Vaughan describes Naples, Amalfi, Sorrento,
Capri, Ischia and the nearby bays as seen at the start of the twentieth
century. His account indicates that these descriptions were contemporary, but
also that they not being experienced for the first time. This is clearly an
experienced traveler. It is interesting to note that he regularly advises that
certain areas have become overpopulated with foreigners, or regularly crowded
with tourists, or more likely to serve an English Sunday lunch than any local
speciality. Gone, perhaps, are the barefoot luggage carriers who are generally
women and who apparently queue up near the ferry hoping to earn a living by
carrying tourists’ suitcases up the hill on their heads. Gone also, perhaps,
are the traditional dances, such as the tarantella, that Vaughan claims the
locals strike up spontaneously at any time of day and in almost any place.
A surprising observation comes early in the
text, when the author refers to the city of Naples, itself, as having been
largely rebuilt, and thus containing predominantly modern buildings. The author
immediately reveals his preference for a particular period of the city’s
history, a preference that looks down on the baroque modernization of Gothic
spaces, perhaps questioning even that the Renaissance should ever have
descended into mannerism.
There is mild surprise when the author lists the
number of places in the Campania region where malaria is either still endemic
or was endemic until just before the account was written. Vaughan then
discusses the possible causes of the disease. A modern reader, when confronted
with the apparent contradictions of contemporary mores, is perhaps gently
surprised. When confronted with the author’s incredulity at the idea of malaria
being spread by mosquitoes, one approaches the state of being flabbergasted.
But the modern search engine can again come into its own to remind the
contemporary traveler that it was less than a decade before the writing of
Vaughan’s book that the causational link had been confirmed. One lives and one
learns.
Sitting in the narrow and sometimes hectic overcrowding
of the matrix of the Spanish quarter near Via Toledo, the contemporary traveler
is often confronted with the rasping noise and the odour of unburnt two-stroke
as motorbikes speed past on what seemed to be collision courses, both with one
another and pedestrians alike. The largely unhelmeted riders remind one of the
fact that Naples was a lucrative market for diagonally striped T-shirts when
the wearing of seat belts in cars became compulsory. One is also minded to
speculate what the experience of Vaughan in the streets might have been without
the noise of the internal combustion engine and the smell of unburnt fuel.
Vaughan of course reminds us that before two wheels there were four legs and
that these modes of transport used to leave different evidence of their
passing, which also had effects on the nose.
When Vaughan visits Pompeii and Herculaneum, his
descriptions are lyrical and vivid. But again the contemporary traveler
realizes that it that the experience of these places in the early twentieth
century was significantly much less than it is now, since much of the
excavation and archaeological work has been done in the intervening century.
Anyone who, like Vaughan, wants to contemplate what life might have been like
in these ancient Roman towns with their single room shops and narrow streets
need only pause for a while in Naples old town or in the Spanish quarter,
where, apart from the motorbikes, life probably looks pretty similar to what
might have been transacted along those ancient streets. From a distance the
city even looks red and yellow, the same colors the decorated most of the
dwellings in the two ruined cities.
Vaughan’s description of Naples Riviera comes
across as surprisingly modern. It confirms that whenever and wherever we travel
it is the experience that matters, the here and now, and crucially how that
changes us, rather than confirms what we expected or anticipated when we
decided to go there. And so it is both refreshing and enlightening to share
another visitor’s insight from a different time as we explore a new any new
experience of travel.
