Inside the Quartieri Spagnoli

(Day 16 of 30 – story crumbs from the world of Loveandpizza.it 🍕)

Carolina lives in the Quartieri Spagnoli: a knot of narrow, steep little streets in the belly of Napoli. Washing strung overhead like bunting. Scooters threading through gaps that shouldn’t fit a scooter, zooming past people, beeping away, terrorising every cat, dog and pedestrian in their path. Shrines glowing on every corner. Maradona posters and Maradona altars (which make this Brazilian frown a great deal, thank you very much 🇧🇷). And noise. Glorious noise, from dawn until well past midnight.

I lived there too. So let me tell you what it’s really like.

First, a bit of history (it explains everything)

The Quartieri weren’t built to be charming. They were built to be barracks.

In 1532, the Spanish viceroy Don Pedro de Toledo – yes, the very man Via Toledo is named after – reorganised this corner of the city to house Spanish troops and their families, right next to the seats of power. The result was a tight chessboard grid: six long streets running parallel to Via Toledo, with dozens of little ones cutting across them, all climbing the hill towards San Martino.

The buildings started out low. Then, as more and more people crammed in, they grew: two floors, three, four, five, stacked up towards the sky because there was nowhere else to go. Add the bassi – those famous ground-floor, street-level homes that open straight onto the alley (my great-grandparents lived in one of them, in the Basilicata region!) – and you have one of the most densely packed neighbourhoods in Italy. Today it’s part of the Montecalvario district, home to roughly 30,000 people living at about four times the density of the rest of the city. A small town, folded into a few hundred metres of hillside.

And that’s why the Quartieri feels the way it feels. When you build a place for soldiers, then pack five centuries of family life into it, your life is not your own, and you simply accept it.

You are never, ever alone

Like I’ve said above, in the Quartieri, your business is everyone’s business, and everyone’s business is yours.

The lady across the alley knows what you had for dinner. Someone will lower a basket on a rope from a fourth-floor window to collect their shopping just as you’re stepping out of your front door. A stranger will tell you your cardigan is far too thin for February, and that you really shouldn’t leave the house with wet hair (🙋🏻‍♀️ guilty, repeatedly) – and they’ll mean every word of it with love.

It should feel like an invasion. But somehow, it feels like being wrapped up in a hug by an Italian nonna you’ve never met.

Domani, domani

Every flat in Napoli comes with a story, and mine came with a landlord and a language lesson I’ve never forgotten.

The first time I went to pay the rent, I stood in front of him, envelope in hand, and he kept saying: “Domani. Domani.”

“Yes,” I said, holding out the money. “Here you are.”

“Domani. Domani.”

“…Yes! Here’s the rent!” (frustration building up)

This went on for some time. It was only when I got back to the flat, envelope still sitting in my pocket, that my husband and I looked at each other and realised what the poor man had been telling me all along: domani means tomorrow. Come back tomorrow. 😂

That’s the Quartieri for you. You learn Italian the hard way, standing in a doorway, being extremely confident and completely wrong.

(Carolina, being Carolina, arrives with rather more elaborate theories about her own neighbours. But that’s a story for the book. 😏)

But wait – Carolina didn’t start here

Neither me, nor Carolina actually landed in the Quartieri first.

My real Napoli life began up in Chiaiano, out on the northern edge of the city, and so does Carolina’s. Which means the Quartieri isn’t where the story starts. It’s where it arrives – the place Carolina chooses, later, once she’s had a taste of the city and decides she wants to live in the middle of it after all.

That choice matters more than it looks. (Ask a certain someone what he thought of it. Actually, don’t. 😌)

The most alive place I’ve ever been

People warned me about the Quartieri. Too loud, too rough, too much.

Even my guidebook warned me. There it was, in black and white: densely populated, rather run-down, and – my favourite phrase – “tourists should take care when visiting the area.” (Eyewitness Travel, Naples & the Amalfi Coast.) Take care! In the area where I was, at that very moment, hanging my pyjamas out of the window like everybody else. 😄

My students were no better. One of them was genuinely appalled:

“Teacher!!! My mum won’t let me go anywhere near that area!”

And they’re all right, of course. It is all of those things. Loud, rough, too much. It’s also the most alive I have ever felt…

And I have to say this, because it matters: I never once felt unsafe there. Not once. I was less afraid walking the streets of the Quartieri than I am walking around my own hometown. A neighbourhood where everybody knows your business turns out to be a neighbourhood where everybody is also, quietly, keeping an eye on you. That was, for me, somehow, comforting and reassuring.

Carolina feels exactly the same way – though she’d never admit it out loud.

So tell me honestly: could you live somewhere this loud and this alive – or do you need peace and quiet to feel like yourself? 👇

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. 🍕

Want to know more about the Quartieri?

• FOQUS – Fondazione Quartieri Spagnoli (the foundation working in the neighbourhood)
• The Naples Pass