Readers' World: Naples is the godfather of Italy's soul

Sunday Times reader Catherine Rudolph avoids Italy's tourist traps and heads instead to Napoli, to experience the country's true character

Maybe it's sacrilege but I passed through Rome without visiting the Colosseum or the Trevi Fountain.

I had no interest in sites I'd seen countless times on glossy postcards, for in reality they inevitably become obscured in a forest of scaffolding and selfie sticks. Instead, I headed for a city that, I had been told, embodied the real character of Italy: Napoli.

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I arrived on the afternoon train, hungry and tired, as my wallet had been carelessly granted to the pickpockets of Rome the night before. Armed with my small backpack and only a few euros in change, I exited the station and entered chaos.

The crowds were not made up of the usual American tourists and touts, but of North African men, all collared shirts and shiny watches, who had stalls selling bags, sunglasses, belts, umbrellas and cellphone covers.

Cars hooted and people bustled and the din rose through the thin alleyways. The restaurants spilt out onto the pavements and I looked up to see people shouting to one another across balconies.

The streets became more and more labyrinthine, merging and splitting again to reveal yet another empty fountain, another cobbled square filled with the yells of kids and thrumming of small feet chasing an old soccer ball.

As I recounted this later, my couch-surfing host Ferdinando laughed.

"In Napoli, Italian stereotypes are exemplified 100 times," he said. "Italian is a language not just spoken. Every conversation is a piece of theatre. The hand gestures, the voices, they resound through the streets, for everyone is part of the audience."

He told me to call him Nando, which he said was fitting because I'm South African so I must like Nando's.

Well, Nando's has nothing on Napoli. That evening, we went to a tiny restaurant surrounded by a crowd of boisterous people drinking from plastic cups while waiting for tables.

It was clearly a popular place, though you wouldn't guess why from the exterior: haphazard tables stood crooked over the cobbles, old white plastic chairs and red-and-white chequered table coverings.

The restaurant seemingly only had one waiter and no menu - Nando asked them to bring us whatever they recommended.

We received an antipasti of parma ham, olives, ricotta cheese and crisply fried mozzarella balls. Then, pasta al pomodoro, with whole Italian tomatoes, so good, I could have written a ballad to my plate.

The meal was ended with two peaches, handed to us from a cardboard box, and some sweet red wine. We sat in silence - the contentedness needed no words. The meal cost €10 each.    

block_quotes_start Everyone has felt that delightful drowsiness after a meal, but only the Italians have enshrined the feeling in a single word block_quotes_end

We walked in the warm night. Nando took me to a square housing one of his favourite statues, The Nose, by our own William Kentridge. Depicting a nose riding a horse, the statue is based on the story of a fascist general whose nose jumped off his face and also became a general.

It's a satirical critique of the militaristic, nepotistic system that Italy became under Mussolini.

The statue is at the meeting point of the old Spanish Quarter and the new quarter characterised by the clean, cold, regimented forms typical of the fascist period.

"But enough architectural history," Nando yawned, "l'abbiocco is upon me."

"What's that?" I ask.

He smiles. "You know when you eat some good food, and it's really good so you eat a lot of it, and then you're full and happy so your eyes start to close?"

I nod. L'abbiocco. Everyone has felt that delightful drowsiness after a meal, but only the Italians have enshrined the feeling in a single word.

The next morning was spent at San Martino Monastery, which overlooks the city from Vomero hill. It's surrounded by pine trees; the needles glint in the sun and smell both sweet and sharp.

Houses stretched below me, a maze of terracotta and pink - with the cobalt sea beyond. The monastery is golden brown with stone cloisters and marble arches. I lay on a bench. The happiness here is Mediterranean in colour and flavour; a joy that is full but calm.

I walked down through the Spanish Quarter, the ugliest, most character-filled area I had seen yet. There are glass-fronted cabinets built into the walls, with plastic flowers adorning little statuettes of the Madonna.

Rubbish spills out of the large bins and the cobbled stones have ominous damp patches. The streets are all graffiti and garish shop fronts; vegetable sellers and plastic chairs.

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In these chairs lounge old men in white vests or sometimes a nonna browning her wrinkled walnut skin. Washing hangs from balconies, like flags limp in the wind. Women's faces appear from behind lace-frilled curtains and young boys loiter and spit and smoke cigarettes.

The sun beat down on the grime-blackened streets and eyes peered at me out of the darkened doorways. I savoured the unfamiliar: the jolt of being somewhere new.

Over the next few days, Nando and I did many things. We rode bicycles along the coast to Parco Vergiliano, where 1st-century Roman poet Virgil is said to be buried.

Sitting on a bench overlooking the sea, we ate taralli (bagel-like snacks) and drank cold, fizzy red wine, a local speciality, from a plastic bottle. 

We trawled musty second-hand bookshops and visited beautiful chapels.

But I never forgot that feeling in the street, that one day, of being somewhere completely different, and being awake to the world.

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