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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.
Enrico Caruso, Roberto Murolo, Sergio Bruni, Renato Carosone, Mario Merola...
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 Neapolitan song.
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 Neapolitan song 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.
More information: La Voce di New York
There are places that you go to, and once is enough.
And then there is Napoli.
John Turturro
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