But the great holidays are just part of it. Almost every day there’s something happening in this city. Each neighborhood has its own guardian saint, and on the saint’s name day, the festivities get under way early. In fact, they begin a few days beforehand, when posts are erected to which green, blue, or red light bulbs are attached, and when paper garlands are strung from one side of the street to the other. Paper of all colors plays an essential role in these street scenes; its radiance, its mobility, and how quickly it wears out perfectly reflect the lively and temperamental character of the Neapolitans. Red, black, yellow, and white fly-whisks, altars made of bright, shiny paper abutting the city walls, green paper rosettes on the raw and bloody cuts of meat: such sights are everywhere to be seen. The traveler folk — they’re everywhere here in the streets — quickly scout out which neighborhood is hosting festivities and head over there at once. And what characters I came across! The fire-eater, calmly surrounding himself with bowls of fire on a wide sidewalk, and then gobbling up the flames from one bowl after another; and the silhouette-cutter, perched in the shade of a city gate, placing his models in the glaring sun and, for one lira, cutting a strikingly accurate profile in shiny black paper. I won’t speak of the soothsayers and athletes, as we see these sorts at fairs here in Germany. But I would like to tell you about a type of painter I’ve never observed anywhere but in Naples. At first I didn’t see him, the painter, at all, only a crowd encircling what seemed to be an empty space. I moved closer. And there, kneeling in the middle of this cluster of people was a small, nondescript fellow drawing a Christ-figure on the cobblestones with colored chalk, and under it the head of the Madonna. He takes his time. He is obviously working with great precision, contemplating where to apply the chalk in strokes of green, yellow, or brown. After a long while he gets to his feet and waits beside his work. Fifteen minutes pass, maybe a half hour, until gradually the limbs, head, and torso of his drawing are covered with copper coins, two or three each thrown from every one of his admirers. He then gathers up his money and soon the drawing disappears under people’s footsteps.
Every festival is capped off with fireworks over the sea. Or I should rather say was, at least back in 1924 when I was first there. Then the government thought better of the great sums of money flying into the night sky year after year, and ordered the fireworks to be scaled back. But in the early evenings back then, from July to September there was one single trail of fire running along the coast between Naples and Salerno. Sometimes over Sorrento, sometimes over Minori and Praiano, but always over Naples, fireballs filled the sky. Every parish sought to trump the festival of its neighbors with new kinds of light shows.
I’ve told you a bit about everyday life in Naples, and a bit about the festival days, but what’s remarkable is how the two blend into each other, how every day the streets have something festive, full of music and idlers, and laundry flapping in the wind like flags; and how even Sunday has something of a workday feel to it, because every little storekeeper can keep his shop open into the night. To really get to know the city, you would probably have to transform yourself into a Neapolitan postman for a year; you would become acquainted with more cellars, attics, backstreets, and recesses than there are in many other cities combined. But even the postmen never really get to know Naples, with so many tens of thousands of people living there who don’t receive one single letter in a year, who don’t even have a place to live. There’s great misery in the city, in the whole region, which explains why most Italian emigrants hail from there. As steerage passengers aboard American steamers, tens of thousands have cast their last glance on their hometown, so beautiful in parting, lying there with its countless flights of staggered stairs, its nestled courtyards, its churches disappearing amid a sea of buildings. We leave you today with this vision of the city.
“Neapel,” GS, 7.1, 206–14. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.
Broadcast on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt, on May 9, 1931. The broadcast was listed in the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung for May 9, 1931, from 10:30–10:50 am: “Schulfunk: ‘Von einer Italienreise: Neapel’ [School radio: On an Italian Journey: Naples]. Talk by Dr. Walter Benjamin.”
1 In a letter to Scholem, Benjamin refers to having visited Pompeii, as well as Naples, during his stay on Capri in 1924 (letter of September 16, 1924, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 250).
2 A reference to the once popular main character and emblem of the “noble robber” in Christian August Vulpius, Rinaldo Rinaldini: der Räuberhauptmann [Rinaldo Rinaldini: Robber Captain] (Leipzig: Gräff, 1799).
3 Here, Benjamin borrows from his previously published essay, “Naples,” cowritten with Asja Lacis, with whom he had spent time in Capri during the visit in 1924. See “Naples,” in SW, 1, 418; “Neapel,” GS, 4.1, 312–13, first published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, August 19, 1925.
4 For a similar account, see Benjamin and Lacis, “Naples,” 419; “Neapel,” 313.
CHAPTER 23. The Fall of Herculaneum and Pompeii
Have you ever heard of the Minotaur? He was the hideous monster that dwelt in a labyrinth in Thebes. Every year a virgin was sacrificed by being thrown into this labyrinth, whose hundreds of meandering, branching, and crisscrossing paths made it impossible for her to find her way out, so she was eventually eaten by the monster; that is, until Theseus was given a ball of thread by the Theban king’s daughter.1 Theseus fastened one end of the thread at the entrance, so he was sure to find his way out, and then slew the Minotaur. The Theban king’s daughter was named Ariadne. People visiting modern-day Pompeii could certainly use one of Ariadne’s threads: it’s the largest labyrinth, the largest maze on Earth. Wherever the eye wanders, it finds nothing but walls and sky. Even 1,800 years ago — before Pompeii was buried alive — it mustn’t have been easy to find one’s way; for old Pompeii, like Karlsruhe for us, was composed of a complex network of perpendicular streets. But the landmarks that helped people orient themselves in those days — shops and tavern signs, raised temples and buildings — have all disappeared. Where stairs and walls once lent order to buildings, gaps everywhere now create paths through the ruins. How often it happened that, while walking through the dead city with one of my friends from Naples or Capri, I turned to him, pointing out a faded painting on a wall or a mosaic underfoot, only to find myself suddenly alone; then anxious minutes would pass as we called out each other’s name before finding each other again. You mustn’t think that you can stroll through this defunct Pompeii as if it were a museum of antiquities. No, there in the mugginess that often fills the air, in the wide, monotonous, shadeless streets, where the ear encounters not a sound and the eye only dull colors, the visitor soon enters a strange state. The simple sound of footsteps startles him, as does the unexpected appearance of another solitary walker. And the uniformed guards with their villainous Neapolitan faces make the whole experience even less pleasant. Ancient Greek and Roman houses almost never had windows; light and air entered through an atrium, an opening in the roof with a basin beneath into which rainwater fell. The windowless walls were always rather austere, but became even more so once their color disappeared, making the streets doubly severe. But Vesuvius, with its forests at the base and its vineyards above, never looks prettier or more charming than when it appears here over the city’s stark walls or through the opening of one of Pompeii’s three or four gates that still stand today.