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urbanology
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“Munnezza e Bellezza”
 That
is the title of Lina Wertműller’s
new documentary about Naples.
(Collaborating with Wertműller were
journalist Francesco Brancatella and sociologist Domico De Masi.) It
ran on
Italian national TV on Sunday, May 11, 2008. You don’t need the
sub-title—“a
look at Naples”—to
know what it’s about since munnezza
is Neapolitan dialect for “garbage.” Thus,
Garbage and Beauty in Naples will do
the trick as a translation although it loses the sad irony of the
original
rhyme. Yes, “garbage” and “beauty” sound poetic together in Neapolitan,
perhaps
something like Beauty and the Beast. The
title may hint at a static inevitability about the pairing of the two.
(I hope
not, but that thought occurred to me.)
The
Neapolitan problem is well-known by now. Not even electricity and
running water
are as essential to the civilized survival of a city in the western
world as
taking out the trash and avoiding not just the obvious problems of
public
health but the cynical depression that settles on one million people
living
in stench and filth. Local bloggers were quick off the mark, even
before
the program
ran, hoping it would not just trot out tourist postcards of the Bay of
Naples
while ‘o sole mio ran in the
background. It was, luckily, not
that. (As a matter of fact, the real musical leitmotif
was Pino Daniele’s Napule
è, a melancholy litany of how Naples
has gone wrong.)
Munnezza e
Bellezza is thick with the sociology and history of blame. In
between
alternating shots of garbage and beautiful castles and coast, there are
excerpts from some films that have tried to explain Naples
to the rest of Italy—and
to the rest of the world. Wertműller uses a couple of Francesco
Rosi’s
highly political films, C’era una volta
(1967), about the Spanish vicerealm of Naples
in
the 1600s, and his Le mani sulle città
1963, about systemic corruption in post-war Naples. As well, she uses parts of
her
own Una domenica di novembre (1981)
that deals with the Bourbon dynasty that
ruled the Kingdom
of Naples before its
annexation into
united Italy.
There
are also interviews with the ex-mayor of Naples
as well as with the current one, with journalists and with people on
the
street. The waste problem in Naples
is seen as a metaphor of the potential collapse of rampant consumerism
everywhere.
The director says elsewhere that she thinks the city is getting a bum
rap from
the world press. The same thing happens in other places, but you just
don’t read
about it all the time. (Without denying “potential collapse of rampant
consumerism,” I’m not so sure about that. Wertműller, more than any
other
living Italian director, as her films show, is in love with the visual
that stuns,
shocks, and delights; thus, she loves Naples.
She has spent time and resources in helping to restore the beauty of
the city,
so maybe she gets a pass on that one.)
There
are three possibilities: (1) It’s the fault of the camorra
(the Neapolitan version of the mafia; (2) It’s the fault of
the central Italian government; (3) It’s the fault of the fatalism in
Neapolitans that accepts corruption and anarchy. Or maybe it’s all of
the above.
Well,
since the “mob” is into everything, at least some of the fault must be
theirs.
After all, for many years they sold cheap dump sites near Naples to
northern firms—sites that are now
full. The second point rests on the fact that Naples,
the old capital of its own kingdom, has never recovered from being
beaten in
the 1860/61 war of Italian unification and then plundered by the
victors, the
government of the new Italy.
There still is no trust of the
central government; thus, you are left with an “every man for himself”
atmosphere, in which greed and corruption flourish.
That third point is more
difficult to deal
with. Mark Twain wrote in The Innocents
Abroad that
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…the contrasts between
opulence and poverty, and magnificence and misery, are more frequent
and more
striking in Naples than in Paris even…
Naked boys of nine years and the
fancy-dressed children of luxury; shreds and tatters, and brilliant
uniforms;
jackass carts and state carriages; beggars, princes, and bishops,
jostle each
other in every street.
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Obviously, times have
changed since the 1860s
when that was written, but today in Naples the contrast between the
villas of
Posillipo
and the
slums of Scampia is still marked to a degree found in few places in
Europe. Even earlier, when Vincenzo
Cuoco was
writing about why the French-imposed
Neapolitan
Republic
of 1799 failed, he said:
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Neapolitan nation was split in two, separated over two centuries into
two very
different kinds of people. The educated classes were formed on foreign
models
and possessed a culture quite different from one that the nation
needed, one
that could come about only through the development of our own
faculties. Some
had become French, and some English; and those that stayed
Neapolitan—most of
the people—stayed uneducated. |
Are there still
two different peoples who call themselves “Neapolitans” after all these
years— centuries!? Yes, and the existence
of an entrenched underclass in Naples is a bigger
problem than the
garbage, but that is a topic for another documentary. The existence of
the
underclass, however, does breed “fatalism, corruption and anarchy,” a
situation
not conducive to efficient social services, so maybe that third point
is not
irrelevant.
Actually, “Munnezza
e Bellezza” has somewhat of an upbeat
ending: new train
stations, new science labs, the improvement in the status of women in Naples. etc. Wertműller has heard the oft-ground political
axe that says if we spend money restoring that beautiful statue over
there (bellezza) we won’t have enough to solve urban
problems (munnezza). She rejects that, and, brother, so
do I.
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