On the Shores of the Mediterranean by Eric Newby Read Free Book Online Page A

and to some extent this is still true today. There used to be and perhaps still are whole families devoted to the reanimation of second-hand clothes. These rianimatori used to hang the garments in closed rooms in which bowls of boiling water were placed which gave off a dense steam which raised the nap of the material. If the garment had a moth hole or a cigarette burn in it, fluff was scraped from the inside of the seams with a razor blade and stuck over the hole with transparent glue.
    Until recently there were solchanelli , mobile shoe repairers. A solchanello carried the tools of his trade in a basket with a board on top which he used as a seat on which he could squat down anywhere and begin work. Uttering a strange cry, ‘Chià-è! Chià-è!’ , to attract attention he would sometimes latch on to some unfortunate person with a hole in one of his shoes or a sole coming off and follow him, sometimes for miles, all the while reminding the victim of the defect in an insistent monotone until whoever it was, unable to stand it any more, sank down in despair on the nearest doorstep and allowed the solchanello to carry out the repair.
    In Naples the loss of one of a pair of shoes does not necessarily mean that the other will not have a long and useful life ahead of it, even if it is not sold to some unfortunate person with only oneleg. It is still possible to find what are known as scarpe scompagnate , unaccompanied shoes, in the great market for new and secondhand shoes which, weather permitting, takes place every Monday and Friday in Corso Malta, an interminable, dead-straight street that runs northwards from the Carcere Giudizario on Via Nuova Poggioreale to Doganella, at the foot of the hill where the cemeteries begin.
    Few people, even Napoletani, buy one shoe. Some, however, can be persuaded to buy two shoes which do not match. Luccano de Crescenza recorded a conversation in dialect between a potential buyer of two odd shoes and a vendor of scarpe scompagnate which went more or less as follows:
    ‘But these shoes are different, one from the other!’
    ‘Nosignuri, so tale e quale – they are exactly alike!’
    ‘Well, they look different to me.’
    ‘And what does it matter if they look different? That’s only when you’re standing still. Once you start walking they will look exactly the same – tale e quale . Let me tell you about shoes. What do they do, shoes? They walk. And when they walk one goes in front and the other goes behind, like this. In this way no one can know that they are not tale e quale.’
    ‘But that means I can never stop walking.’
    ‘How does it mean you can’t ever stop walking? All you have to do when you stop is to rest one shoe on top of the other.’
    Sometimes in Naples one felt that one was in a city on the Near Eastern or North African shores of the Mediterranean, with Castel Sant’Angelo its kasbah or Capodimonte its seraglio, because in it the makers and vendors of particular kinds of merchandise tend to come together and occupy whole reaches of streets and alleys as they do in bazaars and souks in Muslim countries, so that Via Duomo becomes the street of the wedding dresses and the appropriately named Via dell’Annunziata the one in whichnewly arrived Neapolitans are fitted out with cribs and baby carriages.
    Uphill from Spaccanapoli there is a narrow alley which runs up alongside the church of San Gregorio Armeno, which was once a convent of Benedictine nuns and has a famous cloister which was given the rococo treatment at a time in the first part of the eighteenth century when the viceroys of Naples were no longer Spanish but Austrian – Austria having been given Naples and Sardinia in 1713 by the Treaty of Utrecht which had brought to an end the War of the Spanish Succession – viceroys who would themselves soon cease to exist, the last one being ejected by the young Charles of Bourbon in 1734.
    In this alley are to be found some of the men and women who model and bake