Plague Tourist: Naples

Europe has no tourists. What are you waiting for?

France, where Carpetblog is now based, has many strong arguments in its favor. We can all agree on that. We can also agree that there are worse places to wait out a plague than Nice. Complaining about it doesn’t engender a lot of sympathy. But six months in one place is too many months.

I have been feeling confined. I miss planes and airports and disorientation. I worry that the muscle memory that moved me efficiently through those spaces would atrophy, that I would forget how remove my shoes and my scarf and stack my devices at security in a single movement. I miss rolling my eyes at people who lacked these skills. I miss motion.

The dark psychological clouds created by France’s total confinement began to lift in early summer. Moving around became comfortable, rather than potentially fatal. On a weekday in July, my friends and I had Provence’s blooming lavender fields, normally overrun by tour buses carrying multinational mobs, to ourselves. It was madness!

Also, it was a revelation.

Clearly, COVID-19 created one positive outcome: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see Europe’s most popular tourist attractions empty of visitors. So, with one summer curse replaced by another and no work to speak of, I decided to hit the road.

I became a plague tourist.

Naples, which lost half its population to the Black Plague in 1656, was the obvious place to launch Plague Tour ‘20. I visited the city for the first time in 1991. The good thing about being old is you can visit a place 30 years later and have absolutely no recollection of having been there before. Not one church, not one piazza, looked even remotely familiar.

In the intervening years, a different kind of pestilence — unregulated mass tourism — struck Europe. Unwilling to wrestle cruise ship crowds, I hadn’t returned to Naples. Pompeii isn’t going anywhere, important geological evidence notwithstanding. Someday, I’d go see it and eat my head off in Naples.

Someday is 2020.

The Purgatario ad Arco Church, the Church of the Skulls, in the center of Naples’ Centro Antico, opened its doors for the first time post-COVID on my last day in town (It had been under remont for years when I was last there, so I don’t feel bad about not remembering if I had been there or not).

I slipped in the front door and down the stairs to the chapel below the main church, a typical baroque horror show. Beneath is “purgatory,” a hypogeum where I-don’t-know-who still come to worship and make personal appeals to the skulls and leg bones of nameless poor people who died without proper burial and need prayers. This, surprisingly, is only one of the several shrines and cemeteries in town where this still goes on.

1780s:  Neapolitan priest, St. Alphonsus Maria de' Liguori of Naples, built on St. Robert Bellarmine's teaching on purgatory. Liguori taught that God makes the prayers of the living known to souls in purgatory, which made it possible for the dead to help the living with specific matters on Earth.

My friend Chiara noted that religion in Naples has extremely deep roots but they spread broadly and in unpredictable ways. Like toothpaste does when you squeeze a tube with the top screwed on too tight.

Except for dusty skulls and anonymous graves, I was alone in the cool hypogeum. I wasn’t enjoying it, to be honest. Then I saw this: