My name is Salvatore and I’ve lived in Toronto for thirty-five years. I’ve traveled extensively for work, crossed continents, and built a life far from home. I hadn’t been back to Naples for fifteen years.
Over the past few years, perhaps even before the pandemic, I’ve listened to the stories of people who went to Naples, and my friends who had visited Naples returned transformed, their eyes shining with wonder. My neighbors—originally from Bologna—went there after the 2023 Scudetto and came back beaming. They spoke to me of the energy in the streets, of the passion, of a vibrant and irresistible Naples, and of all those things I’d always known about but didn’t recall being so widely publicized, especially by other Italians. Everyone I knew who had been there told me the same thing: Naples was now the most sought-after destination in Italy—visited, loved, celebrated. Their stories were so vivid, so full of life, that I could immediately taste the pizza with cicoli and ricotta, and hear their voices echoing through the alleys. And I was curious to see my beloved city, so full of tourists, and also to see my fellow citizens busy at work, happy and proud to offer their best to leave visitors with the best memories.
This Easter, I finally returned for a nice vacation, to experience the city, visit the new subway stations that are said to be spectacular, to relive the traditions of home, to have fun, and even to relax.
The third and fourth Scudettos had passed without me. Life, distance, the weight of the years had kept me away. But this spring, I carved out a fortnight and returned to the city I thought I knew, bringing with me not only my memories, but also a series of expectations. “…But why, why every evening,
I think about Naples as it was,
I think about Naples as it is?!”
Well, the author of Munasterio ‘e Santa Chiara had nailed the sentiment. And perhaps precisely for this reason, as Thomas Wolfe said,
“You can never go home again because home has ceased to exist, except in the mothballs of memory.” Now I understand what he meant.
I left expecting to find the Naples they had painted for me: the Naples of my memories made even more vibrant, more alive. But what I found this Easter was quite the opposite: rudeness, disorganization, cynicism, low quality, rudeness, a terrible cultural homogenization.
The least predictable thing I ever thought I’d find there was the Americanization of everything.
You find it in Rome, Bologna, Venice, Florence, but not in Naples. Naples has always been special precisely because it has always been different. I experienced a true leveling out. A homogenization. Even the older generation of Neapolitans first became Italianized and then Americanized. I encountered a worrying indifference, a creeping cynicism, and a carelessness among many tourists who seemed like landsknechts. I heard someone say that Muslim immigrants threaten our identity. But I wanted to ask: what identity remains to be threatened?
Naples once held records not for conformity, but for resistance. It was a cultural beacon, a place of study even for the elite, because it maintained its own identity, its energy, its proud and indomitable soul. It was different. It was ours.
But Neapolitans have surrendered their soul to a pseudo-culture that doesn’t belong to them. They have traded the depth of their heritage for American stars, with smoke and mirrors, with the empty promise of “everything now… and tomorrow we’ll see.”
They called me a boomer. They told me I was conservative, uncompromising, anchored to the past. But my reasoning is simple: time passes, yes. Man evolves, systems change. But that doesn’t mean everything that comes from the past is useless. An intelligent person doesn’t discard what works, what nourishes, what sustains. A future without a past cannot stand: it’s a building without foundations!
What is rotten must be thrown away. But what is good—what is ours, what belongs to the people of Naples—must be preserved, protected, cherished.
I was devastated.
I discovered that the mayor of Naples is a Juventus fan. That as a parish priest, he committed acts for which he later pleaded guilty. Yet, Neapolitans accept him. Now they accept everything.
While the city is being invaded by a tourism that prioritizes quantity over quality, Neapolitans spend five days celebrating their city… with a spritz.
A spritz! What is a spritz doing in Naples?
Where is our culture?
I returned to Toronto with a heavy heart. The Naples I loved—the Naples of Caravaggio and Totò, the Naples of Viviani and De Simone, a viscerally Neapolitan Naples, slow, hospitable, and with an indomitable and distinctive personality and energy—has been replaced by something empty.
I mourn the city I lost. And I wonder if anyone else has noticed it’s gone.
