See Naples and Live – 9: Deeply Moving

Galleria Borbonica             ©Nigel Summerley

As I've already mentioned (see this blog 14 October 2021, See Naples and Live – 2: Going Underground), some of the most remarkable sights of Naples are below street level, one of the most unusual being the Galleria Borbonica.

This was originally a huge tunnel commissioned by the Bourbon king Ferdinand II in 1853. His aim was to have an underground link from his palace to the army barracks (and to the Bay of Naples). He lived in troubled times, and the tunnel would ensure that either his troops could come and rescue him and/or that he could escape from the city by sea.

The tunnelling hit so many technical hitches that the king never saw it properly completed.

But in the Second World War it came into its own as a vast air-raid shelter. And in the 1970s it became a municipal dump for abandoned cars and scooters (many of them still there today).

During the war it was fitted with electric lights and extremely basic toilet facilities for the crowds who had to live underground while bombs rained down destroying their city. They had swapped one kind of hell for another...

But one piece of graffiti that one of them left behind summed up their situation – and perhaps also the spirit of Naples.

It reads "Noivivi". Just one word that probably should be two: "Noi vivi". But even then it wouldn't be, strictly speaking, grammatical.

But what it translates as is "Us alive". It must have been a message of defiance and hope and positivity written in the dark and filth and despair of the tunnel. And it meant: "We are still here. We survive."

Bread, Circuses And Patriotism

Is it me? Or is it slightly barking to be spending £50million on a "national commemoration" of the First World War?

Even if the UK could afford it, what exactly is the point? I suppose the old adage about patriotism being the last refuge of a scoundrel could provide some of the answer.

Do we need anything further to remind us that this war was a catastrophic waste of countless lives? Or that war (remember Iraq? remember that Afghanistan has been going on for 11 years?) solves nothing?

The main cause of the Second World War? The First World War.

And here is David Cameron: "This was the extraordinary sacrifice of a generation. It was a sacrifice they made for us, and it is right that we should remember them." 

Perhaps it is enough to remember that this generation was sacrificed by its own military and political leaders.

Perhaps it is also worth remembering that the First World War was 100 years ago. What about the Boer War, the Crimean War? Should we still be commemorating them? And their careless, cruel and incompetent "sacrifice" of more young lives?

If this is the best that the UK government can come up with to re-run the "bread and circuses" effect of the Olympics, it does feel a lot like that scoundrel's last refuge.