Vesuvio is Always Watching

(Day 20 of 30 – story crumbs from the world of Loveandpizza.it 🍕)

Wherever you stand in Napoli, sooner or later you look up (or ahead) – and there it is: Vesuvio. (Vesuvius, if you’re being formal about it. Nobody in Napoli is.) Vast, silent, impossibly beautiful, and technically capable of ending the whole party at any moment. Neapolitans live in its shadow and simply… shrug.

I find that magnificent, and terrifying.

The mountain in every window

It’s in every photo whether you meant it or not. It sits behind the washing lines and the church spires and the ferry masts, a permanent, watchful presence. In the book, it’s always there too, because in real life, it always is.

You don’t paint Vesuvio into the background of Napoli. Napoli is painted around Vesuvio.

They don’t even call it a volcano

In dialect, it’s ‘a muntagna. The mountain. Not “the active stratovolcano with a documented history of civilisation-ending eruptions.” Just… the mountain. The way you’d refer to a large relative who’s a bit unpredictable at Christmas but is, on balance, family.

And family it is. Vesuvio is on the ceramics, the tea towels, the fridge magnets, the tattoos, the writing sets (my friend gave me a gorgeous one once!), the football murals, the nativity scenes. Two thousand years of Neapolitans painting the thing that might kill them, over and over. The writer Jeff Matthews, who lived in Napoli for some forty-five years and left behind an entire encyclopedia of the place, reckoned all that art amounted to a kind of ritual propitiation. Keep the mountain flattered, keep the mountain sweet. Look how much we love you. Look how nicely we’ve drawn you. Please don’t.

The mountain also feeds you

Here’s the part that threw me a bit. Volcanic soil is outrageously fertile. So the same slopes that buried Pompeii now grow the pomodorino del piennolo, the little tomatoes hung in bunches on Neapolitan balconies through the winter, and Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio, a wine whose name means “tears of Christ.”

Isn’t this mind-blowing: the mountain that could end Napoli is also, quite literally, why the pizza tastes like that.

I’m sorry, but you couldn’t write it. If I put that in a novel my editor would gently draw a line through it and write too neat in the margin. But hey, I put it in a novel anyway!

They built a railway up it. Then wrote a jingle.

In 1880 somebody looked at an active volcano and thought: tourists. A funicular railway was built up the side of it, and to promote the opening, Peppino Turco and Luigi Denza knocked out a little song.

That song was Funiculì, Funiculà.

Yes. That one. The one you’re now humming. The most joyful earworm in the history of Europe was an advert for a train ride up a volcano.

And it gets better, because the lyric is a chat-up line. He’s telling a girl he went up the mountain, and asking her to come up there with him. That’s the whole song. Somebody built a railway up the side of an active volcano, commissioned two men to sell tickets, and what those two came back with was a boy trying to talk a girl into getting on it with him.

If you want a single fact that explains the Neapolitan soul, I offer you that one, free of charge.

San Gennaro versus the crater

Then there’s the city’s patron saint, San Gennaro, whose dried blood is kept in a silver reliquary at the Duomo and, three times a year, is said to liquefy. When it does, the city exhales. When it doesn’t, everyone gets a bit twitchy.

Among the miracles credited to him: turning the lava away from the city in 1631. There are churches and shrines all over the Vesuvian towns that exist for exactly this reason. It’s a working arrangement. The mountain rumbles, the saint intervenes, the city carries on eating.

Hundreds of thousands of people live in the official red zone today, on top of the evacuation maps, next to the seismometers, with their tomatoes on the balcony. They know. They’ve always known. They stay anyway. (Would you? I happily would.😌)

Living beautifully, because nothing is promised

Here’s what a volcano teaches a city: nothing is guaranteed, so you might as well live.

Eat the pizza. Kiss the boy. Say the bold thing. Take the ferry to the island just because the light is good today. Skip school and go sunbathe on the rocks.

There’s a reason Napoli feels more alive than anywhere else I’ve been: it has spent two thousand years knowing exactly how fragile it all is. Not in a morbid way. In a pass the wine way.

(Did you know that Vesuvio’s last significant eruption was in 1944?

What it does to Carolina

Carolina arrives careful, guarded, determined to keep her heart in a locked drawer.

And a city that lives like tomorrow isn’t promised is a very inconvenient place to try to stay careful.

The mountain doesn’t push her, exactly, but just… reminds her. Loudly. Staring at her face. Every single day.

So tell me: could you live in the shadow of a volcano? And – go on – what’s the one view in your life that stops your heart every time? 👇

Dani. x

P.S. Loveandpizza.it is coming back in English, Italian and Portuguese. Save your slice and you’ll be first to know the moment your edition’s ready. 🍕

P.P.S. If you’d like to know more, I super recommend this book: In the Shadow of Vesuvius: A Cultural History of Naples (affiliate link). And if you’re actually going, this guide to visiting Vesuvio is the practical one, tickets, the Vesuvio Express bus, and the fact that you still have to walk the last stretch uphill in the sun. Wear proper shoes. I did not. 🫣