"Naples is a Leap": Time, Space and Consciousness in Shirley Hazzard's Naples

Abstract

The city of Naples, on the Tyrrhenian coast of the Italian peninsula, has a 3000-year history of discovery, settlement and exploitation by Greeks, Romans, Hohenstaufens, Angevins, Aragons and Bourbons. Its visitors over the centuries have marvelled at the fruitful lands that surround it, gasped at the beauties of the bay, shuddered at the thundering of Vesuvius, footstepped Homeric heroes in the campi phlegrei (or “fields of fire”), and often ignored or despised the city itself. Today not a great deal has changed: the visitors offloaded at the airport from their low-cost flights scramble onto buses, trains and ferries to escape to magical Capri, or the Siren haunts of Sorrento rather than heading for the city. The attention of classicists has shifted from the supposed entrance to hell on the volcanic landscape of Solfatara, east of the city, to Pompeii and Herculaneum, rather further down the coast on the other side. Vesuvius remains a lure but, if truth be told, Naples doesn’t really “do” tourism. It feels rather dead in August.