Passing Fancy

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

What, then, about the passeggiata? Ask a group of strolling Italians, and they will probably just shrug––or even blush a little, as though you’d caught them doing something shameful, something that smacks of laziness and backwardness, the things that separate a place like Naples from such bustling paradises as Milan or Seattle. They even have derogatory nicknames for the passeggiata: "sweeping the floor," they’ll call it, or "swimming laps." "The only reason we do this," snorted one young man I spoke to in a small town, "is that there’s nothing else to do here. If I lived in America, I’d never have to bother." And yet, grudgingly, they also confess a certain appreciation.

The passeggiata has always been associated with sex. When you walk down Spaccanapoli, for instance, you see young couples, lips locked, inhaling each other across café tables, stone pilings in the piazzas, or the seats of tiny Vespas that become, miraculously, capacious bowers of love. Then they detach suddenly with seeming unconcern, glance briefly at each other with a look of civilized curiosity, and start to stroll again. Young men walk arm in arm, too, but this isn’t a sexual thing—just an expression of comradeship. The passeggiata is about renewing connections of all kinds.

Every ritual has its geographic variations. The passeggiata in Rome these days is really just a shopping circuit: down the Via Condotti (Armani, Gucci, Bulgari) to the Via Babuino (Missoni, Kenzo), then up the Corso—the same route taken by the emperors on their triumphal processions. In the ruins of old Pompeii, the carefully constructed street crossings—stepping stones to keep feet from getting muddied—attest to to the ancient Roman concern for pedestrians. As for modern Pompei, the town has long since dropped the second i from its name but the passeggiata continues, with preteens tossing firecrackers and their older siblings smoking marijuana as their grandparents, strolling past palm trees, lament the lack of rain. I had heard that one of the most famous strolls in Italy was in Naples on a Sunday evening, down the long avenue that curves alongside the bay. Yet I found the strollers there had taken to their cars and Vespas: The bumper-to-bumper traffic was the passeggiata, moving through the exhaust fumes at a pace slower than a leisurely stroll.

The best passeggiatas are the ones in the small towns, where they are slow and stately. Eboli, in the hills south of Naples, is a town made famous by the writer and painter Carlo Levi, exiled nearby in the 1930s, with his book Christ Stopped at Eboli. The title implies that it was a godforsaken outpost of civilization. Eboli has even less going for it today. The town center, bombed in World War II, is now an ugly agglomeration of concrete buildings. When I arrived in Eboli, the main square had been completely fenced off for "restoration," which in Italy means that it has been closed anywhere from four months to 40 years, and will remain so indefinitely.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print