Ortese: Il mare non bagna Napoli

Bay of Naples

Il mare non bagna Napoli, written by Anna Maria Ortese, was published in 1953 by Einaudi and included in their I gettoni series edited by Elio Vittorini. This work, which fiercely criticized Naples, won the prestigious Premio Viareggio.  Ortese was describing a city that ran mechanically, almost apathetically, and one that seemed to move by inertia as well as the immobilization of the ruling and intellectual class within Naples at the time. These ineffectual ruling and intellectual classes reacted very badly to this attack and pushed Ortese into a sort of forced exile from the beloved city of Naple.  This spurning did not diminish Ortese’s admiration of Naples and compelled her to write about the city again.  She subsequently dedicated another book to it, entitled Il porto di Toledo.

The Naples of Ortese is still stunned by the war, which had only recently concluded, and is inhabited by incompetent people incapable of addressing the city’s difficulties. Families were living on the edge, drowning in their empty rituals of Christmas celebrations (Interno Familiare), childhoods marked by pain and desperation (Un paio di occhiali) and a lifeless intellectual class, without any stimulus that seemed oblivious to the decline of the city (Il silenzio della ragione).

It is a relevant book, that of Ortese’s, which, with grace and poetry, recounts to us short stories about the city and of the civilization that survives “involuntarily”, almost mechanically. Even the new generations seem not to have any hope. In the first story, Un paio di occhiali, the writer tells of the young Eugenia and of her happiness, owed to the fact that soon, finally, she will have a pair of glasses that will allow her to see the world and the beautify that surrounds her. But this “secret jubilation” that hides in the “modest voice of the child” transforms itself into a nightmare as she becomes aware of the reality that surrounds her. A reality that is not the bed of a roses she believes it to be. A city, that despite the apathy and the difficulties it faces, seems to find again, sometimes fleetingly, a feeble hope.

In the story, Oro a Forcella, where the flight of the brown butterfly “with its many strands of gold on its wings and torso” fills the tired and inflamed eyes of those who wait with wonder as they stand in line at the counter of the pawnshop, hoping to sell some old object of value in order to get themselves out of trouble. It seems but a momentary hope, a postponing of problems and suffering which very soon will come back, throwing the squalid and pitiable crowd into an environment of misery and discouragement.

While severely critical of Naples and its establishment, Ortese writes of a city that, despite its hardships, perseveres – like the young Eugenia, seemingly brutalized by reality but will, with hope and determination, overcome these obstacles to survive.

by Marcello Gammella