" I care for, because I was born there, the world of the alleys and the poor people of my country. Of all its evil I’m depositary and friend, I talk about it because I know them, I talk about the hope to justify them, to show that before turning in guilts Naples’ evils are only pain. Here the chaste sky is not brother of anybody. " Nothing better of the words of the author can explain the content, the meaning of this book, one of the most famous of the postwar period. It is a declaration of love for Naples, splendid and miserable, loving and merciless city, and for its desperate, miserable, fanciful, magnificent inhabitants, able to invent life day by day, loads of a humanity that the strongness of life cannot destroy. In these stories Naples is described how it was (or perhaps how it is; will it be very different now after forty years of distance?), without stereotypes or stupid folklore, without pietism or rhetoric, but with touched, dry, and sometimes amused share.
Naples, me, certain stones and certain people: here it is, maybe what will be found in this book. In the life of every man of pen, storyteller, poet, minstrel or what he is, a moment arrives (that can last a few or a lot) in which his subject decides to resemble him, revealing itself exclusively composed of facts and of faces that belonged him or that grazed him.
I have lived many years away from my country, wanting to signal me in the printed paper world a great deal more accessible from the north; suddenly Naples and my youth and people and evenements, that lived it or that leaned out as soon as they have started to call me, just with an insistence by people from the Neapolitan alleys, tender and peremptory: or better they have let me know that we had never been separated, that I had always brought them with me.
And my sea?
Here it is, that goes and comes on the sand of S.Giovanni di Bagnoli of Pozzuoli; the beach darkens and it is illuminated for this alternate influx of damp as a thoughtful brow; some zones of water appear equally thoughtful, of a dense blue, while others are laughing with white foams, throbbing as throats of birds. It is in this cheerful one , not in that sulky one, that is necessary to drench the taralli. It’s about donuts with lard and pepper, locally famous, to which the sea saltiness confers a more happy , persuasive taste too, I would say undulant as the same motion of the boat. The taralli are eaten on the rowboat, abandoning the oars, for example fixing the houses of Mergellina that trembles and pulsates as if they are painted on a blouse. Now a sea that has eaten so many times in the " taralli " in the molluscs and in the most complicated and exciting shellfishes, something it has left in our blood. Certain days it is enough a roar of fountain, an escape of clouds, a puff of sirocco, to let beat this sea in our wrists, while the fingers instinctively are bent as on the hilt of an oar. We know by heart this sea, we know its slaps and its caresses; we have heard it shout and whisper, behind the steamboats of Capri it was unrolled and it was fervent as the trailing of a bride, now domestic and cordial as water of cistern, we bring it with us, wherever, as tattooed on the breast with rock-cliffs and sirens. Sea and alleys and people of my youth have let me write this book, that is devoted to my mother.
(Freely drawn from Preface to L'Oro di Napoli, Fifth edition Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli Gennaio1998)