Lonely Girl Travels

Die, the saying goes. They’re not fucking around.

I’d really wanted to go to Naples when I was last in Italy. But my then-boyfriend read the LP description—chaotic, dirty, somewhat dangerous—and nixed the idea. He liked Copenhagen, Scandindavia—clean, calm, safe cities filled with bicycles and crisp air, low unemployment and Nordic blondes with pale beautiful skin.

He can have it. Give me Naples.

I got out of the Metro stop and walked the five blocks to my hostel. It took about that long to totally fall in love with the honking, swarming, spinning mess of it all, wedged with sharp shadows and bright sun between stories of faded facades that seem too tight, haphazard, overgrown. There seems no law or order to the flow of life on the street—cars and motorinos and pedestrians—but rather a kind of rhythm. Not a heartbeat, even and steady, but a wild palpitation, erratic and oxygen-deprived, that somehow keeps beating, keeps from careening.

It only seems like chaos. There’s something actually there, holding it all together.

I want it.

Give me traffic and noise. Give me trash piles and laundry lines. Give me jackhammers and roaring motorbikes. Give me a honk of warning but don’t slow down.

Give me scaffolding and shadows that swallow whole streets. Give me littered ruins surrounded by sidewalk. Give me a small dead bird flattened against the black stone of the street. Give me the smell of fish in open-air markets.

Give me gypsy beggars and business men; give me round bellies on white rocks, tanning in the sun. Give me a woman bathing in a baroque fountain. Give me stray dogs sleeping. Give me 1000 cigarette butts and worn skin on beautiful women. Give me immigrants selling purses; give me hustlers pawning cans of salt.

Give me graffiti. Lots and lots of graffiti.

Give me Naples—give me this city and its swarm, give me something inside my own soul.