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PERFORMING COMMUNITY
Naples, 1760 Ulysses, if Homer is to be believed, was the first mariner to escape the temptations of the Bay of Naples. According to The Odyssey, Ulysses had heard of the bay’s infamous sirens — part women, part bird or nymph-like creatures — who lured sailors to their death by singing so beautifully that no one could sail on without succumbing. Thus, when returning from the Trojan War via the bay, Ulysses plugged the ears of his crew with bee’s wax and bound himself to the mast until they had sailed safely out of range of the sirens’ audible temptation. In response, one of the sirens, Parthenope, angry over their failure to seduce their prey, drowned herself in the sea. The original settlement on the bay was said to have grown on the spot where she washed ashore, claiming her name as its own. Various communities huddled around the Bay of Naples date, in one incarnation or another, back to the second millennium before the birth of Christ. Ever since, this urban area has remained one of the world’s great cultural fulcrums. “The wonder of the place,” as the novelist and writer on the arts Benjamin Taylor reminds us in Naples Declared (2012), “is that it has not been annihilated by so much history. Ask yourself what New York or Chicago or Los Angeles will be twenty-five centuries from now. Imagination falters.”5 Although Taylor is correct in asserting that
our imagination falters, the Neapolitan imagination rarely has. Greek colonizers made the town of Parthenope, which was on the site in Naples where the medieval Castel dell’Ovo stands today, a beachhead for further conquest of the western Mediterranean Sea region. Their cities, including the “new town” of Neapolis, sprang up along the bay’s shores as residents paid their devotion to the god of reason, Apollo. Nearby, the mountain we know as Vesuvius reminded them of Nisa, the sacred mountain of Dionysus back home. They traveled up its slopes to organize seductive rites of fertility and renewal. Ancient and Byzantine Greeks dominated the bay’s towns for centuries, creating a local culture that manically swings between Apollonian rationality and Dionysian sensuality. As the Greeks quickly appreciated, the Bay of Naples promises humans one of the most salubrious habitats on the planet. The bay’s environment, in fact, is so perfect that local residents have rarely been forced to be enterprising. They have merely needed to live off the land and sea as the mild Mediterranean climate, safe harbor, turquoise sky and indigo sea have sustained lush vegetation boosted by a deep layer of rich volcanic soil and an easy growing season.
