Virgil's Golden Egg and Other Neapolitan Miracles

An Investigation into the Sources of Creativity

Michael A. Ledeen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412842402
• eBook ISBN: 9781351297264
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Savvy Italians will tell you that Neapolitans are considered the cleverest, most imaginative, most romantic, and the most entertaining people in the country.

The world's finest men's fashions are Neapolitan, Italy's most celebrated popular songs and a high proportion of popular and operatic singers are Neapolitan—starting with Enrico Caruso. Sophia Loren and Toto are famously Neapolitan. Divorce Italian Style and Marriage Italian Style were based on plays written by the great Neapolitan Eduardo de Filippo. If you check the Italian literary awards year after year, you will find an amazingly high proportion of Neapolitans walking off with the highest honors.

Naples has been a great creative center for hundreds of years. Neapolitan creativity has survived centuries of foreign occupation, widespread misery, the end of its role as a great capital city, repeated natural catastrophes, and terrible epidemics. What accounts for the creativity of Naples? The sorcerer Virgil is said to have created a Golden Egg, inside a crystal sphere, to save Naples from natural catastrophe. The egg, locked in an iron cage, was buried beneath a castle—still known as the "Egg Castle"—to give it stability and to give eternal life to Naples. Michael Ledeen suggests some surprising answers in a highly original exploration of Neapolitan life and death that ranges from religion to organized crime, war and violence. His deep affection for this remarkable city and its people is evident on every page.

1

On Stage

“In Naples everyone lives in a drunken forgetfulness of himself. The same thing happens to me. I barely recognize myself and I seem an entirely different person. Yesterday I thought, ‘either you were mad before, or you are now.’ “—Goethe, Travels in Italy

An obscure Neapolitan by the name of Gennaro Lombardi arrived on Ellis Island on April Fool’s Day, 1895 on the ship Kronprinz Frederick Wilhelm and had his Manifest Line Number (0557) duly entered into the register of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He was twenty years old and single, and gave no “last place of residence.” No one could have imagined that Gennaro Lombardi would transform the eating habits of the entire planet, but his market at 32 Spring Street in lower Manhattan was the first place to serve pizza in the New World. One of his employees, Antonio (Totonno) Pero, is generally believed to be the first pizzaiolo in the United States. You can still get good pizza at the New York Lombardi’s, and the family he left behind makes one of the best pizzas in Naples, at Lombardi on Spaccanapoli, right across the street from the Croce Institute, where the celebrated philosopher/historian Benedetto Croce held court.

As with so much in Naples, pizza goes back a long way, at least to the Romans. Our guide, Virgil, seems to have written about it, in Book VII of the Aeneid:

And here it happened, when their scanty food

was done, that—hungry still—they turned upon

the thin cakes with their teeth; they dared profane

and crack and gnaw the fated circles of

their crusts with hand and jaw; they did not spare

the quartered surfaces of their flat loaves.

Virgil’s pizzas were obviously cooked more than the modern version, which is typically toasted around the border and lusciously soft towards the center. You can’t really “crack and gnaw” Neapolitan pizza (some American pizzas fit the ancient description rather better). But Virgil’s account of the zeal of the diners can easily be repeated in contemporary Naples. My favorite pizzeria is a hole in the wall called “Piscopo” at the border of Forcella, (one of the poorer neighborhoods), although reliable friends insist that the best place is “Michele,” in the same part of town.

Neapolitan pizza is cooked in a wood oven (oddly, a 1998 New York Times article¹ on the revival of pizza in New York City mistakenly insisted that “the real thing” is always cooked in a coal oven), and comes in four basic versions: the now-classic “margherita,” with cheese, tomato sauce, and basil leaves, the “margherita” with fresh plum tomatoes instead of the sauce, the “margherita” with mozzarella cheese, and the “marinara,” with tomato sauce but no cheese. Most stories about Neapolitan pizza claim that it is always made with mozzarella, but it isn’t so. Real mozzarella is made with buffalo milk, and it retains most of its shape and texture even when cooked in a hot oven. Some people like that, but most prefer to have the cheese melt and ooze all over the pizza, and for that purpose a cheese made from cow’s milk—called “fior di latte”—is much better. It looks like the round version of mozzarella, but the flavor and the consistency are different.

Mozzarella itself constitutes one of the city’s many little secrets, because hardly anyone knows just how it is made, and there is considerable dispute about the origin of the (water) buffalos who produce the milk. The process is much like making yogurt. You put a culture into the milk container, and wait several hours until the cheese begins to solidify. Then you scoop out the solid material and shape it, either into the oval or round, large or small balls, or into a braid, like Jewish challah. As for the origins of the buffalos, nobody really knows, although they have been there for a very long time. They were already there in Greek and Roman times (indeed, the Italian Jews during the Roman Empire ate buffalo meat with cabbage as part of their New Year’s meal).

Nonetheless, the pizza we know and love is distinctly modern. The “margherita” was created in 1889, and named after Queen Margherita of Savoy, the wife of King Umberto I. By that time, pizza had acquired considerable fame—it made its first literary appearance in 1866—and had already been served at court. King Ferdinand II, perhaps the most beloved Neapolitan monarch, loved food to excess, and spent hours in the kitchen preparing lavish meals. In the mid-1830s he invited the city’s leading pizzaoiolo, Domenico Testa, to the summer palace, Capodimonte (now a marvelous museum), where Testa prepared some twenty pizzas for the king and his guests.

This single dinner made Testa’s fame and fortune, because when Ferdinand asked him what he would like in payment for the meal, Testa said he wanted a title. Not a title of nobility, mind you, but he wanted to be able to call himself Monzù, a corruption of “Monsieur,” which was restricted to the personal chefs of Neapolitan aristocrats. The king readily agreed, and a few years later Testa opened a pizzeria in via Purgatorio, “Pizzeria di Monzù Testa.” It was a huge success, led to other restaurants, and finally to immortality, when a famous popular actor wrote a smashingly successful comedy set in Testa’s pizzeria.

The Margherita, long since the most popular version, is a patriotic pizza. It was created in 1889 by Raffaele Esposito, whose pizzeria was (and is) in via Sant’Anna di Palazzo. In a replay of Testa’s triumphal dinner half a century earlier, Esposito was invited to Capodimonte, where he prepared a pizza with the colors of the Italian national flag (red tomatoes, white cheese, green basil leaves) for Queen Margherita. It was one of the most famous meals in the history of cuisine, later attracting the attention of Walt Disney himself. A hundred years later, Mickey Mouse and his dog Pluto traveled back in time to witness the great event.

The Neapolitans even anticipated home delivery. In the mid-nineteenth century, most pizzas were made in portable ovens and sold from pushcarts. The most popular vendors had teams of runners to deliver fresh pizza to their clients.

The global success of pizza both delights and enrages Neapolitans, who don’t want to be blamed for some of the world’s “pizzas,” and so, just as the Tuscans established standards for proper wines, the Neapolitans have insisted on certain standards before they will accredit a pizzeria as a reliable source of “genuine Neapolitan pizza.” They are quite right to insist; the pizza in Naples is very different from the usual American variety. The crust is burnt along the border, but the center is soft and the olive oil, basil, tomato, and cheese produce a marvelous aroma. It is very hard to find such a pizza outside Naples, although here and there it has been accomplished. Indeed, in the summer of 2003, a Japanese won the title “best Pizzaiolo in the world” in an international competition in Naples.

Pizza is one of the most famous Neapolitan products, and its history is typical of the city’s remarkable energy and enterprise. They took something that had been around for a long time, and raised it to a new level of quality. Indeed, a celebrated American nutritional biologist, Paul Saltman, was known to exclaim, “You remember when you were a kid and the lady held up the four basic food groups? Well, what the hell is pizza? It’s all the above … (it’s) the most nutrient-dense food … containing 44 nutrients.” To which the food critic Jeffrey Steingarten adds, in appropriate awe, “Pizza is the perfect food.”²

They found dramatic ways to promote and distribute it, from royal palaces to the filthy streets of the city. And they worked tirelessly to make it succeed, far beyond the city walls. It’s an archetypal Neapolitan story, the result of imagination, energy, grit, and hard work. Contrary to their stereotype—people who take life easy, indolent Latin lovers but not disciplined workers or leaders—Neapolitans are very high-energy people. The city itself has always been bursting with that energy.

Naples isn’t one of those places you go to just for the sights, even though the sights are spectacular. It grabs you right away, just like New York does. Like New York, you’ll either love it or hate it, but it won’t let you be indifferent. “Gayest city in the world,” Herman Melville wrote in his diary, “no equipages flash like these; no beauties so haughty. No cavaliers so proud, no palaces so sumptuous etc. etc….Could hardly tell it from Broadway. Thought I was there.”³

Melville loved Naples, but even Mark Twain, who didn’t much care for it, was similarly impressed with the amazing density of the streets and the astonishing energy of the people. It was the Mediterranean version of New York City, and even more so:

The streets are generally about wide enough for one wagon and how they do swarm with people! It is Broadway repeated in every street, in every court, in every alley! Such masses such throngs, such multitudes of hurrying, bustling, struggling humanity! We never saw the like of it, hardly even in New York.

All that energy and movement makes a lot of noise. William Dean Howells liked it, and called it “a joyful noise.” He found it unchanged after an absence of forty years.

I had not been there since 1864, but when I woke up the morning after my arrival, and heard the chickens cackling in the Castel dell’Ovo, and the donkeys braying, and the cab-drivers quarreling, and the cries of the street vendors, and the dogs barking, and the children wailing, and their mothers scolding, and the clatter of wheels and hoops and feet, and all that mighty harmony of the joyful Neapolitan noises, it seemed to me that it was the first morning after my first arrival, and I was still only twenty-seven years old.

It hasn’t changed much in the past century. Today, as then, the joyful noise carries over into most all aspects of daily life. Some of it—notably the riotous festivals that mixed religious devotion and sexual abandon with music and theater—are either gone or tamed into more staid concerts and plays, but on New Year’s Eve, for example, the city still erupts in a spectacle of noise, (illegal) fireworks, and a shower of old furniture and crockery tumbling into the streets.

…the city imitates Vesuvius, throwing off fire and flames…. Over the terrace a piazza of colored lights has grown in the air, they are shooting from terraces and balconies, they are shooting and it isn’t even midnight … (at midnight) Naples sets itself aflame, shoots, breaks, throws things in the streets, it’s impossible to hear a voice…⁴

The noise of Neapolitan life extends throughout society, from the narrow alleys of the slums of Forcella, the Sanita’, and the Quartieri Spagnoli all the way to the centers of power. Before the referendum of 1949 that abolished the monarchy, the raucousness penetrated the walls of the Royal Palace. Casanova, a hardened cynic, marveled at the good humor of the place, and he insisted that Naples was the only court in Europe where he heard people laugh out loud. If the rulers laugh, the people laugh too, even more loudly. Even the poorest Neapolitans somehow maintain their good humor, and they have done it under the most terrible circumstances. During the Allied occupation during the Second World War, a British intelligence officer looked out the window of his office onto a narrow street, “inhabited to bursting-point with working-class families, (who) live as much as they can … out of doors, for which reason this street is as noisy as a tropical aviary.”⁵

Neapolitans don’t need an excuse to make noise, and their exuberance defeats the misery with which they have long been surrounded. The noisy street described by the British officer was bursting with energy at a time when the Neapolitans were starving, when there had been no fresh water for days (they were experimenting cooking with sea water), and when the Nazis were conducting massacres, both by air raids and with mines they had left behind as a parting gift to the city.

Noise still defines the city. “Settled in bed,” the contemporary American writer Dan Hofstadter muses, “I’m disconcerted at first by the sheer volume, by my feeling of floating helplessly in a tide of half-drowned voices, people calling or quarreling, snatches of jokes, television commercials, soccer games, ghosts of song twisted by the wind…I enjoy a sensation of homecoming, of rejoining a crowd of kindred spirits, faces I have always known.”⁶

Naples has a spectacular effect on many visitors. “It says in the Bible,” Hans Christian Andersen wrote a friend, “that one who has tasted heavenly bread can never be satisfied with anything earthly, and so I shall never be satisfied in the cold land where I have to belong.” His days in Naples transformed him forever. “Thanks be to God that I have seen and felt heaven; I shall dream of it, I shall sing of it.” And Hector Berlioz, who knew a thing or two about singing about wonderful things, gushed: “What life! What animation! What dazzling bustle!…The austerely melancholy Roman countryside is to the plain of Naples as the past is to the present, death to life, silence to vivid, harmonious noise.”

These exuberant people cannot be easily governed, either in daily activity or in the life of the spirit. They are extremely playful, and do not readily accept the restraints of social niceties, or even law. They break a lot of rules, despite the best efforts of the meddlesome bureaucrats who are suffocating the rest of Europe in a welter of regulations. The EU really has no chance to win this contest; the Neapolitans have outmaneuvered rulers as different as the Spanish monarchy and Benito Mussolini’s fascist state.

Naples has remained entrepreneurial and fecund, in dramatic contrast with a Europe dominated by constantly increasing government control of business and relentlessly dropping birth rates. Recent statistics show that there is significantly more entrepreneurialship in the Italian South than in the North, hand in hand with its higher birth rate. There will be many fewer “Italians” in a few decades, but Naples is holding its own. In the first five months of 2005, 4,296 babies were born while 4,509 people died. They’re still making plenty of babies, perhaps man’s most creative and exuberant activity.

I first came to Naples, despite innumerable warnings from Italian friends, to find a bit of chaos. I had spent several years writing a book on Machiavelli, which demands a very rigid discipline. When I had finished, I had a great craving for chaos, and Naples seemed the ideal place. The book I had in mind would have been an essay in praise of the fun-loving Neapolitan anarchy. But I had totally underestimated the wonders of the place, the depth of its culture, and the brilliance of the people. I came to understand that the chaos had a method to its madness. And madness it is.

The Neapolitans’ frenetic energy has invariably appeared to outsiders to verge on insanity, and many of them recognized that they were infected with it. Hans Christian Andersen thought he was losing his mind there, overwhelmed by the energy of the people, the heat and humidity of the climate, and the passionate lustiness of the women. Goethe lost control, and felt he was becoming an entirely different person. The city really does have a powerful effect, especially on careful observers, and above all on visitors who are accustomed to bad weather and boring places. They have never met anyone quite like the Neapolitans.

The “normal” Neapolitan state of mind is well described in a recent book: “a temperament characterized by an elevated mood state that feels highly intoxicating, powerful, productive and desirable…”⁷ It’s a perfect description of a considerable number of my favorite Neapolitans. But that book is not about Naples; it’s about America. That state of mind is described as “hypomanic” by Stephen Gartner, a professional psychologist. A similar study, by Kay Redmond Jamison,⁸ links the astonishing creativity and energy of Americans to an “exuberant” personality. Both argue that there are people just this side of manic-depression, who are not going to end up in a psychiatric ward, who are different from the norm, and are more likely than “normal” folks to make major contributions in whatever enterprise they embrace. Manics are created by nature and then shaped by nurture. You can identify them by their DNA, and see them in their myriad activities. Gartner even suggests that the gene or genes responsible for hypomanics may go back to the first hours of the human race, and may come from “alpha male” chimpanzees of the sort that become leaders and organize their followers to dominate their environment. “The paradox,” he says in an elegant turn of phrase, “is that the traits that push mankind toward continuous advancement are really quite primitive.”⁹

It’s a perfect description of Neapolitans. It fits perfectly with the observations of Andersen, Twain, Howells, and Goethe.

A considerable body of medical research underlies Gartner’s and Jamison’s belief that America has a very high percentage of these personalities, and that they are in many ways the human engines of America’s unusual energy and creativity. Why does America have the highest concentration of such people? Because America is an immigrant society (the other countries with known high percentages of manics are also immigrant societies: Canada, Israe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Virgil’s Golden Egg
• 1. On Stage
• 2. Chaos
• 3. The Dead
• 4. Crime
• 5. Conclusion: Naples’ Destiny
• Index