Napoli Galleria Umberto 1

The Galleria Umberto 1 in Naples was conceived as a riposte to the great Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan, twenty years after the latter was built in 1867. It was the centrepiece of a major regeneration project intended to combat the city’s unenviable reputation for squalor and criminality. All this and more is comprehensively explained in the YouTube documentary. The film-makers made the most of privileged access that enabled them to film inside the apartments that occupied the upper floors, the roof top dwellings provided for the maintenance staff and the basement areas that accommodated a theatre, a cinema and a snooker club.

Postcard of the Day No. 78 – Napoli

Il lustra scarpe ed il ladroncello 

 “Shining shoes and the little thief”, according to Google translate, which sounds just about right. A social tableau from the mean streets of Naples in which a pompous and negligent toff gets his comeuppance when a barefoot, slightly diffident scoundrel abstracts his silk underwear, or something very like it. It’s not uncommon for tourist destinations of dubious reputation to attempt to derive some advantage from drawing full attention to its social problems. In this case the postcard publisher re-stages an episode of petty crime in the hope of making a profit. The card shown below is a documentary record of shoe shining in the Levantine city of Alexandria.

Round the Docks

The work was demanding and dangerous, the workforce was casualised and routinely exploited and the workplace was disorderly and perilous but the image of the docks held a special place in the imperialist imagination. All of Britain’s maritime supremacy and economic power as a nation that traded to survive was focused on the dockside. Despite the development of mechanised lifting gear the greater part of the labour involved came from physical effort – enormous quantities of finished goods and raw materials were loaded on and off ships by hand. A picture of ceaseless activity is placed before us. Rail mounted cranes, teams of horses, motor vehicles and railway wagons compete for space on the quayside, above them swing cradles of locomotives or turbines and hoists bearing cotton bales, sacks of sugar or animal carcasses. A compelling theatrical scene of wonder for the spectator and a raucous, turbulent and unstable environment for the manual labourers where the threat of serious physical injury could come from any direction at any moment. 

Our old friend the shipping container killed off this spectacle and replaced it with a highly formalised aerial display of bar-coded containers – all very fascinating in a different way but totally inaccessible to the general public. It’s a world of computer commanded reach-stackers, gantry cranes and side-lifters manoeuvring outsize boxes from ship to shore and back again with maximum cost effectiveness in an anonymous intermodal zone where the most frequently heard sound is the warning beep of reversing vehicles. 

Postcard of the Day No. 25, Napoli

An ill-assorted trio perform a public demonstration of pasta eating technique on the streets of Naples. Two barefoot street urchins and an adult male of cheerfully wayward disposition comprise the team of experts, posing on well worn flagstones in front of a somewhat improvised display of food preparation apparatus. An impressively diverse gallery of spectators muscle their way in from the left, the head of a feral child prominent among them. The presiding chefs lurk in the shadows while mellow afternoon sunlight slants across the scene. This is local colour at its most eccentric. It’s a carefree and animated scene presented for the delight of passing strangers but it also exemplifies the smile on the face of poverty that exists to ease the conscience of the economically privileged traveller.