Death, Soccer, and Art in Naples
My five-year-old son knows he and everyone else will die. He understands the universality of death because we, his parents, have refused to euphemize or lie. His questions came too early, too often, for plotted fictions. He had stranded us on truth. Yet the vicissitudes of death remain beyond all imaginations, however precocious. My son, for one, refuses to fathom its finality. He asks, at intervals that continue to surprise despite their frequency, what will happen once he dies.
I have never had a satisfactory answer. Even though I have washed and shrouded the bodies of two relatives before their burials. Even though I have sat bedside while respirators were unplugged. Even after I discovered our elderly neighbor at home, and my son asked what the officers did with her remains.
When I talked protocols, when I described how corpses are ritually interred or fired unto ash, my son was merely excited to ask how that happened and why. When I explained how all organisms become inert and slowly rejoin the lifeless matter of the world surrounding them, he required proof.
We have no pets, and my wife would never allow any, however vital the experiment, so my son and I went to the backyard and secured a roly poly in a pot.
My son is more than capable of holding two contradictory notions to be absolute truths. He pesters me with questions because he is certain I know it all. And once he has an answer that he accepts, he usually insists, more correctly, that I know nothing. Then he teaches me what he knows.
My son was baffled by what the roly poly did in its dirt as we watched. He did not listen, however, when I explained how it fed and composted the soil. He wanted more than facts. He wanted truth. So he asked someone else.
He picked up his roly poly and watched it curl into a ball. He nestled it in his hand and inquired directly what it was doing. It replied, or so he said. It was making a home. He remained certain of this knowledge, even after the roly poly hardened and would no longer unfurl.
When I informed my son that his new friend was dead, when we then lowered it reverently into its pot to watch it return to the dirt, he told me I was wrong about death. The roly poly, he said, had not returned to dirt. He had gone home.
My wife is far smarter and less morbid than I. Fortunately, we also coincide with Keanu Reeves, who is even better attuned to this universe and any others. After my failed experiment, my wife began to paraphrase Keanu’s wisdom whenever our son asked about death.
We know only one thing, she explained. After you die, the people who love you miss you very much and they remember you for as long as they continue to live. They then pass along their memories of you so that others might know and love you, too. The more people who know and love you, the greater and stronger the connections that remain to the world after you die.
My son understood immediately. In death, he said, we become legends.
I was uncertain of his wisdom until we spent a month in Italy.
I have never felt death so imminently as I did on the streets of Naples. Do not mistake me, the final exit is always near. I, for one, have fretted I could die at any moment for at least the past 30 years. In Naples, however, seemingly no one feared death. They kept it closer than most, as one should an enemy.
Where we stayed in Naples, death notices and shrines adorned every public wall. Around every second corner were entrances to catacombs, dating back millennia, which advertised the experience to tourists as: “a liberation from the earthly burden: matter was and will become dust. Putridarium, perhaps better known as death chairs, were still kept in convents and castles around the city, where they had long collected remains after humans decomposed on them, so the penitent could pray to skulls. My son begged for a postcard picturing one and we obliged.
Catholicism has always been something of a death cult. But etched into the cornice of a funicular stop in the neighborhood of Vomero, I noticed something less Christian, less morbid—a quote from De Rerum Natura by Lucretius. This lengthy poem was among the first to explain material death as a finale, and the excerpt atop that municipal building is from the book’s infamous chapter Nothing Exists, per se, Except Atoms and the Void.
Almost nothing is known about the life of Lucretius, two millennia ago, except for this poem. Yet, at that cable car stop, he still informs daily commuters, “time does not itself exist; it is things that create the sense of that which is past, of that which is present, of that which will follow.”
Naples has been called an oblique city, largely because of its slopes. Below the heights of Vomero, there is indeed a direct, grimy menace to all things. I do not even mean the Camorra. The fug from vehicles is literally suffocating. The stench from excrement is so noxious I feared another plague. Forget jogging on those streets, forget eating healthy or light. The pastries, the gelati, the pizza, the fried zucchini flowers and eggplant. The food is but a luscious artery clog and carbo load.
I apprehended death most readily, however, because the city teemed with life. Uncertain balconies six floors up, a “stone slab perched unnaturally over the void” as the Neapolitan writer Domenico Starnone described, on which people heedlessly leaned to hang their laundry or gossip. I saw a young couple sneak out on neighboring balconies and kiss over the void. Below them, residents drove their Vespas with such abandon, even through pedestrian zones, that we were always a stumble away from eternity.
Had I lived there I, too, would have prayed to San Gennaro, the city’s patron, who was said to have diverted lava from Mt. Vesuvius to save Naples, in 1631. Although he was decapitated more than 1700 years ago, Gennaro’s blood still flows three times a year at the Cathedral of the Assumption of Mary.
Neapolitans are never so charming as when they cheat or lie, and they are endlessly charming. The most prominent figures in the city’s folklore are all tricksters or schemers—‘O Munaciello, the Little Monk, and Pulcinella, who wears a prominent mask. I won’t even mention Elena Ferrante and her mask of anonymity.
The local dialect seemed calculated to cheat, clipping all the syllables I needed to make any sense with my Italian. Thankfully, most people were charmed when I played along, insisting on discounts or brazenly cutting lines. Neapolitans do not only recognize virtue in clever sins, they venerate brilliant sinners.
When the greatest soccer player ever to wear the number 10, Diego Maradona, came to Naples some 40 years ago, he called it his resurrection. While playing for Barcelona the year before, Maradona had broken his ankle, contracted hepatitis, and head-butted an opponent on the pitch. Coming to Naples was more than renewal; it was deliverance. As the great Neapolitan filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino said: “Maradona didn’t arrive in Naples, he appeared like a God.”
Some 75,000 people filled Stadio San Paulo just to witness the assumption of this man, born from humble beginnings, a savior known for his miraculous touch and tricks, after he signed. Maradona led SSC Napoli to its first ever championships in Serie A, which fans then celebrated with fake vigils and wakes for opponents.
Maradona led his native Argentina to its first two World Cups while living in Naples. During the first, in a match against England after the nations had warred, Maradona scored two of the most infamous goals in history, four minutes apart. In the first, he leapt and surreptitiously punched the ball into the net with his fist, claiming afterward he had scored the goal “a little with the head and a little with the hand of God.” The second was the most cocksure ballet ever broadcast; he pirouetted from one end of the pitch to the other around his lurching opponents before he scored en pointe.
But as his celebrity heightened so did his fall. He fathered an illegitimate son, skipped practices, fired an air gun at the press, befriended the Camorra (allegedly), and received bans from play, twice, for drugs. He left the city, or rather fled, after leading Argentina to victory against Italy, in his home stadium in Naples.
Death is the one thing no one, not even Neapolitans, can cheat, so they respect the exception. After Maradona died in 2020, Naples absolved him. Thousands of people held an impromptu wake in the Quartieri Spagnoli, despite Covid, laying flowers at the foot of a mural, painted just as SSC Napoli was about to win its second ever championship. Since then, the square in front of the mural has been renamed, as has Napoli’s stadium, after Maradona. The Quartieri is still overwhelmed with shrines, images, and icons to him. Maradona is depicted either as a saint alongside San Gennaro or as a savior with a burning heart and a crown of thorns. He is unabashedly referred to as D10S, as their God still wearing the number 10. Roberto Saviano, the author of Gomorrah who once lived in the Quartieri, has called the neighborhood Maradona’s temple and tomb.
My son, who tells everyone he will one day play professional soccer, insisted on buying an unlicensed t-shirt of Maradona, who is balancing a ball on his head and looking up, mischievously, to the heavens. I am pretty sure we were cheated on the price.
Paolo Sorrentino was 16 years old when he realized the divinity of Maradona, during that famed championship season of 1986. The player, literally, saved his life.
Sorrentino’s parents went to the mountains of Abruzzo on holiday that season, but Sorrentino stayed home just so he could watch his favorite player. Maradona scored a stunning free kick and Sorrentino exulted while his parents died of a gas leak in the family cottage.
Sorrentino has acknowledged that his films are about the universals, especially death, family, and sex. He is, in truth, Italy’s leading filmmaker of nostalgia and beauty. Growing up in Vomero, near the wise funicular, his introduction to beauty, and now the primary source of his nostalgia, was Maradona’s balletic play. When Sorrentino won an Oscar forThe Great Beauty, in 2012, he named Maradona as one of his three great artistic inspirations, alongside Fellini and Scorsese.
Maradona has even figured in two of Sorrentino’s films. In Youth, which is in truth about aging and death, a retired soccer player, who is roly-poly and well past his prime (played coincidentally by an actor named Roly), is still a revered figure at a Swiss resort where he holidays. Alone and shirtless, on a clay court, he juggles a tennis ball high in the air, repeatedly and miraculously with his feet, as Maradona once did before games. My son, after I showed him this clip, tried to do the same, again and again.
Sorrentino’s most recent film, his return to Naples after betraying his city for Rome, was a semi-fiction, a picture-a-cléf, about the death of his parents, called The Hand of God. The film was released one year and a day after the death of Maradona, and a quote from the player is its epigraph: “I did what I could. I don’t think I did so badly.”
In the opening scene, San Gennaro appears to a woman at a bus stop and escorts her into a palazzo where the light has fallen, literally. A chandelier litters a floor where ‘O Munaciello awaits. The woman, a sometime prostitute, kisses the little monk on the head and San Gennaro gooses her so she may bear children.
The film ends with Maradona leading Napoli to its first championship, and a young stand-in for Sorrentino leaving Naples for Rome. In between, Maradona performs his miracles on the pitch as the young man learns the art to film, after the death of his parents. He has not yet realized he has his own story about love and death and beauty to share with the world.
Outside the funicular stop near the Istituto Salesiano, the high school that Sorrentino attended and later filmed in The Hand of God, I began noticing posters that announced a woman’s return to Naples after 400 years. This was, in the Neapolitan way, a lie. She had been away for at most 390 years.
Artemisia Gentileschi had been living in Naples for only a year when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 1631 and San Gennaro averted lava from the city. Gentileschi had come to Naples to establish an art studio and enhance her considerable renown as a painter for the aristocracy. Local artists often threatened outsiders who moved to Naples, but they could not move Artemisia. The new bishop of Pozzuoli, the city where Gennaro had been beheaded, commissioned her to paint his martyrdom for the local cathedral.
During her first years in Naples, Artemisia mostly painted Mary Magdalene, witness to the resurrection of Christ. Artemisia had previously rendered Magdalene, whom churchmen fallaciously called a prostitute for millennia, at least four other times—as melancholy, as penitent, as ecstatic, as plain. In her fifth depiction,La Maddalena emerges from shadows, lightly haloed, serene if not self-assured, while removing a pearl necklace. She is renouncing her material possessions as she turns toward God and toward the light.
Like Artemisia herself, this painting was unknown for centuries. It was “jealously guarded” in private collections, according to the exhibition, until August of 2020. After one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history, in the port of Beirut, the painting was recovered from the rubble of the Sursock family palace. The painting was then crated and shipped to Milan, to be restored by an exhibitor named, coincidentally, Arthemisia.
While I was in Naples, La Maddalena was on display at a convent, the Chiostro Maiolicato in the Complesso Monumentale di Santa Chiara, which advertised her prodigal return. I took my son, dressed in his illicit Maradona shirt, to the exhibition, to give my wife time alone to work.
Artemisia made several self-portraits, dressing herself, much as Cindy Sherman later would, as a martyr, a queen, or an allegory for painting itself. She died during the mid 1650s, most likely of the plague that halved the city’s population. She was buried in the Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista dei Fiorentini, later demolished for condominiums.
Artemisia was not lost history; she was, for a time, erased. She was the daughter of an artist, and when her works were rediscovered by art historians, around the turn of the 20th century, many of her finest paintings were attributed to him or to her male assistants. Thereafter, people defined her by the violence done to her, the rape by Agostino Tassi and the physical trials she had endured to convince a court of his guilt.
She knew, however, her legend would prevail. She told Galileo Galilei that her paintings would outlive her and enhance her fame. She informed her patron, Don Antonio Ruffo, “The works will speak for themselves. And with this, I end with the most humble bow.”
Inside the convent, my son grabbed my phone unbeknownst and took an oblique photograph of La Maddalena, not quite 400 years after it had first left the city. He said it was so pretty he wanted to remember it forever.
I lied. I am going to mention Elena Ferrante, whose book My Brilliant Friend was voted the best of the century while I was visiting Naples, whose quartet of novels about the city is perhaps the most complex, most real, story of memory and violence and love ever told.
Ferrante is not a wistful writer, although she has said she always expected to die young. She did not fear the end of existence. As a Neapolitan, she knew death need not be the end. As she wrote in The Lying Life of Adults, the dead are merely broken objects we keep with us, “and the best thing is to remember them as they were when they were working, because the only acceptable tomb is memory.”
Yet, Ferrante’s characters frequently insist they must escape Naples if they do not wish to die young. After surviving Naples, I read Trick by Domenico Starnone, the Neapolitan writer whom most people believe to be either Ferrante or her husband. In the novel, an elderly illustrator, who has also left Naples for Milan, returns to the apartment where he grew up, where his daughter now lives with her family. He will spend a few days in his unrecognizable former home watching over his grandson.
Surrounded by his memories, and the dialect he once spoke, the man, Daniele, is frightened in the sixth-floor apartment, its balcony perched so high above the void. “The sense that each and every thing was precarious,” he said, “a feeling that Naples had conveyed to me since my adolescence, and prompted me to flee when I was twenty, was resurfacing.”
Daniele is struggling with a commission, to illustrate a book of stories by Henry James, as he is struggling to care for his precocious grandson. Near to death, Daniele is as concerned for his legacy as he is the four-year-old with whom he shares his old room. He insists the boyremain quiet and leave him alone so he can make art.
The boy, Mario, convinces his grandfather to let him draw beside him. It is Mario who captures the memories and impressions too elusive for his grandfather to render. It is Mario who locks him on the balcony. The old man then destroys his own sketches and keeps the boy’s.
In our fifth-floor apartment in Naples, to prepare my five-year-old son to spend a half day in the full sun at Pompeii, my wife played a cartoon describing the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and the city’s burial in ash, shortly after the death of Christ. The chorus chirped, “Pompeii, Pompeii, most people got away, but some were killed in a flash.”
On our walk through the city’s forum, my son gathered lapilli, the drops of molten lava ejected during the eruption, that hardened to rock and fell on the city as rain. My son later tried to drive a Hotwheel car over a 2,000-year-old fresco, while our guide explained the pervasive phallic imagery and made jokes about sex workers, who etched their still visible names at the entrances to stately homes.
It is impossible to escape the dead of Pompeii. It is something else to seek them out. After witnessing the villas, saunas, bakeries, amphitheater, and an ancient pool, before we left the ruined city, my wife and son insisted on seeing the dead.
There is only one site in Pompeii where you can view what remains of the residents where they died—Garden of the Fugitives. As blazing rock and ash flowed toward the city 2,000 years ago, 13 people tried to flee through the Nocera Gate near the amphitheater. They lost their way in a vineyard and came to the city wall, where they were overtaken by the ash and buried face-down. They had tried to flee, when nothing but their lives remained.
A few of the dead were children, and they lay somewhat apart from the adults. My son asked question after question about them, loudly, in front of a group of elderly German tourists. He wanted to know why the parents were not holding the children. He wanted to know if we would hold him when he died. He wanted to know if the people were in pain when they were buried. He wanted to know why they were still there, why they were not under the soil, why they had not gone home, as his roly poly had. He wanted to know if they were real. Every question he asked, every answer we gave, elicited more and more foreign stares from the tourists nearer to death than we were (I hope). We left and had a conversation about the dead, over a light lunch and a spritz.
I tried to explain to my son that the people he saw were not actually there, that they were not still where they had died. They had turned to ash almost immediately, and decomposed long ago, so almost nothing remained after they were buried in ash. Despite the bodies we saw, they had in fact gone home.
During the earliest excavations of Pompeii, in the 18th century, people noticed small bones were often found inside hollow cavities. While directing the excavations during the 1860s, Giuseppe Fiorelli, born and raised in Naples, began filling those hollows with plaster of Paris and glue. His teams recovered these plasters after they dried. What we had seen were casts of those hollows, the impressions left where the bodies once were. We had visited a mere sculpture garden, decorated with the reliefs of corpses.
My son will not remember the conversations we had about death when he was five. He will not likely remember the month we spent in Naples, even the late afternoon he played soccer with local kids on the street, scored, and felt like a legend. Even the very early morning when he awoke, a dead weight in my arms, while we were walking home from an exquisite dinner, when he suddenly needed to tell me why the daytime sky is so beautiful and blue. The answer, he said, was atoms and light. That was all there was, and they colored the void.
What will remain for my son are mere impressions and trinkets. But also, the stories we, his parents, will tell him, again and again.
Death is insatiable. The dirt swallows us whole. So I want my son to understand death as a universal and material end. But here I am, giving facts again without the deeper truth of feelings.
My son was wrong about his roly poly. Death is not our home. But my son rightly interpreted the wisdom of Keanu Reeves. In death, we become legend, in that word’s truest sense. We become a tale, a text to pass on, a body to be read.
Worse than death is oblivion. That is why we all want to be memorialized, whenever we die. We want to be loved despite our sins. We want the best of us, our art, to remain and speak for us, should we be forgotten or omitted. We want our loved ones not only to know us, but to exceed us. We want our stories to resonate in the void that we leave in the world and to resound through the lives of others, to convey that we have loved and that we were loved in turn. We want people to keep that love alive when we are not. We want to etch our names in stone, to be depicted in murals. We want someone to fill the hollows, to preserve our impressions, even when our material body is gone.
Truth can be simple, if not trite. That does not make it less true. The afterlife is nothing but memories, art, and love.
After my family landed back in the United States, while riding home after having spent the month in Naples, we nearly died. Minutes after we left the airport, while my son was asleep in my wife’s arms, a van swerved next to us on the freeway and entered our lane.
I closed my eyes and knew only after I then opened them that the van beside us had missed. The driver exhaled loudly, looked at us in the rearview mirror, and spoke. We could call it luck or reflexes, we could even call it the hand of God, he said, but something had saved us. He swore he had done nothing, he had not been in control. We had cheated death, if only this time. We would make it home, alive.
And after we did, we bought my son his first pet, a fish.
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