Naples

Naples as we saw it on a brief visit a few years ago is big, aggressive, beautiful, smart and formidable. It shouts at you, seems to enjoy the impact it makes on you, but is impervious to how you may judge it. We have rarely been to a city where we have felt so out of place and yet at the same time at home. Traffic has its own rules in Naples, which seems to dictate that you drive as hard and as selfishly as you can as if no one else is on the road, and stay alive if possible. Miraculously it seems to work and we saw no accidents, only hairsbreadth escapes.

Alleged these days to be the home of various Mafioso, the city was founded many years ago by the Greek colony Cuma some time between the 7th and 6th centuries BC, and was given the name Neapolis, meaning new city. During the period of Roman domination, the town preserved its Greek language and customs. Following the Roman period, the city was dominated by many different groups of people (Goths, Byzantines, Lombards, Normans, Swabians, Angevins, Aragonese, Spaniards, Austrians, Bourbons and revolutionary French).

No one seems quite sure, how the phrase ‘See Naples and die’ (once you have seen it there’s nothing else to live for!) originated. It may have been first used during the reign of the Bourbons of Naples, considered by historians to have been the city's Golden Age. Goethe uses the phrase in his book ‘Italian Journey’ (1786-88). From 1816 until its annexation to the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was the wealthiest and most industrialized of the various Italian states. After London and Paris, Naples was the third most populous city of Europe and certainly one of the most extravagantly wealthy. It then declined, but in recent decades has regained its cultural reputation.

We visited the great Museum of Archeology which of course has many artifacts from nearby Pompeii and Herculaneum, added to as excavations continue in both places. We were particularly struck by the experiments to try and recover the remnants of some of the burned books, which I referred to in a previous blog. By an elaborate chemical process the actual texts are being discovered, some of that patient and necessarily slow process being carried out as I remember by a team from Oxford University. What was left after Vesuvius erupted in AD 97 continues to fascinate the historical explorer in all of us, and the museum reveals much of the fruits of that journey so far.

Bryan

Cities and the Future of the Planet

The Tate Modern Gallery in London has a vivid and informative exhibition called ‘Global Cities ‘ filling much of the huge space of the main hall, and we were there yesterday. Using London as a template, it presents and explores the social, cultural, environmental and architectural life of nine rapidly expanding cities. With a range of existing films, videos and photographs by artists who have some relation to the ten cities, and other works commissioned by the Gallery, the exhibition raises specific issues such as sustainability, public space and social inclusion whilst also addressing the effect of escalating climate change.

The cities are Tokyo, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Cairo, Istanbul, Los Angeles, Mumbai, Johannesburg, and – the smallest – London, with amazing contrasts between them all. Istanbul for example covers an area similar to London but has a population 30% larger. Tokyo is the largest urban region in the world and Tokyo Bay (once seen as a buffer against tornadoes) has been progressively in- filled to create more land for offices and housing. Eighteen million people live in Mumbai (Bombay) and more than half of them live in slums, and with governance split between the state and central government, there is a lack of power and knowledge to implement necessary change.

With a population about nine times that of London, Cairo has one of the lowest ratios of green space per inhabitant in the world. 66% of the population in Sao Paulo – the largest Spanish city outside Spain - are under 20. Ethnically diverse, a major project in the city is to erect a hundred new schools. In Mexico City, located on a high plateau with few geographic boundaries to curb its growth, the attempt to lure people back to the historic areas of the city has merely increased the price of housing there. Bottled water is more expensive than petrol.

When we began this series of blogs on Cities in Europe, I quoted from a 1950’s book by Lewis Mumford who claimed that ‘soon’ half the world’s population will live in cities or be affected by city culture. Now apparently there are twenty mega cities with populations of over ten million and four hundred and fifty with more than one million. According to the United Nations, we have now reached and exceeded Mumford’s forecast. And it is estimated that the number is set to rise to 75% by 2050.

We found the exhibition moving, alarming, but also unifying. If this is how most of the world’s people are going to live through this millennium, what happens to cities should be everyone’s concern.

B.R.