Naples is a city that calls me, it called me in 2008 to shoot the documentary Forbidden to breathe on the immense tragedy of toxic waste, with the leachate that polluted the earth like a liquid monster, so he called me again in 2023, this time for a joyful reason: the third championship of the beloved football team.
I was escorted by Marietto, a Neapolitan friend of mine, to act as Virgil’s guide in the happy hell of the celebrations, for Naples all it took was a draw against Udinese to win the Scudetto. And so it was. In Naples I feel free, is a city where if you ask a traffic policeman for directions, he can send you straight in a one-way direction to get you to your destination. Naples is a city where I’m not afraid of gaining weight, or rather: I don’t give a damn about gaining weight. A pizza and a baba and I’m in heaven.
Naples is the city where Leopardi was a child again enjoying an ice cream. An overflowing city, of a beauty that takes your breath away, a volcanic, imaginative, enveloping and overwhelming city. In Naples life invents itself and the rules struggle to keep up with it. Naples is also a violent, paradoxical, catastrophic city, but in Naples homologation has failed, you cannot homologate a Neapolitan, for this reason Naples will never be a vulgar city, vulgarity is always artificial, adulterated, sophisticated, while Naples is instinctive and natural, bubbling, and there is nothing more false than a Neapolitan postcard, precisely because you cannot imprison Naples in a postcard.
With Marietto we went to watch the match in a tourist restaurant near Castel dell’Ovo, we sacrificed a genuine trattoria in exchange for a suggestive panorama for “cinematographic” reasons, my idea was to film the celebrations from afar, on the pitch long, e then enter the bedlam, risking his eardrums, an act of courage for a “tinnitus” like myself. “You can’t make plans in Naples, Riccà,” Marietto told me, but there’s also a very stubborn Milanese part of me.
The game finally starts just when they bring us the seafood appetizer, at one point my bladder pushes me towards the bathroom, when I come back Marietto has a funeral face “Udinese scored”. Nope, tragedy. I put my hands in imaginary hair. “Ricca, isn’t that bad luck?” Marietto says to me. I’m desperate, but Marietto reassures me, “It’s good that Udinese scored almost at the start of the match, there’s time to recover, but Riccà don’t go to the bathroom anymore”. Even I who am a rational man, devoted to the Enlightenment, I start praying to San Gennaro. You never know, that’s the beauty of life: in the end you never know.
In fact, Napoli’s draw finally arrives and I can give a name to whoever saved my film: To install Victor Osimhen. It would have been almost impossible for me to stay until Sunday, I needed Napoli to win the Scudetto. Thanks Osimhem, thanks Naples.
The rest, the delirium of the celebrations, I leave to my film to describe, after all I went down to Naples to shoot some images, to make them a little movie. The only thing I found unbearable were the trumpets, those cursed trumpets that tortured my eardrums every three seconds, so I took my revenge with the film’s soundtrack, placing madrigals between one trumpet and another.
I’ll just tell you the last thing: on the way back to Milan, we found a Panda stationary in the fast lane, Marietto was driving, turning the lights, playing, but the Panda didn’t move, proudly adamant. Marietto then overtook it on the right, a quick glance at the driver and he came out with this Neapolitan expression “But what a fish in broth look!”, “Marietto, what does fish in broth mean?” “Didn’t you see the face he had? like that of a fish that comes to the surface in broth” and mimics the expression of the fish. Here, Naples is also this, a series of idioms absolutely perfect, there was no other way to define the driver of that Panda.
Then we arrived in Milan in 6 and a half hours, with stops. Marietto drives well.