A skyscraper-sized babà. Naples beyond the clichés at the Centro Direzionale

With mass touristification, now that the city is overrun by hordes of retired tourists, proud of the high-speed rail and the convenience of an Orio al Serio–Capodichino flight, now that even the most hesitant cruise passengers have been persuaded to disembark from the ships moored at Beverello, no one is surprised any more by the presence of the underground, or even the university. The last curiosity that still persists is that linked to the Centro Direzionale: “Ah, but do you have skyscrapers in Naples too?”

Yes, we do. If the Ryanair flight from Orio glides in on a beautiful sunny day, the bewildered tourist starts snapping photos whilst still at high altitude: the lakes of the Phlegraean area, the cliffs of Posillipo, the countless windows of the immense Real Albergo dei Poveri, and barely notices they’re landing amongst a row of glass-fronted skyscrapers. It is not New York but Naples’ Centro Direzionale, just a few minutes from the station and the airport, designed in the 1980s by Kenzo Tange. For local patriots, this was the site of Italy’s tallest skyscraper until 2010 (the Torre Telecom is two metres taller than the Pirellone).

Once on the ground, however, you forget all about it straight away. There are the endless queues for a pizza at I Tribunali, those for the Veiled Christ, and the ‘spread-legged’ lemonade. This wonderland takes you to another part of the city, and amongst the skyscrapers there’s no time to stroll about. ‘Thank goodness,’ one might say: it’s one of the few places that tourists haven’t yet taken over. Even in Scampia, amongst the demolished ‘Vele’, you might come across a small group of Asian tourists gathered behind a tour guide’s parasol.

Between the 1990s and the early 2000s, Tange’s tower blocks served as a welcome counterpoint to the picture-postcard city in Neapolitan cinema. In "Libera" (1993), a cult film by Pappi Corsicato, the opening scene is set on the construction sites of the Centro Direzionale, where Ninni Bruschetta performs a neomelodic serenade, not beneath the balcony of an alleyway, but beneath that of a skyscraper under construction. How could one forget the ending of Certi bambini, a film by the Frazzi brothers (not to be confused with the D’Innocenzo brothers), based on the book by Diego De Silva, when little Rosario, after shooting a man in the metro tunnels, returns to the surface to play football with the other children in the square of the Centro Direzionale?

In this new era of Neapolitan readability, now that Neapolitan has become cool and every neighbourhood has its own tourist identity – even the least Neapolitan of them (see the Vomero) – it is still a Japanese man, Takashi Homma, who is coming to terms with the Centro Direzionale. Leafing through his photography book, Napoli Direzionale (C/O Bardi), it feels as though you’re looking at photos of the protagonist from Wim Wenders’ film Perfect Days – the man who cleans Tokyo’s public toilets, so to speak: crisp images, taken in the late afternoon, as the sun begins to set. Skyscrapers, skaters, escalators. It is only when we come across a photograph of an underground car park, where a graffiti tag reads ‘Digos boia’, that we realise we are not in Tokyo, but in Naples, in Poggioreale. The rest is absent from the photographs: the high suicide rate, the desolation of the night, child prostitution, and the office workers who, at the end of the day, rush out of their offices to catch the last Circumvesuviana train.

The photographer is also a musician. At the book launch, held at Cabinet Milano, he gave a musical performance whilst wearing a horse’s head mask and strumming Brian Eno-style melodies on a keyboard. Before leaving Naples, he wrote to the editors: “I’m done. Can I come back?”. Even the Japanese photographer, when he comes to Naples, cries twice, and so on and so forth.