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ROAD FROM PERDITION
After the sinful trappings of Rome and Naples, Italy’s Amalfi Coast is a little slice of heaven.

Text: DOUGLAS ANTHONY COOPER

1 | 2 | 3 | OCT 03

We begin our excursion in hell. Literally. We fly into Rome, where a welcoming card at our hotel invites us to "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." Yes, the new Boscolo Aleph has cleverly adopted damnation as its theme: sinister red lighting; a prison cell for the bartender; a wine list divided into the seven deadly sins. Only the complimentary toiletries get it wrong: The wrapping offers all the traditional New Age pap about health and relaxation. I would have preferred soap studded with nails, horned shower caps and a body lotion of sulphuric acid. (This is why they don’t let me design hotels.)

The theme to our trip, accordingly, is gradual salvation, earned not through good works but through good food and even better hotels. A mere 10 days of town hopping, working our way down through ever-more-beatific locations on the Amalfi Coast, should fully squeegee our souls. So from designer hell we take the train to Naples, which also has a somewhat hellish reputation (if not by design). Naples’ rep as a fallen city dates from 1884, when the cholera epidemic and ensuing urban rot pretty much deep-sixed the city’s status as a high point on the grand tour.

In Naples, we check into Grand Hotel Parker’s, another designer joint (designed, however, in the 1870s.) It, too, has sin at the foundations. George Parker Bidder, a wealthy marine biologist, was a regular guest in the 1880s. One morning in 1889, a bailiff banged on Parker’s door; the hotel was being seized to cover the proprietor’s gambling debts. Parker – without even getting out of bed – told them to put the hotel itself on his bill.

The sinister side of Naples is pretty subtle these days. The place is ridiculously hospitable, and our room and the hotel dining room command an astonishingly beautiful view over the Bay of Naples. Ah, but there at the southern tip of the bay broods Mount Vesuvius, one of the world’s most irritable cones of stone. (A day trip to Pompeii is highly recommended, if only to put a grace note of mortality into your vacation: It was once a much-vaunted resort town – before the lava intervened.)

By the time we hit the streets, the guidebooks have already prepared us to be stabbed by pimps, robbed naked by experts, abused by locals and choked by filth. Now we do get warned by a number of people to clutch our cameras close, and one nice little old lady warns us away from an alley by making a universal gesture for drug use. But Naples simply isn’t scary. Nobody is unpleasant, much less violent. Neopolitans, in fact, have a reputation among Italians as an unusually happy lot.

Very few travellers know that in recent years, an activist civic government has quietly performed a heart transplant: Naples is now a centre of contemporary Italian culture. This doesn’t mean that the pickpockets have up and left – this ain’t Times Square – but between cheerful criminals you can now find playwrights and string quartets.

It seems every church in town is associated with a pleasant miracle. The plazas in front of them are flush with bohemian students. (Bologna is generally considered to have the world’s first university, but the law faculty here is even older.) The narrow streets in the historic district are lined with buildings prepared at any moment to give way to the laws of physics and are thronged with potentially murderous motorbikes and oblivious children.

Neopolitan cuisine deserves a word or two. In fact, one word will do: mollusc. We visit Da Cicciotto, a restaurant that occupies a cave at the edge of the bay. Here the antipasto arrives without warning (or choice). We count two squid dishes, two octopus preparations and an unidentified squiggly thing that inhabits a straight shell. I happen to adore calamari and the like, so this benthic buffet suits me fine. Even the famed Neopolitan pizza is an excuse for mollusc worship.

The connection to Hades is definitely here, in the topography. Naples has a famous underground city of cisterns and passageways dating back to the Greeks and then made fabulously sophisticated by the Romans. A circling stairway takes you down 40 metres and 1,000 years.

More recently, the underground city housed 4,000 Neopolitans during the Second World War. Their graffiti is ubiquitous: caricatures of Hitler and Mussolini, wishful cartoons of American pin-up girls smoking in short skirts, a sign indicating that this particular stone shelf was a wedding bed.

1 | 2 | 3 | OCT 03