I had the opportunity to see you perform live in 1993 at the Circus Maximus Theater in Atlantic City. I had visited the city drawn by Bruce Springsteen's song, only to encounter the goddess of country music.
As a huge fan of folk music -and by extension, country music- I have always followed and enjoyed your work, alongside that of Tammy, Shania, and Emmylou. Tammy left us some years ago, and today you have decided to join her.
Artists possess the greatness of never truly dying, for your works endure through time. While the vast majority of people will likely remember you for "Jolene" or as the original songwriter of "I Will Always Love You" -a song Whitney later covered with the kind of breathtaking excellence only she could achieve- for me, the song that has always moved me the most is "Coat of Many Colors." It is a masterpiece with incredibly powerful lyrics and chords as simple as your voice; for that is what your voice was: simple, powerful, honest, transparent, and sensitive.
We are currently sailing the Mediterranean, and our small tribute to you is "Sail Away." We know you won't be coming back, but we also know that one day we, too, will arrive at the place where you must now be singing and bringing happiness to others.
We will always love you. Thank you so much for your music, your commitment to children's education, and your love of literature.
It's my tears that fill this ocean And my sorrow rocks these waves 'Cause my true love took the notion To take my heart and sail away
Sail away, he sailed away Promised he'd be back one day Left me crying in his wake Sailors, they sail away He sailed away, he sailed away
Mothers warn your sweet young daughters Pure of heart and fair of face Sparkling eyes like sun on water Tell them "Sailors sail away"
Sail away, they sail away Promise they'll return one day Some will do just as they say But mostly they just sail away They sail away, they sail away Sailors they sail away
A sailor's true love is the sea They give what's left to you and me And yet we love them anyway Knowing they Will sail away Sailors they just sail away
Sail away, they sail away They sail away, they sail away They sail away, they sail away They sail away, they sail away
Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn't get some of that stuff out.
After spending a few days with her Neapolitan friends, The Grandma is spending some time on the CostaBrava,where she plans to enjoy her favourite hobbies: sailing, scuba diving, history, birdwatching, and literature.
And she won't be alone, as ClaireFontaine and Joseph de Ca'th Lon have joined her to enjoy a few days of rest before visiting Lyon next weekend, where a very interesting football match awaits them.
As an older person, TheGrandma has been reflecting on the wonderful, unique places the Catalan coast has to offer, and she started with Cap de Creus, where they enjoyed a fantastic day of scuba diving in a fascinating and beautiful location.
There are places where nature seems to have decided to show everything it is capable of doing. Cap de Creus is one of those places.
After spending some time in Napoli and writing about Vesuvius, it feels almost natural to continue the journey through another landscape where geology and life are impossible to separate. Vesuvius is a volcano that reminds us that the Earth is still alive beneath our feet. Cap de Creus tells a different story: one of ancient mountains, metamorphic rocks, tectonic forces, wind, erosion and a Mediterranean Sea that has slowly transformed the landscape into something extraordinary.
The difference is that at Cap de Creus, the landscape does not stop at the shoreline. It continues underwater. And when you dive here, you discover that what looks like a spectacular rocky peninsula from the surface is only the beginning of the story.
Cap de Creus occupies the easternmost end of the Iberian Peninsula, where the Pyrenees finally reach the Mediterranean. Geologically, it belongs to the axial zone of the Pyrenees, the part of the mountain range where some of its oldest rocks are exposed. The geological history of Cap de Creus goes back hundreds of millions of years, to the Paleozoic Era, when sediments accumulated in environments very different from those we know today.
Over geological time, those sediments were buried, compressed, heated and transformed. The result is the extraordinary variety of metamorphic rocks that characterises the peninsula: schists and phyllites, but also marble, quartzite, amphibolite and gneiss. There are also granodiorites and, in some areas, much younger basaltic rocks.
In other words, when you walk through Cap de Creus, you are not simply walking through a beautiful Mediterranean landscape. You are walking through geological history. The rocks record enormous forces that operated long before humans existed: sedimentation, burial, metamorphism, folding, faulting, mountain building and erosion.
The Variscan orogeny, hundreds of millions of years ago, profoundly transformed the ancient rocks. Much later, the Alpine orogeny contributed to the formation of the Pyrenees and produced further deformation in the Cap de Creus area.
The landscape we see today is therefore the result of several geological worlds superimposed upon one another.
And then came the wind.
Few places in the Mediterranean demonstrate the power of wind as clearly as Cap de Creus. The Tramuntana has shaped the peninsula for thousands upon thousands of years. Together with rain, waves, temperature changes and other erosive processes, it has sculpted the rocks into an almost surreal landscape of cliffs, ridges, gullies, coves and bizarrely shaped formations. Sometimes the landscape looks almost extraterrestrial. This is not surprising. The rocks are heavily fractured and folded, providing erosion with countless weaknesses to exploit. Water and wind penetrate cracks, enlarge them and gradually remove the material around them. The result is a coastline that seems to have been carved rather than simply eroded. And the sea continues the process. Every wave that strikes a cliff is participating in a geological experiment that began millions of years ago. The landscape is never finished. It is still being created.
For someone who dives, this peninsula reveals another dimension. The marine environment of Cap de Creus is extraordinarily diverse because the seabed is extraordinarily complex. There are rocky bottoms and soft sediments, shallow illuminated areas and dark deeper environments, sheltered coves and places exposed to strong currents, waves and the Tramuntana.
This enormous variety of habitats creates an equally extraordinary variety of life. And descending beneath the surface feels like entering another version of the same geological landscape. The rocks that dominate the coastline continue underwater as walls, ledges, caves, cracks and reefs. But now they are covered by living organisms. The Mediterranean suddenly becomes a three-dimensional forest.
One of the first things that can transform a dive is the sight of a meadow of Posidonia oceanica. Posidonia is not an alga but a marine flowering plant. Its underwater meadows are among the most important ecosystems in the Mediterranean. They provide shelter, food and nursery areas for numerous species, while their roots and rhizomes help stabilise the seabed. They also contribute to oxygen production and to the productivity of coastal ecosystems. Swimming above a Posidonia meadow can therefore feel deceptively peaceful. Beneath the apparently simple green leaves, there is an entire ecosystem. Small fish hide among the plants. Juveniles find refuge there. Invertebrates move between the leaves and the seabed. Predators patrol the edges. What looks like a meadow is actually a city. And every square metre can be full of life.
As you descend, the underwater landscape changes. Light gradually disappears, algae become less dominant and another community begins to emerge: the coraligenous habitat. The word "coralligenous" may sound as if it refers simply to coral, but the reality is much more complex. It is a highly structured Mediterranean community created largely by organisms such as coralline algae, which build and cement a complex three-dimensional habitat. It becomes a kind of underwater architecture. And among its most spectacular inhabitants are the red gorgonians. Their branches rise from the rocks like underwater trees.
They are animals, not plants, and their colonies create shelter and structure for numerous other organisms. Around them, the apparently bare rock becomes a living world of sponges, bryozoans, molluscs, crustaceans and fish. Then there is another extraordinary presence: red coral, Corallium rubrum.
Cap de Creus is particularly remarkable for the presence of this species, one of the Mediterranean organisms that has fascinated humans for centuries. But underwater, coral is not simply something beautiful to collect or admire. It is part of a complex ecosystem that has evolved over immense periods of time.
The rocky seabeds of Cap de Creus are home to an impressive variety of Mediterranean fish. You may encounter seabreams moving through the water, wrasses exploring the rocks, colourful salema feeding among the algae, or a grouper watching from the entrance of a cave. And then there are the species that seem to have been designed specifically for camouflage.
The red scorpionfish is a perfect example. It can sit almost motionless among the rocks, relying on camouflage rather than speed. Unless you know what you are looking for, you may swim past one without realising that a fish is watching you. The same is true of moray eels, which often remain hidden inside cracks and caves, revealing only their heads. And perhaps one of the most fascinating encounters for a diver is the common octopus. The octopus is not simply another animal on the seabed. It is an intelligence encounter. It can change colour and texture, manipulate objects, explore its environment and disappear into its surroundings with extraordinary efficiency.
In Cap de Creus, the rocky landscape provides exactly the kind of complex environment in which such an animal can thrive.
Not everything remarkable is large. Look carefully into the cracks and shadows and another world appears. Crustaceans occupy the crevices. Sea stars move slowly across the rocks. Sea urchins graze on algae. Polychaete worms live within the seabed. Sponges and bryozoans cover surfaces that, from a distance, appear lifeless.
The deeper you look, the more obvious the fundamental lesson of Cap de Creus becomes: absence of movement does not mean absence of life. Sometimes the richest places are the ones that initially appear empty.
One of the most remarkable geological features of Cap de Creus is not visible from the land at all. Off the peninsula lies a major submarine canyon that descends rapidly into the deep Mediterranean. The underwater topography is therefore not simply an extension of the coastline. It is a continuation of the geological drama. The cliffs we see above the water become walls and slopes below it, while the seabed suddenly opens into much deeper environments. These changes in depth and topography influence currents, sediments, nutrients and the distribution of marine organisms.
The sea here is not a uniform blue space. It is a landscape. And, like the terrestrial landscape, it has mountains, valleys, walls, forests, plains and canyons. Only we cannot see most of them from the surface.
There is another fascinating connection between the landscape above and the life below. The Tramuntana does not simply sculpt the rocks. It also influences the sea. Strong winds can mix surface waters with deeper waters, helping to bring nutrients into the marine ecosystem. Together with currents and the complex underwater topography, this contributes to the productivity of the waters around Cap de Creus. The same wind that makes the landscape look harsh can therefore help sustain the extraordinary richness beneath the waves. It is one of those beautiful contradictions of nature. A force capable of eroding the landscape can also help nourish the life that surrounds it.
The waters of Cap de Creus can also become a meeting point for animals that are not permanently associated with the seabed. The pelagic environment -the open water itself- is inhabited by plankton, jellyfish, small crustaceans and countless microscopic organisms that form the foundation of marine food webs. Among the larger inhabitants are sardines, anchovies and bonito. And, depending on the season and circumstances, the wider waters can also be visited by migratory species such as sea turtles and cetaceans. The Mediterranean may sometimes look like an empty blue surface. It isn't. It is one of the most densely interconnected ecosystems on Earth.
Perhaps this is why moving from Vesuvius to Cap de Creus feels so natural. Vesuvius tells the story of fire. Cap de Creus tells the story of time. One landscape was dramatically shaped by volcanic activity; the other preserves the scars of ancient mountain building, metamorphism and erosion. But both remind us of the same thing: the landscape is never merely scenery. It is a geological archive. At Vesuvius, you can look at a volcano and imagine the enormous forces that lie beneath it.
At Cap de Creus, you can look at a folded schist, a fractured cliff or a strangely sculpted rock and read the traces of forces that acted hundreds of millions of years ago. Then you put on a mask and descend beneath the surface. And suddenly the story changes again. The ancient rocks become the foundations of a living ecosystem. Posidonia grows above them. Gorgonians rise from them. Corals occupy their cracks. Octopuses disappear among them. Moray eels watch from their caves. Fish move through the labyrinth. And somewhere beyond the familiar coastline, the seabed plunges into a submarine canyon.
The geological and biological stories are not separate. They are the same story. Life builds upon geology. Geology creates habitats. The sea transforms rock. The rock shelters life. The wind changes the sea. The sea changes the coast. And everything is connected.
Standing at Cap de Creus, with the Mediterranean stretching towards the horizon, it is tempting to think of this place as the end of something. The easternmost point of Catalunya. The end of the Pyrenees. The place where the mountains meet the sea. But perhaps it is better understood as a beginning. A beginning of the Mediterranean. A beginning of an underwater world. A beginning of a geological journey that reaches far beyond what our eyes can see. And when you dive here, you realise that Cap de Creus is much larger than the peninsula that appears on a map. Its real landscape continues beneath the surface. Its rocks continue downward. Its ecosystems extend into darkness. Its canyon opens into the deep. And the Mediterranean keeps writing the next chapter.
After Vesuvius, Cap de Creus feels like a perfect reminder that nature does not need to choose between drama and beauty. Sometimes it offers both. Sometimes the most spectacular landscapes are made not by a single catastrophic event, but by millions of years of pressure, movement, erosion, wind and water. And sometimes, to see the whole story, you simply have to dive.
There are places where history is written on monuments, in museums, in churches or in the stones of ancient cities. And then there are places where history is written on the landscape itself.
Napoli is one of them.
After walking through its Greek origins, its Roman past, its medieval castles, its music, its popular traditions, its football, its painters and its archaeological treasures, there is perhaps no better way to end this journey than by looking at the mountain that has watched over all of it.
Vesuvius.
It is difficult to imagine Napoli without the volcano in the background. From almost everywhere in the city, it is there. Sometimes majestic beneath a perfectly blue sky, sometimes hidden by clouds, sometimes almost indistinguishable from the landscape at sunset. It is beautiful, familiar and, at the same time, unsettling.
Because Vesuvius is not simply a mountain. It is a reminder. A reminder that beneath the apparent permanence of a city, there is always something capable of changing everything.
Vesuvius became part of the historical consciousness of Europe on 24 August AD 79, when one of the most famous eruptions in history buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. The catastrophe was witnessed from across the Bay of Napoli by Pliny the Younger, whose letters to Tacitus became one of the most extraordinary surviving accounts of the ancient world. His uncle, Pliny the Elder,commander of the Roman fleet at Misenum, died during the disaster.
What is particularly striking is that the eruption did not destroy an isolated landscape. It struck a densely inhabited and extraordinarily prosperous part of Campania. Neapolis, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae, Oplontis, Puteoli and the villas scattered around the Bay of Napoli belonged to a world in which the sea, agriculture, commerce, leisure and culture were deeply interconnected. And behind all of them stood Vesuvius. The mountain was therefore not an external threat to Campania. It was part of Campania. That distinction matters.
There is something almost paradoxical about Vesuvius. The same volcanic processes capable of destroying settlements have also contributed to creating extraordinarily fertile land. The ashes that once buried towns also enriched the soil. The slopes of the volcano became productive agricultural territory, famous for vineyards and gardens. The Campanian landscape could therefore offer extraordinary abundance precisely because it lived under the shadow of extraordinary danger. Perhaps this contradiction is one of the keys to understanding Napoli. Beauty and danger are not necessarily opposites here. They coexist. The sea can feed you and drown you. The mountain can destroy your home and nourish your fields. The sun can illuminate the most beautiful city in the Mediterranean, while the same horizon reminds you that the earth beneath your feet is not entirely still. Napoli has always lived with these contradictions.
Centuries passed after the eruption of AD 79. The buried cities gradually became part of memory, legend and eventually archaeology. And when Pompeii and Herculaneum began to return to the light, they transformed the way Europe looked at the ancient world. This is where my journey through Napoli comes full circle. At the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, so many of the objects recovered from Pompeii and Herculaneum are preserved: mosaics, sculptures, frescoes, everyday objects and portraits of people who, without Vesuvius, would probably have disappeared completely from history. Including the mysterious woman traditionally known as Sappho, whose quiet gaze has survived almost two thousand years. The volcano destroyed their world. But, paradoxically, it also preserved fragments of that world for us.
Vesuvius became both destroyer and archivist. That may be one of the strangest paradoxes in the history of Napoli.
The eruption of AD 79 was not the end of the story. Centuries later, another catastrophic eruption occurred in 1631, one of the most devastating eruptions in the volcano's historical record. Towns around Vesuvius were destroyed and thousands of people died. The eruption profoundly affected both the landscape and the communities living around the volcano. There is something particularly human about the history of 1631. People had forgotten.
After centuries of relative quiet, Vesuvius no longer seemed like an immediate threat. The memory of catastrophe had faded, and communities had continued to grow around the mountain. Then the mountain reminded them. This is perhaps one of the most important lessons contained in the history of Vesuvius: human beings become accustomed to almost anything. Even to living beside a volcano. Even to danger. Even to the possibility that one day the landscape may change forever.
And when people face something they cannot control, they search for meaning. In Napoli, that search has often taken a religious form. During the eruption of 1631, historical accounts tell us that a relic of Saint Gennaro, the city's patron saint, was carried in procession and that people attributed the eventual cessation of the eruption to his intervention. Whether one believes in miracles or not is beside the point. What matters historically is what this tells us about the people who lived through the catastrophe. They needed to believe that someone -or something- could stand between them and the mountain. Faith became a language for confronting fear. And Napoli has always been a city of extraordinary faith: Saint Gennaro, the Virgin, Padre Pio, countless saints and protectors -and, in a completely different register, Maradona. Perhaps that is not as strange as it initially appears. Napoli has always known how to turn hope into devotion.
The volcano gradually became much more than a physical presence. It entered literature, painting, travel writing and the European imagination. Artists and writers came to Napoli precisely because of its extraordinary combination of beauty and danger. The Bay. The islands. The ruins. The light. And, above everything, Vesuvius.
The mountain became one of the great symbols of the Romantic imagination: sublime because it was beautiful, but also because it reminded human beings of their own fragility. And this is something I have always found fascinating about Napoli. The city does not hide its vulnerability. It celebrates life in spite of it. Perhaps even because of it.
Vesuvius erupted again in 1944, during the final stages of the Second World War. It was the last eruption of the volcano. Lava flows destroyed settlements and ash spread across the surrounding area. The eruption was observed and documented by Giuseppe Imbò, director of the VesuviusObservatory, who remained at his post even during the most dangerous phase of the eruption.
There is something profoundly symbolic about the date. Europe was already being torn apart by war. Napoli had experienced occupation, bombing, hunger and destruction. And then Vesuvius erupted. The city and the mountain seemed, once again, to be speaking the same language: nothing is permanent. Yet Napoli survived. Again.
Today, Vesuvius is quiet. But it is not extinct. And this distinction has become part of the collective consciousness of the region. The volcano's last eruption was in 1944, and it remains an active volcano in a state of repose. For someone who has never lived near a volcano, this might sound frightening. For Neapolitans, it is simply part of reality. You go to work. You take your children to school. You drink an espresso. You fall in love. You argue about football. You go to the theatre. You walk along the seafront. You celebrate a Scudetto by filling the city with flags, fireworks and noise. And somewhere behind everything, Vesuvius remains.
Perhaps this is where the volcano has influenced the Neapolitan character most profoundly -not by creating a particular personality, because people are always more complicated than geography, but by becoming part of the collective memory of impermanence. You know that things can change. You know that life is fragile. And perhaps, therefore, you learn to live intensely.
There is a beautiful contradiction here. Napoli is one of the cities in Europe with the strongest sense of history. Yet it is also a city that lives intensely in the present. Ancient ruins stand beside modern buildings. Medieval castles overlook contemporary streets. Baroque churches coexist with graffiti. Opera, tarantella, football chants, street markets and archaeological museums all belong to the same city. And above them all stands Vesuvius. It is almost as if the mountain tells Napoli: Remember. Remember Pompeii. Remember Herculaneum. Remember 1631. Remember 1944. Remember that nothing lasts forever. And Napoli seems to answer: Then let us live.
Perhaps this is why I have always felt that Vesuvius is more than the final chapter of my journey through Napoli. It is the thread running through all the previous chapters. The Greeks built Neapolis beneath its shadow. The Romans developed their extraordinary cities around the Bay. The medieval city rose again. Castles were built. Kings came and went. Armies invaded. Empires disappeared. Musicians composed. Painters painted. Fishermen went to sea. Footballers became legends. And ordinary people continued to live their ordinary lives. The mountain remained. It watched everything. And perhaps this is the most beautiful lesson I take from Napoli. Monuments may survive centuries, but human life does not. The stones of Pompeii survived. The walls of Castel dell'Ovo survived. Castel Nuovo survived. The archaeological treasures survived. Caravaggio's Seven Works of Mercy survived. The music survived. The stories survived. But the people who built, painted, sang, loved, fought, worked and dreamed are gone. Their lives were brief. Tempus fugit. And yet, somehow, Napoli continues.
I have walked through Napoli many times. I have walked down to the port. I have crossed its squares. I have entered its churches, museums and theatres. I have sat in stadiums. I have looked at the sea. I have celebrated birthdays there. I have remembered people there. And I have looked at Vesuvius more times than I could possibly count. I think that is why I did not want to end this series with a monument. I wanted to end it with the mountain. Because Vesuvius is not merely something Neapolitans look at. It is something they live with. It has destroyed their past and preserved it. It has frightened them and inspired them. It has given extraordinary fertility to their land and, throughout history, reminded them that nothing can ever be taken for granted. Perhaps that is what living beside an active volcano teaches you. Not to live in fear. But to understand that life is precious precisely because it is temporary.
Napoli has lived for centuries beneath the shadow of a mountain that can destroy, but also nourish; frighten, but also protect; remind its people of mortality, while giving them reasons to celebrate life. Perhaps this is why the Neapolitan way of living has always seemed so intense to me: when you live beside a volcano, you learn that nothing is guaranteed and that every day is worth living.
So, after travelling through the history, art, music, traditions, football and everyday life of this extraordinary city, I think there is only one possible farewell. The sea will still be there. The city will still be noisy. Someone will still be singing somewhere in a narrow street. Someone will still be arguing about football. The espresso will still be served. And, above everything, Vesuvius will still be watching. Quietly reminding us that we are only passing through.
Not addio. Never that. Just: Ciarà, Napule, ce verimmo ampresso.
There are museums that we visit. And then there are museums that we enter as if we were crossing a threshold between two worlds.
The Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli belongs to the second kind.
After speaking about Caravaggio and his SevenWorks of Mercy, it feels almost inevitable to come here. Caravaggio showed us Napoli through light and darkness, compassion and suffering, human bodies and human emotions. The Archaeological Museum takes us much further back in time, but somehow the conversation continues. Because Napoli has always been a city built upon layers.
Greek Napoli lies beneath Roman Napoli. Roman Napoli lies beneath medieval Napoli. Medieval Napoli lies beneath the modern city. And beneath everything there is Vesuvius, reminding us that time is never entirely still.
I have visited this museum dozens of times, and I have never quite managed to decide what its most extraordinary object is. That may actually be the point. How can one choose between the Farnese Hercules, the Farnese Bull, the mosaics and frescoes of Pompeii and Herculaneum, the sculptures of the ancient world, the treasures of the Villa of the Papyri, the mosaics that once decorated Roman houses, and the countless objects that survived an eruption that should have destroyed them forever?
The museum is almost overwhelming. And perhaps it should be. It is not simply a museum of Ancient Rome. It is one of the places where the extraordinary artistic culture of the ancient Mediterranean becomes tangible. Here, mythology is no longer something we read about. It has faces. Bodies. Colours. Landscapes. Gestures. And eyes.
The frescoes are particularly extraordinary because they remind us of somethingwe sometimes forget when we think about classical antiquity: the ancient world was not white marble. It was colourful. It was theatrical. It was intimate.
Roman houses were filled with painted walls, gardens, gods, heroes, animals, architecture that existed only in illusion, still lifes, portraits and scenes from mythology. The archaeological collections from the Vesuvian area preserve an extraordinary record of Roman mural painting from the first century BC to the first century AD.
And then, among all these monumental works, there is one very small face that has always fascinated me. A young woman. She looks directly at us. She is usually called Sappho. But perhaps she wasn't Sappho at all. And that is precisely what makes her so fascinating.
The fresco is remarkably small: only about 37 by 36 centimetres. It was found in Pompeii and dates from approximately 55-79 AD. Today it is displayed in Room LXXVIII of the National Archaeological Museum of Napoli. The woman wears elegant clothes and jewellery. Her hair is carefully arranged beneath a golden hairnet. In one hand she holds four small wax tablets. In the other she holds a stylus, touching it to her lips. She is thinking. That tiny gesture is everything. She is not posing triumphantly. She is not looking at us as an empress or a goddess. She appears to be caught in the fraction of a second before writing. The museum's own description interprets the gesture as embodying the reflection that precedes writing. And someone, nearly two thousand years ago, decided that this moment was worth painting. That is extraordinary.
At some point in the nineteenth century, the woman began to be identified with Sappho, the great Greek poet from Lesbos. But there is no evidence that the woman actually represents Sappho. Modern scholarship generally treats the identification with caution. Perhaps she was simply an educated Roman woman. Perhaps she was an idealised representation of female literacy. Perhaps she was somebody whose name has disappeared forever. We will probably never know. And I think that is beautiful. Because the mystery has survived along with the painting.
There is something deeply moving about this anonymous woman. We know that she could write. Or, at the very least, that the person who commissioned the portrait wanted her to be associated with learning, culture and literacy. She holds the tools of writing. But we never get to know what she was about to write. That is where the imagination begins. Was it a letter? A poem? A shopping list? A private thought? A love story? A philosophical reflection? We have the tablet. We have the stylus. We have the expression. But the words are gone. Perhaps this is why I find her more fascinating than some of the museum's gigantic masterpieces. The great sculptures tell us what they are. This woman asks us a question. Who are you? And, perhaps even more importantly: What were you thinking?
There is another extraordinary story behind the objects in this museum. Many of them were not originally intended to become museum pieces. They belonged to houses. Gardens. Temples. Theatres. Private collections. They were part of everyday life. Then Vesuvius erupted in AD 79. The cities disappeared beneath volcanic material. And the objects disappeared with them. For centuries, they remained hidden. Then came the excavations.
Excavations transformed the way Europe looked at the ancient world. Paintings were removed from the walls and treated almost like individual works of art, separated from the architectural contexts in which they had originally existed. The museum's fresco collection itself explains how this process sometimes made it difficult to reconstruct the original decorative ensembles.
Napoli therefore became something more than the guardian of its own archaeological heritage. It became one of the great interpreters of the ancient Mediterranean. Pompeii. Herculaneum. Stabiae. Boscoreale. The Villa of the Papyri. Baiae. Places that had once been alive became fragments of a lost world, and Napoli gathered many of those fragments together. Walking through the museum is therefore almost like walking through the memory of an entire civilization.
And this is where my own story with Napoli returns. I have always felt that the Mediterranean is much more than a sea. It is a cultural language. A way of eating. A way of building. A way of telling stories. A way of understanding beauty. The ancient Greeks crossed it. The Romans transformed it into their Mare Nostrum. Phoenicians, Etruscans, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Catalans, Occitans and countless other peoples crossed it, traded across it, fought across it and made their homes around it. Napoli was never isolated from this movement. It was born from it.
The very name Neapolis -new city- reminds us that the city emerged from the Greek Mediterranean world. And the archaeological museum is one of the places where that Mediterranean dialogue can still be seen. Greek mythology became Roman mythology. Greek artistic traditions were transformed by Roman artists. Egyptian cults found their way into Pompeian houses. Local traditions absorbed influences from distant places. Cultures met, changed and reinvented themselves. The Mediterranean was never a collection of isolated cultures. It was a network.
After the noise of Napoli -its scooters, conversations, markets, football, music, traffic, laughter and endless human energy- the museum can feel strangely silent. But it isn't really silent. The marble is speaking. The mosaics are speaking. The frescoes are speaking. The statues are speaking. And somewhere among them, a young woman who may or may not be Sappho is still holding her stylus to her lips. Still thinking. Still waiting to write. Almost two thousand years later. That is the extraordinary thing about archaeology. It does not simply bring the past back to us. Sometimes it reminds us that the people of the past were not really that different from us. They loved. They travelled. They argued. They decorated their homes. They worried about money. They admired beautiful things. They wrote letters. They fell in love. They went to the theatre. They worshipped their gods. They raised children. They dreamed. And then, one day, the volcano came.
When I stand in front of the so-called Sappho, I don't really think about whether she was Sappho. I think about the woman herself. Someone looked at her nearly two thousand years ago and thought: This moment deserves to survive. And somehow, it did. Her name has disappeared. Her voice has disappeared. Her thoughts have disappeared. Even her identity has become a mystery. But her face remains.
Perhaps that is the greatest lesson of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli. Empires disappear. Cities are buried. Languages change. Buildings collapse. Volcanoes erupt. Earthquakes shake the ground. Wars come and go. Centuries pass. And yet, sometimes, a human gesture survives. A hand holding a stylus. A face lost in thought. A mosaic fragment. A painted eye. A marble body. A tiny piece of a world that once seemed eternal.
Napoli keeps them all. And perhaps that is why I can never really say goodbye to this museum. I have walked through its rooms dozens of times, and every visit feels slightly different. Because the objects have not changed. I have. And so, each time I return, the ancient world looks at me from a different place. Sometimes through the eyes of a god. Sometimes through the body of a statue. Sometimes through the terrifying beauty of a mosaic. And sometimes through the quiet, mysterious eyes of a young woman who may have been Sappho. She holds her stylus to her lips. She is about to write.
And for a moment, in the silence of the museum, it feels as though the whole ancient Mediterranean is waiting to hear what she will say.
Perhaps she was Sappho. Perhaps she was not. But after almost two thousand years, she still looks at us as if she knew that being remembered is another form of immortality.
Il Museo Nazionale è nell'anima di Napoli, e uno straniero se ne accorge più di un napoletano stesso. Non si potrebbe immaginare un museo del genere altrove che a Napoli.
The National Museum is inside the soul of Naples, and a foreigner notices it more than a Neapolitan himself. One could not imagine a museum like this anywhere but Naples.
There are cities that seem to have been built from stone. And then there is Napoli.
Napoli
seems to have been built from contrasts. Light and darkness. Life and
death. Faith and superstition. Beauty and decay. Devotion and
irreverence. Sacred temples and football stadiums. Perhaps this is why Caravaggio feels soprofoundly Neapolitan.
In Napoli,
I have always felt that darkness is never entirely dark. Somewhere,
somehow, there is always a light emerging from it. And perhaps this is
the best way to approach one of the most extraordinary paintings in the
city: Caravaggio's Le sette opere di Misericordia (The Seven Works of Mercy). It is not simply a religious painting. It is Napoli. A painting born in Napoli.
Michelangelo Merisi, better known as Caravaggio, arrived in Napoli in 1606 after fleeing Rome following the killing of Ranuccio Tomassoni. His stay in Napoli would be relatively brief, but enormously important. The city offered him something that few other places could: an environment where the sacred and the everyday existed almost on top of one another. Churches stood among crowded streets. Religious devotion coexisted with poverty, violence, superstition and an extraordinary vitality of popular culture.
Caravaggio understood this immediately. During his first Neapolitan period,hereceived a commission from the Pio Monte della Misericordia, a charitable confraternity founded by young Neapolitan aristocrats who had decided to devote themselves to helping the poor and vulnerable. Their mission was based on the traditional seven corporal works of mercy, drawn from the Gospel of Matthew and Christian tradition. They were simple but demanding:
-To feed the hungry.
-To give drink to the thirsty.
-To shelter the homeless.
-To clothe the naked.
-To visit the sick.
-To visit prisoners.
-To bury the dead.
Seven acts. Seven ways of transforming compassion into action. And Caravaggio did something extraordinary with them. He put them all into a single painting.
At first glance, Le sette opere di Misericordia can appear almost chaotic. There is no serene biblical landscape. No distant paradise. No carefully arranged collection of saints performing charitable deeds one after another. Instead, there is a crowded Neapolitan street. People overlap. Bodies twist. Hands reach out. Faces emerge from darkness. A woman gives milk to an old man through the bars of a prison. A man carries a dead body. Another offers his cloak to a naked man. A pilgrim receives shelter. Someone gives water to the thirsty. The acts of mercy are not presented as abstract theological concepts. They are happening here. Among ordinary people. In the middle of the city. And that may be one of the most revolutionary things about Caravaggio. He makes holiness human.
This is not a painting about perfect people. Caravaggio's characters are not idealised saints with immaculate faces. They look like people you might have encountered walking through seventeenth-century Napoli. Poor people. Old people. Prisoners. Pilgrims. Begging people. People who are tired. People who need help. And people who are willing to provide it. The sacred does not descend from heaven. It happens at street level. This is particularly powerful because Caravaggio does not separate physical suffering from spiritual salvation. Hunger is real. Thirst is real. Cold is real. Illness is real. Death is real. And therefore mercy must also be real. You cannot feed someone metaphorically. You cannot bury someone metaphorically. You cannot give your coat to someone metaphorically.
Caravaggio's Christianity is profoundly physical. You touch. You carry. You feed. You embrace. You give.
And then there is the light. Or, more precisely, the battle between light and darkness. Caravaggio is one of the great masters of chiaroscuro, thedramatic contrast between light and dark that gives his figures extraordinary volume and emotional intensity. But in The Seven Works of Mercy, the darkness is not simply an artistic background. It becomes part of the meaning. The world is dark. And then someone performs an act of kindness. A little light appears. That light does not illuminate everything. It does not magically eliminate suffering. It simply reveals a human gesture. And perhaps that is enough. This is what makes Caravaggio's technique so fascinating to me. The light behaves almost like mercy itself. It finds the person who needs to be seen. It falls upon the gesture that matters. It guides our eyes through the confusion. It tells us: Look here. This is important.
I cannot look at Caravaggio's chiaroscuro without thinking about Napoli itself. Because Napoli is also a city of light and darkness. The Mediterranean sunlight can be overwhelming. It floods the streets, the sea, the façades and the archaeological ruins with an almost excessive brightness. And yet, just a few metres away, there may be a dark alley, an ancient church, an underground passage, a catacomb or a courtyard where the sunlight barely reaches.
Napoli constantly moves between these two worlds. The city is beautiful and chaotic. Generous and harsh. Sacred and profane. Ancient and contemporary. It can celebrate life with an almost unbearable intensity and, at the same time, live alongside death with remarkable familiarity. That is why I think Caravaggio understood something essential about Napoli. The darkness does not cancel the light. It makes the light visible.
This is particularly meaningful in Napoli. Death has never been completely hidden from Neapolitan life. It appears in churches, catacombs, cemeteries, votive traditions, funeral notices pasted onto walls and popular religious imagery. But Napoli does not simply mourn. It celebrates. It eats. It sings. It dances. It falls in love. It goes to football matches. It celebrates saints. It celebrates Maradona. It laughs loudly. It argues passionately. It lives.
Perhaps this is why the city has always fascinated me. There is a profound awareness that life is temporary, but instead of turning that awareness exclusively into melancholy, Neapolitans often transform it into an extraordinary appetite for life. If life is short, live it.
And Caravaggio's painting seems to understand this paradox. The dead man is there. The prisoner is there. The hungry and the thirsty are there. Suffering is there. But so is generosity. So is compassion. So is human contact. So is light.
And this is where my journey through Napoli takes another unexpected turn. Only recently, I was writing about the StadioSan Paolo -today the StadioDiegoArmando Maradona- and about the almost sacred place that football occupies in the city. Napoli has its saints. It has San Gennaro. It has PadrePio. It has churches, relics, processions and centuries of Catholic devotion. And it also has Diego Armando Maradona.The Argentine footballer became something much more than a sportsman in Napoli. He became a symbol of pride, belonging and redemption. For many Neapolitans, Maradona represented the possibility of triumph.
Caravaggio, centuries earlier, had painted something different but strangely related: the possibility of human dignity emerging from darkness. One transformed a football stadium into a temple of popular devotion. The other transformed a religious commission into a scene populated by ordinary Neapolitans. Both understood something about this city. Napoli does not need perfection. It needs passion.
What makes Le sette opere di Misericordia so powerful today is that its message has not become obsolete. Quite the opposite. The seven works remain remarkably concrete. There are still hungry people. Still thirsty people. Still homeless people. Still prisoners. Still sick people. Still people who need clothing. Still people who need to be buried with dignity. The painting therefore does not allow us to remain comfortable spectators. It asks something from us. Look. And then do something. Perhaps this is why the painting feels so different from many religious works of its time. It does not invite us to contemplate mercy from a safe distance. It places us inside the street. Inside the crowd. Inside the darkness.
There is something deeply Mediterranean about this way of seeing the world. We are surrounded by ancient stones. Temples survive for thousands of years. Castles survive wars. Churches survive earthquakes. The sea continues to touch the same coastline. Mount Vesuvius continues to watch over the city. And human beings come and go. Our lives are brief. The monuments remain. Tempus fugit.
Perhaps that is why we need light. Not because darkness can be eliminated, but because our time in it is so short. Caravaggio understood that. He painted a world in which darkness is immense, but light is extraordinarily precise. It falls exactly where compassion takes place. A hand. A face. A body. A gesture. A cup of water. A piece of clothing. A burial. A little act of humanity. And suddenly, the darkness has meaning.
I have walked through Napoli many times. I have walked beside the sea, through its ancient streets, past churches and castles, archaeological ruins and noisy squares. I have watched the city celebrate. I have watched it mourn. I have seen its devotion and its irreverence, its beauty and its disorder. And perhaps that is why Caravaggio's painting feels so right here. Because Napoli has always seemed to me like a gigantic chiaroscuro. A city where beauty is more intense because it exists beside decay. Where joy is louder because death is never very far away. Where faith can be fervent without necessarily being obedient. Where the sacred can coexist with the profane. Where a football stadium can become a temple and a footballer can become a saint. Where ancient stones remind us that civilizations endure while individual lives disappear in an instant.
Caravaggio did not paint an ideal world. He painted a world that was broken, difficult and profoundly human. And then he illuminated it. Perhaps that is the greatest lesson of Le sette opere di Misericordia. We cannot always remove the darkness. But we can choose where to bring the light. And somehow, in Napoli, that feels less like a lesson from a seventeenth-century painting than a way of life.
Che cosa significasse per il Caravaggio l'incontro con la immensa capitale mediterranea, più classicamente antica di Roma stessa, e insieme spagnolesca e orientale, [...] un'immersione entro una realtà quotidiana violenta e mimica, disperatamente popolare.
What the encounter with the immense Mediterranean capital meant for Caravaggio [...] was an immersion in a violent, t heatrical and desperately popular everyday reality.
There are places we visit, places we live in, and places that somehow become part of our bloodstream.
Napoli is one of those places for me.
I have always loved football. I played it for as long as the rules of my time allowed me to. In the 1980s, being a girl who wanted to play football was not exactly an easy thing. There were limits, prejudices and doors that were not always open to us. Eventually, the federation decided that my playing days had to come to an end. But they could never take football away from me. I needed it in my blood.
So, when I went to Napoli to study, I did something that seemed completely natural to me: I became a season-ticket holder of Napoli. I was a Barça supporter and member, and I still am. But football has never been something I have understood as belonging exclusively to one club. It has always been a way of understanding people, cities and identities. And Napoli taught me that lesson particularly well.
The stadium I knew was the Stadio San Paolo, in Fuorigrotta. Today it is called the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona, a name that could hardly be more appropriate for a place where football became part of the collective identity of an entire city. The stadium was inaugurated in 1959 and was renovated for the 1980 European Championship and the 1990 World Cup.
But statistics, dates and architectural facts tell only a small part of the story. A football stadium is not merely a building. Sometimes it is a city concentrated within concrete walls. And the Maradona is certainly one of those places.
In Napoli, football has never been merely about football. It is about pride, belonging, memory, disappointment, hope and, above all, identity. And nobody embodied that transformation more profoundly than Diego Armando Maradona.
For many Neapolitans, he was not simply a footballer who played for Napoli. He arrived at a moment when the city desperately needed to believe in itself and gave an entire generation something that football rarely gives: the feeling that history could finally belong to them. Maradona did not merely win matches. He restored pride.
I have watched football in several European cities, and one of the things that fascinates me most is that the rules are identical everywhere, but the way people experience the game is completely different.
Napoli is perhaps the most spectacular example. The Neapolitansupporter does not wait to see what happens. The Neapolitansupporter arrives already knowing how the match should feel. The noise begins before the first whistle. Songs, drums, flags, gestures, voices, smoke, colour. The emotion does not gradually build towards the climax. It starts at minute zero.
Napoli has a particular relationship with excess. Everything is intense: food, religion, music, grief, celebration, love, football. Perhaps this is also connected to the landscape itself. This is a city living beside Vesuvius, in a land shaped by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and geological instability. Napoli has lived for centuries with the knowledge that permanence is an illusion. Perhaps that is why celebration can be so absolute. When Napoli won the Scudetto in 2023, the city exploded into celebration. Blue flooded the streets, balconies, squares and façades. Fireworks illuminated the night. The city did not simply celebrate a football championship. It celebrated itself.
Years later, my professional life took me to Lyon. And, once again, football followed me. I became a season-ticket holder of Olympique Lyonnais, although I was particularly fascinated by the women's team, which at that time was the dominant force in European women's football. The atmosphere was different. The passion was there, but it had another language. Lyonnais supporters seemed to me to reflect something of their city: resilient, disciplined, proud and persistent. They did not necessarily need to be the loudest people in the stadium. But they were there. From the first minute to the last. There is something deeply beautiful about that kind of support. It is not an explosion. It is endurance. And perhaps that is another Mediterranean lesson: passion does not always have to be loud to be profound.
Then came Montpellier. And, once again, football became a way of entering a city. Montpellier felt different again. There was something creative, ironic, irreverent and contradictory about its football culture. Perhaps that is partly what I associate with the wider Occitan world: a cultural tradition that has always valued individuality, language, intellectual freedom and a certain resistance to being neatly classified. The football reflected that impression. Not Napoli. Not Lyon. Something else. Another way of being Mediterranean.
Barcelona is my home in football. I'm Catalan. I am a Barça supporter and member, and the way I experience football is perhaps very different from the Neapolitan way. We can be passionate, certainly. But we are often more restrained. We appreciate good football. We want the team to play well. We admire creativity, intelligence, technique and collective movement. Sometimes we celebrate the result, but for many of us, the way the game is played matters enormously. Perhaps that is why Johan Cruyff became so important to Barcelona.
If Maradona restored pride to Napoli, Cruyff gave Barcelona a language through which to understand football. He transformed not only the way Barça played, but the way generations of supporters understood what football could be.
And so, after all these years, I find myself looking at football differently. Napoli taught me about passion. Lyon taught me about resilience. Montpellier taught me about creativity and irreverence. Barcelona taught me about ideas.
Four cities. Four cultures. Four ways of standing in a stadium and believing that the people around you are part of something larger than yourself. And yet, they are not really four separate worlds.
They are Mediterranean cities. They have ports. They have migration. They have memories of other cultures arriving by sea. They have languages shaped by centuries of contact. They know what it means to live beside the water and to look towards another shore.
Football does something remarkably similar. A ball crosses borders without needing a passport. A song can be understood without translation. A blue shirt, a red-and-blue shirt, a white-and-red shirt or a blaugrana shirt can become a second skin.
The rules are the same. The pitch is the same. The goalposts are the same. But the way we love the game is never the same.
And then I realised something. There is no single Mediterranean way of loving football. If you win, even better. If you don't, you competed and gave us a beautiful spectacle. That is the greatness of sport: competing. Winning is wonderful. But sport is greater than victory. You compete, you give your best, and you offer a spectacle to those who came to watch. That is the greatness of sport:competition.
And perhaps there is one more reason why Napoli remains so special to me. When I was young, I wanted to play football. I played until they told me I could no longer do it. Decades later, I was standing in the San Paolo, watching Napoli, thousands of kilometres and many years away from that little girl who simply wanted to play. I sometimes wonder what she would have thought if someone had told her that one day she would live in Napoli, become a Napoli season-ticket holder and watch football in a stadium where an entire city had found one of its greatest symbols. She probably would not have believed it. But she would have understood one thing immediately. Football had followed her. And perhaps that is why I have never really stopped following it.
From Barcelona to Napoli. From Lyon to Montpellier. From one Mediterranean shore to another. Different languages. Different histories. Different ways of singing. But the same beautiful, irrational need to belong.
Because football does not merely unite cities. Sometimes, it teaches us how different cities can be united without becoming the same.
And that, perhaps, is one of the most Mediterranean things of all.
There are cities that you remember through their monuments. Others remain with you through their streets, their smells, their food or the colour of their skies. And then there are cities that you remember through their music. For me, Napoli is one of those cities.
I lived there for a while, many years ago, and although I eventually left, Napoli never really left me. Perhaps this is because Napoli is not simply a city to be visited. It is a city to be listened to.
Napoli sings. It sings in the streets, in the cafés, on balconies and in restaurants. It sings beside the sea and in the narrow alleys of the historic centre. It sings about love, jealousy, happiness, poverty, separation, the sun, the moon and, inevitably, the sea. And nowhere is this more beautifully expressed than in the Neapolitansong.
During the previous chapters of my journey through Napoli, I have written about the extraordinary Neapolitan musical tradition: the tammurriata, the tarantella, the great composers of the Neapolitan School and the glorious tradition of opera at the Teatro di San Carlo. But the canzone napoletana is something different. Opera belonged to the theatre. The tammurriata belonged to popular religious festivals and rural traditions. The Neapolitan song belonged to everyone. It was music that could leave the theatre and walk straight into the streets.
During the nineteenth century, Napoli developed a remarkable tradition of popular song, particularly through the famous song competitions associated with the Festa di Piedigrotta. What began as a religious celebration gradually became one of the great musical events of the city, providing composers and lyricists with a stage on which to present new songs. And something extraordinary happened. The songs became part of the identity of the city itself.
Perhaps it is not surprising that so many Neapolitan songs are connected with the sea. Napoli is a maritime city. Its history, economy, imagination and identity have always been connected to the Mediterranean. The sea is everywhere. It is in the landscape, in the language, in the food and in the stories told by generations of Neapolitans. And it is also in their music.
“Santa Lucia”, one of the best-known Neapolitan songs, evokes the waterfront of Napoli and the picturesque district named after the saint.
“Marechiare” takes us to another corner of the Neapolitan coast, where love and landscape become almost impossible to separate.
“Torna a Surriento” turns the landscape of Sorrento into a plea for someone not to leave.
And then there is “'O sole mio”.
Few songs in the world are as instantly recognisable. Its melody has travelled across continents, languages and generations. Yet its lyrics are written in Neapolitan. That detail matters. Because the Neapolitan song did not simply export melodies. It exported a language, a culture and a way of looking at the world.
There is another reason why the Neapolitan song became so powerful. People left Napoli. During the great waves of Italian emigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, millions of Italians crossed the Atlantic in search of a different life. They carried very little with them. But they carried memories. They carried recipes, religious traditions, family stories and, of course, music. A Neapolitan song could travel much more easily than a monument. It could cross the ocean inside someone's memory.
For an emigrant thousands of kilometres away from the Bay of Napoli, hearing 'O sole mio or Santa Lucia could suddenly bring back a street, a mother, a lover, a harbour or the colour of the Mediterranean. Music became a portable homeland. And perhaps that is one of the reasons why the Neapolitansong travelled so extraordinarily far.
But it would be a mistake to imagine that Neapolitan songs are simply sentimental. They can certainly be passionate. They can be tragic, melancholic and full of longing. But Napoli has never been a city that takes itself entirely seriously. There is irony everywhere. There is humour. There is theatricality. There is exaggeration. There is that wonderful Neapolitan ability to turn tragedy into a story, suffering into a joke and everyday life into theatre. The same city that could produce the sublime music of the Neapolitan School could also produce songs that made people laugh. Perhaps this is why the Neapolitan song feels so human. It does not try to hide life. It celebrates it in all its contradictions.
There is something else that fascinates me about the canzone napoletana. It reminds us that Napoli is not simply an Italian city. It has its own linguistic and cultural identity. Neapolitan is a Romance language with a long history and an enormous literary and musical tradition. Through songs, it travelled far beyond the streets where it was spoken. And music gave the language an extraordinary form of immortality.
A person who has never spoken Neapolitan may still know: “Che bella cosa na jurnata 'e sole…” They may not understand every word. But they recognise the emotion. That is the extraordinary power of music. You do not always need to understand a language to understand what it is saying.
When I think about the Napoli I knew, I don't remember only Pompeii, Vesuvius, Castel dell'Ovo, the narrow streets of the historic centre or the extraordinary churches. I remember the sea. I remember walking towards the port. I remember the sound of the city. And I remember that feeling of being surrounded by a culture that seemed to have music embedded in its DNA. Perhaps this is why Napoli has never really left me. I may have left the city, but somewhere inside me, it is still singing. And perhaps that is the greatest gift of the Neapolitan song. It reminds us that places can become memories, memories can become music, and music can become a way of travelling home.
Even decades later. Even from the other side of the Mediterranean. Even when the city itself is far away. Napoli sings. And once you have heard it, it is very difficult to forget the melody.
And even though you are not Neapolitan by birth -as you are at heart- you will never stop singing these musical gems, just as John Turturro did in Passione.Such cherished memories -Mísia and the eternal Napoli of Era de Maggio...
And this is the secret of the universality of the Neapolitan song -it captivates us and stays with us wherever we go, even those of us who are not Neapolitan.
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