Naples, eruptions, chittlins and the tears of Christ

Its not easy, prone in the dentist's chair, mouth agape and filled with fingers, to tell the nurse twice describing how her aunt prepares chittlins, to STFU, though I tried, believe me. Squeamish about food I may well be - at least according to the Celt - and surprising perhaps for one who, as a child, relished uncooked tripe laden with salt and malt vinegar, but couldn't remain in the same room as a bowl of tripe and onions cooked in milk, my grandfather's favorite dinner, which to me looked nothing more than a bowl of ... well, perhaps I'd better leave you without that image. Still shining bright in my mind's eye, though.

I hoped they were olives, not eyes, in the Polipo alla Luciana the Celt ordered and consumed with gusto, but olives or not, so repelled was I, despite sitting in the sun on a terrace overlooking the bay, I couldn't finish my pizza Margherita and drank my wine as if it were Pepto Bismol. Antacid it was not, and dyspeptic eruptions occurred along the sea-side of the Via Partenope towards our hotel opposite the Castel dell'Ovo.

On St. Stephen's day, despite horror story after horror story about crime and dirt in Naples, we took the train from Rome to Naples - a shortish, pleasantly sun-lit journey with plenty of time to take in all the beauty rushing past the windows. We talked with other tourists sitting near - an American couple and their daughter, the latter playing games on her phone, not once looking out at the views.

Across the bay, Vesuvius dominates more than the land it once destroyed, I think, for surely it must overshadow the minds of the people who live near it or on it - and people do live on it. Houses, farms and vineyards climb the slopes, unbelievably to me, given what there is to see at Herculaneum.

At Herculaneum, in the early morning light, it is possible when standing quietly in certain parts of the town, to imagine the life once lived there and that the people are not yet awake. To walk down a steeply-raked tunnel to the old shoreline and then to look back and see the cliff down and through which one has walked – and know that it is the layer after layer of volcanic mud and ash, nearly 60 feet in all, that buried not only Herculaneum but the memory of it too – is shocking.

 

Pompeii, much bigger, is a sadder place - not so much because of the ancient tragedy, inured as we are to that by television dramatizations, but more for the fact that so much appears to be falling down, that so many streets are barricaded off for restoration, and that one of the most egregious infestations afflicting Naples – graffiti – mars even the faded remnants of decoration in those Pompeian houses one can still enter. To know that in 1979, Alberto loved his Adriana, is not the edifying experience for which I crossed the Atlantic. Yet for all its sadness, and the nightmarish feeling of endlessly walking through low ruined walls beyond which are more of the same, I wish we'd had more time and I more energy.

I did not fall in love with Naples, despite its wonderful archaeological museum, its charming two-and-a-half-hour-long siesta, and staying at one of the best hotels in town - frankly, I found the town awash in graffiti and dog-dirt even in the more fashionable parts, with swarms of small cars and scooters clogging every street and alley, laundry hanging over every balcony in sight - not as romantic as one might think - and the food not nearly as interesting as one might wish. I stuck to pizza, fish and rough wine and was perfectly happy.

A wine still produced on the slopes of Vesuvius, Lacryma Christi, and recommended by a fellow blogger, I never knowingly drank in Naples - I had forgotten about it. We've bought it since and, in my opinion, it needs a good steak to to go with it - a steak which, by the way, in my own increasingly queer way, I prefer cremated rather than rare.

It also occurs to me, on a more cheerful note, that if that thing ever goes off again - Vesuvius, that is - there'll be more than one tear of Christ needed for the scale of that tragedy.

The name, Lacryma Christi, "Tear of Christ", comes from a old myth, or marketing ploy, that Christ, lamenting over Lucifer's fall, cried his tears onto the slopes of Vesuvius and gave divine impetus to the vines that grew there.  

Of areas, bow ties, hotels and linens

"Come and look," I said to the Celt as he was adjusting his bow tie. I had opened the window, chill notwithstanding, of the little dressing room earlier in the day for fresh air, whilst waiting for the inevitable rearrangement of my pocket square, the latest of the Celt's attempts to bring me, sartorially speaking, into the 21st-century - wearing one always makes me feel visible - I poked my head out to see what there was. What met my eyes was an enticing view over roofs and terraces towards the church, the Trinità dei Monti, that moors the Spanish Steps to the side of the Pincian hill.

We walked early that morning along the banks of the Tiber past the Ponte Rotto, a single-spanned midstream remnant of Rome's oldest stone bridge, up the steep slope of the Aventine hill towards the Basilica di Santa Sabina and the Giardino degli Aranci from whose belvedere one of the most beautiful panoramas of the city is to be seen.

The dressing room, as I call it, was merely an extension of the hall flanked on one side by closets - a space for suitcases on stands, convenient to the clothes hanging in the closets and large enough for the two of us to get in each other's way. In HGTV-speak, I should call that little space a "dressing area" much as a hall in many a fatuous program is called an "entry area," a living room a "living area" or, as I heard only yesterday, a tiny rectangle described as "formal living area," a rudimentary bathroom called a "bathroom area," a family room as a "family room area," and scraps of concrete and grass below the back door as a "patio area" and "garden area."

I'm not sure what happened with the kinds of programs where potential buyers ostensibly are looking at a formulaic three properties - one of which has, of course, already been bought - but it appears they are reading, in squeaky voice-over, a script from which "room" has been scoured and replaced by "area." I know words go in and out of fashion but what did this good old-fashioned word "room" do? Did it offend or is it that it does not sound grand enough?

So, in our tiny dressing area, the pocket-square demanded patience from both of us. If I had a preference, and seemingly fashion trumps all such whims, it would be for a regular handkerchief starched, pressed and placed square in the pocket and left alone for the rest of the day - if I wore one at all. Not so with the pocket-square which, for all its listless dishabille, seems to need an inordinate amount of attention and, maybe more importantly, is inhospitable toward reading glasses and all the other things men stow in a breast pocket.

Our hotel, steps away from the Piazza del Popolo, with a garden that climbed in terraces over the feet of the Pincio, and a bar I remembered seeing years ago in Architectural Digest, was once, allegedly, the favorite of the Russian aristocracy. There is nowadays little trace of what must have been the magnificence of that time, except perhaps in the architecture, now unrelentingly white. Yet the hotel has all the luxury of contemporary minimalism without the feeling of diminishment that much modern design and decoration can bring to old interiors.

Perhaps it's a peculiarly Italian sensibility, this skill in giving simplicity the air, if not the fact, of well-tailored luxury. Not so, I felt, about one hotel in London - Europe's first grand hotel it is claimed -redecorated with a "signature look" by one of London's finest, where we took tea with an Atlanta friend and her children, that had suffered the same application of contemporary drabs and whites in a not-quite-minimalist obliteration of its grand past that compared, albeit cursorily, to our hotel in Rome, appeared heavy-handed if not downright oppressive. Perhaps such a comparison is wrong, for the difference is not only one of wit - a quality the Italians have in spades when it comes to aesthetics - but in weather. London's often lowering skies and grey light can suck the life out of white, whereas Rome's frequently blue skies and golden light can make even the drabbest white sparkle with vitality.

My favorite white in the whole of Rome was that of the linen sheets at the hotel - neither the first nor the last linen sheets we'd sleep between while in Italy - heavy, thick and beautifully ironed. Cool, soft to the touch, they'd appear each day, a miracle of crisp uncreased cloth draping shy of the floor and as inviting as a long drink of cold, fresh water in the heat of summer.

A richer dust

"Properties down here in the late thirties were easy to find and the prices comparatively reasonable. It was a question, really, of elimination and on what part of the coast one wanted to be. It took my mother about six weeks to find her ideal; a house on the end of Point Saint Hospice with enough land around it to assure complete privacy. St Hospice is a small peninsula jutting out from Cap Ferrat and, bending back like a thumb, faces out across Beaulieu Bay to the mainland, and is about as near to being an island as it is possible to be. Angled east-west, the house faces due south and full out to sea on one façade and to the shelter of a large, open bay on the other. The property was known as La Fiorentina, and as its name suggests, was a Florentine pastiche and was built just after the outbreak of the 1914 war by Comtesse Robert de Beauchamp, and is illustrated, incidentally, in Robert Doré's extremely useful L'Art en Provence.

"It was a typical house of the period and remembering it as it used to look it is much to my mother's credit that she saw its possibilities and understood what could be made of it. I was not experienced enough in those days to be consulted seriously and the whole responsibility rested with her. It was a brave choice and, as it turned out, a very fortunate one. Of course its whole raison d'être is the position, its gardens reaching right down to the rocks and the heaving Mediterranean. The end of the point was left wild and grown over with a tangle of stone pines tortured by the wind into wierd Rackham-like shapes, and it was for these trees, I believe, that my mother really bought the place.

"The Comtesse de Beauchamp had sold Fiorentina to Sir Edmund Davis, a man who had made his fortune in South Africa, and it was from him, or rather his widow, that my mother had bought it. The purchase went through a few months before Chamberlain and his Cabinet declared war on the Third Reich, and the family spent the first few months at Fiorentina, dispersing afterwards to their different duties; my mother and sister to London, and myself, an American citizen, to a heavy bomb group based in Nebraska. I was eventually transferred to the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, and from there moved to London, on loan to MI5, England's Intelligence service. Fiorentina stood empty for some time and was subsequently occupied by the Germans when they moved over the demarcation line into unoccupied France. Fearing an allied invasion they started fortifying what they considered the strategic points along the coast, and our peninsula, commanding the entrance to Beaulieu Bay, was one of them. One wonders, however, at their reasoning, for no invading force could possibly have considered landing on a mountainous coastline that dipped precipitously from the height of some thousand feet directly into the sea."

The day we headed to Rome we took the morning to visit Pointe Saint-Hospice, thinking, perhaps, we might get a glimpse of La Fiorentina from the coastal path that wound around the point. Before we set off, we knew the house was not visible from the street and so it proved, for Impasse Fiorentina, at the end of which the villa stands, is a gated street - in effect, all the houses and their grounds, form a gated community. Chilled in the shade, as we were, and impatient to get up the hill, as I was, the Celt went back to fetch the car to schlepp his aching and cranky partner upwards. I, in my excitement at being in a place I had read so much about, climbed a long flight of steep stone steps - a shortcut, so called - the while feeling dulled by the certainty that I was come pretty close to being one those people who in LA take the "houses of the stars" tours.

We met again at the parking place at the gate of the Great War military graveyard above which looms the King of Sardinia's memorial chapel and a twelve-metre-tall bronze Madonna and Child, cyclamen, the bedding plant of the Cote d'Azur, at her feet. She stands there, not so much wedged between the walls of the chapel and those of a park surrounding the ancient tower on which, as an icon for the sailors of that coast, she was originally intended to stand, but rather in that no man's land between faith and kitsch where her shadow stretches back to a world predating Christianity.

It isn't difficult, I think, to find a melancholic romance in old, tottering and lichen-blotched graveyards but, on walking into a place such as this - this corner of a foreign field - one sees not romance, but  a ninety-four-year-old, kept-as-new military graveyard where the inevitabilty of war and the waste of life is heartbreakingly clear - as clear as the light that raked the Madonna and threw her shadow over that rich earth a richer dust concealing.

So, in the end, did we take the sea-path around the headland in the direction of Villa Fiorentina? Given my misgivings as I climbed those steps to the Belgian military graveyard, and when I looked at the surface of the path - gravel it seemed to me, and not the easiest surface for me to walk on - the distance to be walked, the distance I'd already walked, and the fact that we been texted to say that we should be at the airport early than we'd expected to be, we, acutely aware of the irony of it all, did not take the path.



There are a couple of references to Rupert Brooke's The Soldier in the text, and the quotation with which I set the scene is from Roderick Cameron's The Golden Riviera.

The light from the sea

The entrance hall, with its encaustic mural representing peace

The bathroom next to the entrance hall

The grand salon 

The library

The dining room

Just for a few seconds, before my eye roamed again, I was entranced by the way light, as only it can when reflected off moving water, trembled on the walls and the ceiling of Théodore Reinach's bedroom. We had walked slowly through each room and upstairs, iPhones in hand ready to capture everything we could, not quite overwhelmed but certainly slightly addled by the riches to be seen in this astonishingly beautiful house. And astonishing it is: not just because of the Romantic recreation of ancient Greece and to some extent of ancient Rome, or its Greek and Roman-inspired furniture (Mr Reinach's bed, actually a reproduction of a Roman bed found in Pompeii and displayed at the Archaeological Museum in Naples), but also because of its marble walls and encaustic murals, its thyrôreion, balaneion, gynaeceum, andron and triklinos, delectable columns, mosaic floors, stucco friezes, painted ceilings, polished bronze tabletop serving, as it would have in the ancient world, as a mirror, Roman-style "rain" shower, embroidered linen curtains, rotting and frayed though they are, chandeliers inspired by those in Hagia Sophia, electric lamps modeled after ancient oil lamps, Christophle silver vase based on the krater found with the Hildesheim Treasure and, finally - because this list could go on and on - a carrara marble altar bearing the inscription To an Unknown God.

It occurs to me, as I sort through the hundreds of photographs we took, how little one experiences from behind the lens - involvement at a remove, as it were - and how intrusive and misleading the desire to photograph everything can be. An end in itself, perhaps, using the world's wonders as background for our lives: as one sees with tourists everywhere, for there they are, grinning away in front of every monument, fountain, ruin, painting and statue, even posturing for the camera, as I saw last year in Florence, to appear to be holding David's dick.

All photographs by us except for the second - the bathroom next to the entrance hall - which is by M. Listri, from The Kérylos Villa, Beaux Arts magazine/TMM Editions, Paris. 

X A I P E

It was on a whim that we decided that this winter the Villa Kérylos should be part of our itinerary - an itinerary that eventually involved seven flights, three train journeys and numerous taxi rides. Rome was a given but, instead of going north via Lucca to the Veneto as we had originally discussed, we decided that Naples with its proximity to Pompeii and Herculaneum, its Archaeological Museum and warmer weather might be just the thing at the end of what had been a very long year. Nice, an aside as it were, became, because of our visit to the Villa Kérylos, one of the many highlights of the whole vacation - its mild weather and sparkling sea a blessing after those short, sombre, sodden, solstice days we'd left behind in London. As the plane circled over the water towards the airport, it occurred to me that this was my first view ever of the Mediterranean and that, in two countries, I was to spend a number of days on its shores.

The rental car with automatic transmission, reserved long before and despite emailed confirmation, was nowhere to be found, and enquiries produced wreaths of bemused smiles, tossings of the head and shrugs of the shoulders indicating quite clearly that in France one does not drive an automatic, one simply knows how to drive properly. We lurched a few times around the parking lot - the Celt remembering how to drive a stick-shift (I'm purely automatic) - flung ourselves into early morning rush-hour traffic and headed for the Promenade des Anglais where our hotel, cunningly disguised behind a large sign for the Casino, awaited.

The first view we had of Villa Kerylos was above the Baie des Fournis on the ever-climbing and narrow road from Nice. I had read about the villa years ago in an issue of The World of Interiors and it had remained at the back of my mind as nothing more than a curiosity. It was our friend Will's recent visit there and his account of what he saw that made Kérylos interesting enough for us to decide it should be part of our vacation.

The most surprising thing for me about houses such as Villa Kérylos, Villa Ephrussi, La Leopolda, even Villa Fiorentina, was that they are all either on or at the end of narrow, frequently car-choked, paved tracks winding up and around the terrain. Surrounded as they may be by large grounds and as magnificent as they are, these houses are as closely packed together as any subdivision in America. Why I should have been expecting otherwise I cannot say.

Villa Kerylos is probably one of the most exciting houses I've seen. It was difficult to concentrate on it when we first arrived, so much was there to take in: the air; the light; the sea; the curve of the bay;the plantings; the sky; the flanking hills; the boats in the dock; and the house itself - in all its crisp, white splendour speaking of a time long gone, if only from the imagination of the modern world. Hard to concentrate indeed, difficult not to photograph everything in sight and consequently easy, in my excitement, to feel I missed a lot.

There were but two other visitors when we arrived at the front door and they quickly departed, leaving the house to the two of us so we could wander at will - or, at least, where the self-guided tour recording suggested. The Villa Kérylos is a marvelous place, an entirely convincing (save for the chrome and lucite folding visitor's chairs discretely placed here and there) recreation of what could have been an ancient Greek house. This house does not make one shuffle self-consciously through its rooms, across its mosaic floors, by its murals and friezes, under its lamps and ceilings, through its peristyle and by its superbly crafted and beautiful inlaid furniture, as did the Getty Villa when I first visited it fifteen years ago.  Perhaps the culture has changed, but there was a time when such a recreation, or better, evocation, would have been dismissed as mere rich-man's revivalism, kitsch even. Not so, I felt, with the Kérylos, for clearly it is the product of an education, depth of scholarship, culture and refinement, the likes of which today, if it exists, is subsumed in a celebrity-ridden culture that has not one jot of value for it. Judgmental, you think? Perhaps.

The experience of visiting the Villa Kerylos is so astonishing - almost overwhelming - that I shall leave for a second post more details of the interiors, decoration and furnishings.

The vestibule or thyroreion has a beautiful mosaic floor (as do most of the rooms) with a delightful inset panel of hens and chicks and an inscription that translates as both "hail" and "rejoice" - a wonderful welcome, as well as an instruction to the visitor.

Unlike a museum, where one is herded through roped-off corners of rooms and allowed to peer at things from a "safe" distance, at the Kerylos, the rooms are completely open and one may walk where one pleases. One could almost sit on the furniture if one dared (we didn't of course). This freedom, and the fact that we were entirely alone, created the impression we were truly visiting a house, rather than a museum - a 3,000-year-old house, but a living house. The sensation was vivid and enveloping and quite, quite magical.

Above, the statue of Sophocles that faces the visitor on entering the vestibule; then, views of the peristyle, or atrium, that formed the center of a classical Greek house, with its colonnade of devastatingly simple white marble Doric columns surrounding a slender basin, and sepia-colored frescoes of gods, legends and sea creatures on all the walls.

All photographs, except the second which is from Wikipedia Commons, are by the Celt and me.