance their own allure – so as to offer those who manage to unearth them a joy that is doubled when the price is a bargain – and it’s not about the money; book lovers know this. Then, suddenly – though not always – certain books reappear on the shelves, fresh from the press: for De Simone, this happened with "Il presepe popolare napoletano", which, prior to its 2025 reissue, could be found at collector’s prices. The same happened with "Malacqua" by Nicola Pugliese, one of the finest novels of the second half of the twentieth century, which captures the Naples of the 1970s – a city of which today’s tourists can now only form a vague idea. Published in 1977 by Einaudi at the behest of Italo Calvino, it went on to achieve cult status, began circulating as photocopies, and only returned to bookshops after the author’s death, thanks to Pironti, in 2013. It enjoyed renewed publishing success in 2022 and has been translated into several languages, receiving enthusiastic reviews in major foreign newspapers; this was followed by the reprinting of Pugliese’s eight short stories, included in the small volume "La nave nera" (published by Polidoro) in 2024.

The atmosphere of Naples harbours a secret that the finest storytellers have grasped, but only those who have not allowed themselves to be ensnared by it have truly been able to convey it. It lies hidden in the acoustic and chromatic contrast that can be perceived in places and moments of transition between light and shadow, between above and below, and it occurs in that slender strip of present space where the thread between yesterday and tomorrow is stretched. Silvio Perrella, in a book small only in size and recently reprinted, offers various descriptions: “I look at the entrances to some buildings, some of them very beautiful: they are often dark; light is a privilege of the upper floors. Sometimes their rear sides are almost pressed up against enormous tuff walls. On one side, air and space; on the other, darkness and damp.” And again: “There is a Naples made up of secret, almost inaccessible streets, yet very close to far better-known and busier roads. When you arrive there, you are struck by the silence that suddenly descends upon the space. The buildings are arranged in such a way that the sounds of the city drift elsewhere, leaving a street, a building, a bend, or a Vico Paradiso undisturbed.” A native of Palermo who has become Neapolitan, Perrella, in "Giùnapoli" (published by Neri Pozza), offers insights that can only be grasped whilst strolling; it is no coincidence that he dedicates a delicate portrait to the walker Ermanno Rea, who began writing late in life but very successfully reclaimed his place in the present: "Mistero napoletano" is not a forgotten book, nor are "Nostalgia" and "Napoli Ferrovia". In all these works, the focus is on the relationship between the city and those who return after having established a biographical distance that is not merely geographical, sifting through their memories and even attributing a predominant colour to them. Rea, who was also a photographer, was particularly attuned to the colour grey: ‘One might say that Naples is a city that loves greys above all else, and not only because it cultivates them in the sky and employs them in the plasterwork of its buildings, but also within itself, in its most hidden thoughts.’ Whether this applied to his own eyes or holds true for everyone, who knows. Perrella, too, remembers the city as grey, though in the 1970s – as anyone who opens "Malacqua" cannot fail to confirm. “I wonder today how this perception is possible,” reflects the writer. “And yet the memory conjures up a city just like that, without the clamour of colours, a city where it rains even when it isn’t raining. A melancholic city.”

This is the gritty side of Naples, found in certain obscure novels shrouded in drizzling rain, such as Luigi Incoronato’s “Scala a San Potito”, a post-war tale of the homeless taking shelter on the landings of the building that gives the book its name. They have remained just as they were, so that when walking up from Piazza Dante along the uniquely designed ramps, anyone who has read that slender text will, despite themselves, be drawn back into the echo of a stark prose from which the euphoria found in other desperate yet not despairing novels is banished, such as "Scende giù per Toledo" by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, dedicated to an almost sacred figure in the Neapolitan human nativity scene: that of the "femminielli" before they became a folk attraction with the "tombola vajassa" – dinner included – in the "bassi" of the Spanish Quarter.

For any (arbitrary) shelf of books that stand the test of time, the criterion cannot be based on copies sold, even if, to quote Arbasino, ‘here, we take great pains to draw up rankings between books accessible to all, which are to be praised, and those that are reprehensible because they are for the elite’. Reprehensible, then, is "Morfisa o l’acqua che dorme" by Antonella Cilento, a whirlwind 400-page rhapsody set in Naples in the year 1000, an era generally neglected by fiction because it is too distant. Reprehensible is "Di questa vita menzognera" by Giuseppe Montesano, a dystopian novel about the transformation of Naples into a hallucinatory theme park from which it will be difficult to escape. The book, published in 2003, has not been reprinted but second-hand copies can still be found. Seven years after its first publication, however, Marco Ciriello’s Un giorno di questi returned in an expanded edition, published by Rubbettino. According to Durante, it is “one of the most off-kilter, unpredictable and brilliant works written about Naples in recent times”: it depicts the city of the 1980s as experienced by F.P., a crime reporter who witnessed a splendid yet bloody decade spanning from Massimo Troisi to the murder of journalist Giancarlo Siani. It is a generation – and a story – to which Franchini also gave voice in "L’abusivo", a work that lives on and already contained the seeds and characters of his latest novel, "Il fuoco che ti porti dentro".

No guide to books on Naples, even if it merely mentions it in passing, can ignore the Camorra, given the many stories that have grown up around it. Some interesting titles are, unfortunately, also difficult to track down: "Il capo della camorra" by Ernesto Serao, last reprinted in 1977, explained with the insight of a reporter on the ground the rituals and figures of that ‘society’ as seen at the end of the nineteenth century; Luigi Compagnone’s Mater Camorra (1987) also revisits those turbulent years that culminated in the Cuocolo case, featuring the first ‘maxi-trial’ and the first ‘false turncoat’ in Italian history in 1912. Everything is, of course, viewed through the writer’s hindsight, in a scathing narrative essay that provides him with the starting point for reflecting on the present. Naso di cane by Attilio Veraldi, Naples’s foremost crime writer, published in 1982, is of an entirely different genre: the author of La mazzetta recounts, through the story of a seasoned hitman, a crucial phase in the modernisation of the Camorra.

Following a rough chronological order, we arrive at "I leoni di marmo" by former boss Giuseppe Misso: it is the story of the criminal rise of two young boys who would become bitter enemies, he and Luigi Giuliano di Forcella. That autobiography will be followed by "Verso un probabile giorno dopo", published by Mondadori in 2024 as a low-key spin-off of Teresa Ciabatti’s "Donnaregina", which was shortlisted for the Strega Prize: although the literary merit of these titles is negligible, those written by Misso certainly enrich our understanding of the dynamics of a clan viewed from the inside and the complex psychology of a Camorra boss.

Everything can continue, however, with the occasional or regular visit to Port’Alba, letting chance guide the way to reveal other delightful surprises that we shall leave unmentioned here. Because, as we know, it is often the books themselves that choose who they are meant to go to.