Dante's Inferno

September 24, 2006

Short trip to Rome today and tomorrow to meet up with another American who is traveling in Italy.

I'm at the main train station here in Naples, sitting on the ground near the binario where my train is waiting to take me away ... It's really early in the morning. I had to get up at 5:00 am. to get here on time. The good news is that, since it's so early, I'm not totally afraid to take my laptop out of the bag at the station. The only living creatures here besides me are the hundred or so feral dogs that live in the building ... and they are all asleep.

More on the feral dogs at a later date. Seriously.

They are actually quite friendly, though.

I have started to refer to the neighborhood around the train station as "Dante's Inferno," due to its resemblence to the Nine Circles of Hell. The other day, I wanted to take my camera out and get some photographs of how the underclass of Naples lives, but I was pretty sure that someone would have approached me and taken it from me.

This is not an irrational fear.

At any rate, imagine a fairly dense urban neighborhood without a modern sewage system where people are living among ruined buildings that have been, over the centuries, bombed out by the Spanish, the English, the Germans and the Americans and have never been repaired except with plywood and sheets of corrugated aluminum. Now, imagine that all these buildings are six stories tall and people are living stacked one on top of each other.

Charming ...

The problem is that the parts of the old city near the train station cannot be avoided. For one thing, to get around here, I need to get on the trains. But for another, many of the city's best tourist sites are either in this area or very near it. I'd like to take some pictures of the Castel Capuano, for example, but so far I've not wanted to take my camera out of my backpack anywhere near the place.

Oh, well ...

Off to Rome. More tomorrow ...