NAPOLI

Arriving at Capodicino airport or the mainline railway station at Piazza Garibaldi gives you no idea you are entering a pre-Christian world. Naples, the oldest city in Europe, is the only civilization from the ancient world to survive. Computers, motor cars, washing machines and refridgerators are merely a modern veneer. Because Neapolitans are descendents of the original inhabitants of  a designed city built to the specifications of the Greek architect Hippodamus of Miletus in 600 B C, many have the same surnames that you find on the tombs of Pompei or Ercolano.

The values described in Homer are still current in the feasts, sharing food in large amounts as a bond of friendship. In Naples the family is charged with the duty of maintaining a proper code of behaviour and the family, not the state, feels it has the responsibility of punishing a crime against a family member: the vendetta. This is a city which has undergone endless invasion: after the Greeks, the Romans. Virgil wrote 'The Georgics' in the castel del' Ovo, Lucullus' villa. On a more frivolous level Nero sang in the theatre.
 
There followed a long period of darkness when Naples was ruled by the Church.
 
The city was already one thousand eight hundred years old when Federico II founded  the university to train his lawyers, contraposed to the Papal seminary of San Domenico Maggiore where St Thomas Aquinas, a Neapolitan noble,  taught. The glory of the Angevin French monarchy brought Petrarch and Boccaccio to live in and write about the city. The Spanish dominion lasted four hundred years and still today gives Naples its dark side, religious and violent.
 
 Then came the Bourbons, Charles III the great grandson of Louis XIV, with the philosophical enquiries and scientific research developed under Ferdinando IV. The first railway in the world, built for the King, ran between the royal palace of Naples and the royal palace of Portici.
 
Italian Unification was a disaster for Naples, which the Neapolitans paid for believing their king would rule Italy. And finally, Fascism: the March on Rome started from the San Carlo Opera house and the nearby Piazza Trieste e Trento.
 
 Degraded, with no economic base and massive unemployment, the city maintains its mystery and facination. Neapolitans who spend their lives in the same streets as their ancestors are only too aware of the past. At the same time as living in the Naples of today we are making a journey through time.