Years ago, when Greg Bennick and I organized the Legacy Project, it all started around a single, simplistic question. What’s it like to grow up in Oswiecim, Poland, next door to Auschwitz? Or, to put it another way, what does normal look like when you spend your life to one of the universal symbols of humanity’s capacity for unfathomable evil? We were planning this in the aftermath of 9/11, when we realized that we, as Americans, had no understanding of how to respond to a national tragedy of this magnitude–nothing like it had happened over the course of our lives. However, many other countries unfortunately had this painful experience, and so we hoped to learn from them.
Over the course of these two days, it has been difficult to not return to that train of thought, albeit from a slightly different angle. What’s it like to live in the shadow of a cataclysmic natural disaster–and to realize that someday–probably many years from now, but not necessarily–it will happen again?
Leaving Pompeii, I follow backroads to the southwest, working my way to the coast. Contrary to my expectations, it didn’t take centuries for Romans to return to Pompeii. On the contrary, archaeologists this year discovered new evidence to show that some residents returned not long after the eruption. Some, of course, saw an opportunity–all kinds of valuables had been abandoned in the mad dash from the town. Others, though, faced the same plight as many residents of New Orleans after Katrina. They simply couldn’t afford to move and start over. As the researchers explained, “Judging by the archaeological data, it must have been an informal settlement where people lived in precarious conditions, without the infrastructure and services typical of a Roman city.” Given that only 10% of the residents of Pompeii died in the eruption, there were many survivors out there, so it makes sense that some sought to persevere. Even then, it was a short-run thing, and eventually Pompeii was abandoned completely, until its rediscovery in the late 16th century.
Their fate has not been a warning to today’s Italians. Roughly 800,000 people live on Vesuvius’s slopes today, and perhaps three million reside within the likely blast zone. How do people reconcile this choice? One answer points to the ambivalent relationship many have with the volcano; for all the destruction it has wrought, it has also become a source of wealth. Tourism, for sure, but also agriculture. The volcanic rock retains water quite well, while the soil is exceptionally fertile and mineral-rich thanks to those past eruptions, allowing for the production of specialty vineyards and tomatoes.
A coastal walk leads me to Castellammare di Stabia, where the real work begins. I plunge southward into the trees and immediately ascend, launching with no preamble into the climb over Monte Faito. Instead of wrapping around the Amalfi Coast, I’m cutting straight over the top, and it’s an unforgiving experience, pushing from sea level to 1150m without any break from the uphill. Most of the time, I’m immersed in a green cocoon, but occasionally the trees part ways, and Vesuvius is right there, attentive, reminding me that I’m not yet in the clear.
Naples, too, is back there. I’ve been reading Norman Lewis’s Naples ‘44: An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth, and it’s a delight, very much in the vein of Catch-22. It’s a diary account of Lewis’s time stationed in and around Naples between September 1943 and October 1944, just as the Allies pushed the Nazis out of Southern Italy. Nearly two millennia after Vesuvius blew its top, the Neapolitan people had found whole new ways to suffer, and Lewis manages to balance a wry, sardonic wit with genuine compassion. He spotlights one of the major coping mechanisms employed by the locals, centered on the popular saint, San Gennaro. As Lewis explains, “San Gennaro had confined his miracle working to Naples for fourteen centuries… [his] job had been to keep the fires of Vesuvius at bay, but only on behalf of Naples. During this period Resina and Torre Del Greco, only five and seven miles respectively down the coast, had been overwhelmed by lava and rebuilt seven times.”
Allow me to backtrack for a moment. San Gennaro, or Januarius, was the bishop of nearby Benevento and is believed to have been martyred during Diocletian’s persecution in 305. One legendary account suggests that Gennaro had taken an active role in hiding Christians from Diocletian, until he was caught, at which point he was condemned to be tossed to wild bears. Lucky for him, the sentence was later downgraded to simple decapitation. But really, we have practically no credible evidence about his life.
Here’s the important part: three times each year, San Gennaro renews his relationship with the Neapolitan people–first in May, then on 19 September, and once more on 16 December. (That last date is the time when, in 1631, Vesuvius erupted and Gennaro was called upon to save the city. Naples went unharmed.) He does this in a very particular way. One of the city’s most prized relics is a pair of small, sealed ampoules holding his blood. The larger of the two preserves a significant amount of blood, nearly 60ml, though over the centuries this has, of course, dried. Most of the year, both ampoules are kept in a bank vault, with the keys held in the safekeeping of city luminaries, like the mayor. On those three special days, though, the vials are brought from the cathedral to the Monastery of Santa Chiara, where the archbishop leads intense prayers, after which he holds up the ampoule to reveal the glorious miracle–the blood has liquified once again. They are kept on display for the next eight days, periodically being turned by priests to show the movement of the liquid.
Nothing is guaranteed, though. Lewis writes on March 25 that, “Fear is expressed that the blood of San Gennaro may refuse to liquefy this year, and that such a failure might be exploited by secret anti-Allied factions and trouble-makers to set off large-scale rioting of the kind that has frequently happened in Neapolitan history when the miracle has failed.” He proceeds to discuss the resurgence of superstition in the city, as a coping mechanism of sorts for the beleaguered people. “Everywhere there is a craving for miracles and cures. The war has pushed the Neapolitans back into the Middle Ages. Churches are suddenly full of images that talk, bleed, sweat, nod their heads and exude health-giving liquors to be mopped up by handkerchiefs, or even collected in bottles.”
I realized, much too late, that I would be passing through Naples just a couple days after San Gennaro’s Day, on 19 September. I was pleased to learn, though, via EWTN Vatican, that the blood liquified! The archbishop declared that, “Today Naples stands still like the sea when the wind dies down. It is an inner calm, the feeling of a day of celebration, of faith, of identity.” As the miracle was observed, he explained, Naples itself changes: “The streets become naves, the balconies become choirs, the city becomes an entire cathedral. At the center, not an object, but a sign: a vial, a blood, a name — Januarius. Here we celebrate not a trophy but a living memory: that of the martyrs whom Love has not abandoned.” And lest he leave it at that, he extended the miracle in Naples to an ongoing tragedy that is of great concern to many Italians: “It is the blood of every child of Gaza that is on display in this cathedral.” What Lewis (and I) might regard as superstition, though, the archbishop suggests is something else entirely: “Let us look at that sign not with superstition but as an invitation to stake everything on entrustment.”
Standing atop Monte Faito, where the funicular–when operational–unloads passengers, I bade farewell to Vesuvius and Naples. The trail finally leveled out, and I moved through a densely wooded section, a muffled quiet prevailing over all. When the trail finally disgorged me on the opposing side of the mountain, I was astonished at what I saw. Unspooling beneath me was the Amalfi Coast, every bit of it, though most of it coated in clouds.
I’m terrible at savoring a view, but even I froze in my tracks and proceeded to admire the panorama from every possible angle. Even when I finally eased my way into the treacherous descent, I repeatedly halted mid-step and resumed the admiration anew. With steep cliffs plunging all around me, the trail was forced to take a circuitous approach on the way down, looping further to the southeast, before finally doubling back towards Positano. Well before I reached the city, I could hear the “Macarena” blasting off one of the yachts off the coast, a reminder that you can’t buy good taste.
And a reminder, as well, that another way to respond to disaster is with luxury and comfort, an unending bacchanalian celebration. The rain picked up as I trudged down, to the dismay of the beautiful people in Positano, many of whom suddenly found God inside the unusually crowded church. The restaurants swelled, as few other sources of shelter exist–the gift shops lack the interior capacity–and the beach emptied out completely. Walking around Positano, for me, was like skimming through a teenager’s Tiktok–just a wildly disorienting and distasteful experience.
While the tourism boom wouldn’t hit Positano until after World War II, even during the Roman Empire this was a place of escape, of recreation and delight. A small collection of luxurious Roman villas have been excavated, undoubtedly owned by elites. Many years later, in the 18th century, Baroque villas took over the eastern slopes. By World War I, the artists had taken over, with figures like Clavel, Escher, Massine, and Kovaliska establishing themselves here. But today? As one Vox writer noted, in an article titled, “The Instagram capital of the world is a terrible place to be,” her tour guide said, “there is no history here, it is just for relaxing and for pictures.”
I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I recognize the beauty, but even that strikes me as overblown, in comparison to the Ligurian coast. The impossibility of movement, the crush of luxury good shops, and the dearth of open breathing room make it feel like the most expensive brand of claustrophobia ever invented.
Fortunately, though, I had a handful of kilometers left to cover, so I pushed on, through a driving storm. The Sentiero degli Dei is a famous walking route that kicks in just outside of Positano. I was pretty worn out by this point, so the many, many steps leading up to the path were a grueling experience, but for all that I was basically having a victory parade in comparison to the steady stream of dour faces that were coming back towards me. Most people, I suspect, take the bus out a ways, pick up the Dei further east, and then walk back to Positano. And many of those are clearly not avid hikers, as they were thoroughly unprepared for the strenuous walking and the incoming weather. People were soaked, stumbling, and often giving one another the cold shoulder. Every single person asked me for intel. Were they close? Was it hard? Was there any alternative? A bus maybe? In the end, they had to meet their personal disasters in the only way they could, given the circumstances–with grim determination. Meanwhile, I was met at my accommodation with homemade biscotti, an espresso, and ice cold fizzy water.
Sleep did its work and I rose the next morning ready to subject my body to new horrors–more specifically, 2700 meters of descent. The day wasted no time in chipping into that total, winding around the cliff face and sending me down one step after another. The terrain is demanding enough, but as on the Ligurian coast, it’s the dominance of stairs that makes the walking here such an ordeal at times, maximizing the difficulty of each meter gained or lost. Still, I was refreshed, and I flew through the early kilometers with relative aplomb, finding myself at sea level just in time to hit Amalfi’s grocery store.
The town of Amalfi, some might say, is the site of a very different kind of disaster. In Karl Marx’s “The German Ideology,” the author credits (or blames) Amalfi for its role in the early stages of European capitalism, stemming from the central part it played in a trade network linking the Byzantine and Arab regions with Italy. It’s hard to imagine this small, charming town, nestled into a crook in the rocky coast, at its peak with a population around 80,000 people–even with all the tourists packed in today. Forget capitalism, though. For Amalfi, the disaster came in 1343, when a tsunami practically wiped it off the map. Never again would it return to a position of international significance.
I continued along around sea level, popping up and down more stairs, winding around the different layers of roads wedged into the hillside, and passing through the neighboring towns of Minori and Maiori. And then the day’s significant climb kicked in–not quite as intensive as the ascent of Monte Faito, but wearying enough, especially coming much further into the day’s walk. At its peak stood the Shrine of Maria Santissima Avvocata, founded in 1585 after the appearance of the Virgin Mary before a shepherd boy, Gabriele Cinnamo. This ultimately drew the attention of the monks in Camaldoli–on the Via di Francesco and the Cammino di Sant’Antonio–who founded a priory here. Napoleonic conquest led to the suppression and destruction of the complex in 1807, but a group of Benedictine monks brought it back a few decades later. Because when you’re faced with disaster, you always want to make sure you have an advocate around to have your back.
And I certainly found it miraculous that the correspondingly large descent from the mountaintop had few steps at all, instead following a delightfully steady footpath all the way down. I could see my destination–the sprawling beach city of Salerno–for hours, so the final approach was no surprise, but it was a relief nonetheless to put these two challenging mountain days behind me, stunning as they were. Salerno represented release.
For Lewis, however, Salerno was synonymous with disaster. As they sat in ships off the Italian coast, Lewis and his fellow soldiers learned that an armistice had been signed with Italy and they would be landing in Salerno the next day. What follows is a chaotic scene. Right from the start, Lewis and the rest of the intelligence officers are told that, “despite all the agents we had assumed to be working for us in Italy absolutely no information had come out regarding the situation. The next day, as one load of men after another made landfall, Lewis marveled at it all: “This was the greatest invasion in the war so far–probably the greatest in human history–and the sea was crowded to the horizon with uncountable ships, but we were as lost and ineffective as babes in the wood.”
Conditions did not improve. Lewis and his small British contingent were implanted within a larger American force, which was mostly composed of troops “who were utterly raw and had been shipped out here straight from the eternal peace of places like Kansas and Wisconsin.” And they were in no way prepared for a proper military engagement. “Armed hillbillies were constantly jumping out from behind a hedge to point their rifles at us and scream a demand for an answer to a password that nobody had bothered to give us.” For all the confusion, though, at least one part of their mission was clear: “we were told by Americans belonging to the 45th Division that they had been ordered by their officers not only to take no German prisoners, but to use the butts of their rifles to beat to death those who try to surrender. I find this almost incredible.”
Conditions did, however, deteriorate. “Outright panic now started and spread among the American troops left behind. In the belief that our position had been infiltrated by German infantry they began to shoot each other, and there were blood-chilling screams from men hit by the bullets.” Lewis summed up the whole experience this way: “Official history will in due time set to work to dress up this part of the action at Salerno with what dignity it can. What we saw was ineptitude and cowardice spreading down from the command, and this resulted in chaos. What I shall never understand is what stopped the Germans from finishing us off.”
My arrival in Salerno was much less dramatic, but it wasn’t entirely smooth. I had a room booked in the city hostel, one that promised a “mountain view.” Instead, I was given a hostel bed, resulting in a back-and-forth (and forth-and-forth) between the hostel staffer, his boss (existing solely in Whatsapp), and me. I should note that the night before I had planned to camp, but the heavy rain all afternoon, and the possibility of overnight thunderstorms, sent me scurrying for any sort of affordable spot outside of Positano. Miraculously, I found one, almost immediately on my route, for 40 euros. I couldn’t believe my luck, but I also rued the expense. In any case, let’s get back to Salerno. Once the hostel folks had determined they couldn’t deliver a room, they asked me what could be done to balance the scales. I said they should give me the bed for free and reimburse the room cost. They quickly agreed. The cost of the room? 40 euros.
While Salerno gets top billing, the American forces made landfall all along this long, flat chunk of coast running southward from Amalfi. There’s little to be said about the experience, beyond some mild delight over the lack of luxury developments, and some extended stretches of beach-walking that were possible as a consequence. Lewis himself made landfall around the same place that I turned inland, leaving the Mediterranean behind until I cross it to Sicily in a few weeks. That resulted in a jarringly evocative scene, in which Lewis describes looking “out into an open space on a scene of unearthly enchantment.” Indeed, while trying to find their bearing and avoid a surprise attack by whatever German forces might remain on the scene, they had stumbled into the great Greek ruins of Paestum, “pink and glowing and glorious in the sun’s last rays.”
I didn’t have to fear for my life, but I did have to pay 15 euros for my Paestum experience, but it was worth it. The size of these stunning Greek, Doric temples outstripped my imagination, and I loved being able to tromp around the interior of the two largest surviving structures. Having made the sweaty, exposed, kilometer-long walk from the coast to the ruins, I was surprised to learn that it had been a port town. Not only did those waters silt over, doing damage to the then-Roman economy, but a nearby watercourse overflowed its bounds, transforming the surrounding land into an infectious swamp. The town held on for a while, but eventually the people took to the hills–many of them ending up right where I did for the night, in Capaccio.
It’s a little uncharitable to have spent these three beautiful days writing about disasters, but that Icarus-like quality runs through this region–and that’s even without discussing the Camorra. Lewis had a similar reflection, months into his stay in this area. “These people,” he wrote about the Neapolitans, “must be thoroughly sick and tired of us. A year ago we liberated them from the Fascist Monster, and they still sit doing their best to smile politely at us, as hungry as ever, more disease-ridden than ever before, in the ruins of their beautiful city where law and order have ceased to exist. And what is the prize that is to be eventually won? The rebirth of democracy. The glorious prospect of being able one day to choose their rulers from a list of powerful men, most of whose corruptions are generally known and accepted with weary resignation. The days of Benito Mussolini must seem like a lost paradise compared with this.”
