| The Ancients Vacationed Here |
August 9, 2009
Shirley Hazzard writes in her introduction to Ancient Shore, a collection of her essays written from and about Naples, that "I wake these mornings in Naples ....realizing, in surprise and gratitude, that....I -- like Goethe, like Byron -- am living in Italy." I was looking forward to feeling some of that same surprise, gratitude and awe through her essays; I anticipated sentences that set me firmly in the port town that dates back to the Ancient Greeks (Naples was their northern most port) and I wanted to be surrounded by neighborhoods, monuments, and churches, ensconced in Neapolitan lore and volcanic epics, and immersed in tastes and sounds specific to this town of such good and bad repute.
But instead Hazzard's essays are somewhat cold, a cataloguing of historic events, personages, villas, and volcanic eruptions. People have been reviving themselves in Naples for centuries (why do you think all these seaside villas were built?) but nothing personal about Hazzard's own reviving or enlivening or just plain vacationing is shared. For me, books about travel should come with connections between reader and traveler through personal moments observed and related, or fun or interesting or sad stories about a locale-specific occurrence. Details of Hazzard's own actual experiences, observations, and feelings would have told me why she loves Naples. Instead I'm kept outside of her own experience and given history, ancient and modern, some journalistic renditions of current events, and a lot of described vistas, one not so distinguishable from another.
It was only when I read the included essay by Francis Steegmuller entitled "The Incident at Naples" that I finally landed in Naples. Steegmuller was Hazzard's husband (not that she mentions the connection in the book) and in his essay he writes about a mugging that occurred in Naples when the two of them were out together and in which he was brutally injured. The incident and its aftermath, including their up close and personal experience with the public health system of Italy, is marvelously told by Steegmuller. He shares the entire experience, the personal fears and surprises, the details of the impromptu ambulance service and care in the hospitals, his observations about the other patients and the doctors, nurses, and hotel staff, and his changing and growing affection for the town he thought he knew but after this crime, he knows much better. Thanks to his meticulous and heartfelt writing, so do I. His moving piece that told me more about the city of Naples and its people than any of Hazzard's essays or any of the beautiful but somewhat blank and cold photographs that complement the volume.
In the final essay of the book, Hazzard states that Italy provides its visitors with a respite from the known and the ordinary, and restores them to "unclassifiable experience: we are encouraged to stop defining life, and to live it. The element of chance regains importance; we recover the capacity for astonishment, and the gift of taking some things for granted." I would argue that all travel away from home, all journeying that take us out of our known environs and familiar routines, restores within us a sense of wonder and possibility and allows us to throw off cares, roles, and game plans. Freedom of unknown possibilities: that is what is so wonderful about travel and why so many people hit the road. If not to Naples, then somewhere, anywhere. Anywhere but here (guess who needs a vacation?).
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