The Broken Fountain

Thomas Belmonte

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780231501088
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Poverty in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

As Ida Susser writes in reference to Belmonte's Broken Fountain, "good ethnographies have long lives." This classic of urban anthropology, one of the most acclaimed ethnographies of recent years, offers vivid, literary descriptions of Fontana del Re, an impoverished Neapolitan neighborhood. Belmonte documents the struggles of Neapolitans surrounded by crumbling buildings and economic insecurity. He details family dynamics as well as the working of Naples's informal economy, the day-to-day struggle for economic subsistence, and the intermittent begging and thieving of the young. Taking us from the bustling, vibrant, and gritty streets and alleyways of Naples to the kitchen tables of poor Neapolitan homes, Belmonte resists simplistic depictions of the poor. Instead, he presents subtle, compelling portraits and analyses that capture the emotional, social, and economic lives of his subjects.

In addition to the continuing relevance of his insights into the effects of poverty, Belmonte's willingness to reflect on his own reactions and emotions while in the field has influenced a generation of scholars. In The Broken Fountain, he poignantly describes the experience of living alone in a strange urban environment and his interactions with the residents of Fontana del Re.

This edition includes a foreword by Ida Susser and an afterword by Pellegrino D'Acierno and Stanislao G. Pugliese.

chapter one

Paean to the City

Journal entry, 5/17/75,
last day in Naples

I embraced my friends. . . . As I left to board, the morning sun was bright to blinding. The plane thrust upward, lifting and careening, dipping past the stark crater, and the receding sea-mountains, sunken in their dense silvery mists—on to the green plain, on to Rome, to New York, to future . . .

I ARRIVED IN Naples on a cold, wet, abysmally gray day of early April. I was frightened and apprehensive. I didn’t speak more than a few sentences of Italian, and I was geographically lost. As I followed the crowds from the railroad station up what seemed to be the main boulevard, looking for a hotel, I stole glances into the side streets. The boulevard was modern and bustling, lined with drab turn-of-the-century office and residential buildings. But the side streets, the narrow, winding vicoli, appeared shadowy and broken, far older in architecture and somehow removed from the activity of the main street.

I soon stopped at an inexpensive hotel, grayer than the day itself but near what seemed to be a large working-class zone. I checked in, and after a few minutes of rest in the dull room, I ventured into the old quarter for my first confrontation with the world I had come to study and know.

The darkening streets echoed with the wailing of car horns and phonographs and babies. They were hung with strings of lights and had been built to human, not mechanical, proportions. The small Italian cars were slowed down, pinned and trapped between groups of people, blocked by other cars, or otherwise frustrated in their movement. But there was a rush of humanity, teeming inward and outward from the buildings, flowing through the streets, collecting and pausing in the open spaces that were markets.

Girls walked by me, swaying and chattering, arm in arm, and pairs of young men strutted past close behind them. They also walked arm in arm. Boys shouted and darted in and out of doorways, while mothers hurried about everywhere, clutching at the hands and elbows of their offspring, who in turn held on to their straying younger siblings, in haphazard chainlike formations. And in the midst of this whirl of noise and voices and streaming, rain-muted colors, a boy on a motorbike zoomed up and down, savoring the joy of speed and caring as little for the lives of others as for his own.

The adobe-colored buildings leaned about me like low ravines. They were all festooned with laundry. Some had small, arched entranceways and deep-set windows. Others were more regal in aspect, with great iron-filigreed portals. In all of the edifices there were the same ground-floor cavelike dwellings, the famous bassi. In one of these little homes, which seemed cozy and warm to me, at least five small children were bouncing up and down on the large matrimonial bed, like little clowns on a trampoline.

As I walked I unconsciously stopped and looked at the scenes that drew my attention. People stared back and probably realized I was a foreigner by my clothes. The looks of the old women frightened me. They were the sentinels of that world, on guard for intruders. They sat about in the street on chairs and stools, and peered from doorways. Their faces were hard and embittered and drawn toward the mouth. They looked me over, up and down, as if to ask why I was there and why I would not go away. The faces of the young women were becoming like those of the old. Like the old, many were dressed in black, while by contrast their men were clad in the brightest of colors, stretched tight around the frame.

Stalls were everywhere, selling dry goods and cigarettes, bread, cheese, oil, wine, olives, and vegetables—all of it spilling out onto the cobblestones. The air was faintly scented with the odor of scallions. The colors were riotous. The fish displays impressed me as neat abstractions of black and white and silver. There were rows of white squid and bushels of sleek eels, and stacks of a long flat fish, like cut pieces of silver ribbon. I remember the delicate feet of the clams, the color of pure coral, waving back and forth in their large wooden buckets.

In the days that followed, I wandered through many of the poorer districts of Naples. I made forays into the forbidding labyrinth of dark lanes near the port, as old as the Decameron whose tales they inspired. I explored the brighter section called Sanita, which looked as though it were hewn from a hillside of volcanic rock, then bleached by the sun and the rains of five centuries, so that now it gleamed like a crumbling honey-colored hive in the sun. I was approached with pistols for sale in the sinister market section of Forcella, which sells everything that the species is capable of smuggling. Finally there was the zone of my first exploration, the old Spanish quarter, which at night was dominated by the prostitutes, gathered near their fires, and the geisha-like faces of the transvestites.

In those early days I was apprehending only the surfaces of things, but there is much to be learned from surfaces. From the whole torrent of impressions a hidden figure seemed to be emerging (and receding as fast), a formal if loose arrangement of select qualities and contradictions. In the donning of a sweater, or the sipping of a caffè, there was always the same fine, brisk grace of movement, the same high sense of style. Etiquettes in all domains of behavior were elaborate and subtle, but people were comfortable with their bodies in Naples in ways that would scandalize an American.

What could be more typical of Naples than the occasional lavender veil of wisteria, softening some centuries-old façade? But even the most drab concrete apartment houses, stained with a wash of fading yellow paint and patched with the jagged blue fiberglass of their broken terraces—even these bunkerlike structures were rendered aesthetically unique by the arrangement of cement and metal and plastic, and the dozen or so flowerpots enlivening every balcony. Everywhere there seemed to be the same valleylike topography to the street scenes in the overflow of humanity and stall-produce, whether the walls were made out of homogenized orange fire-brick or gracious, crumbling, pink terra-cotta. Houses and pastry alike were decorated with the same colors, because life in Naples is an event to be celebrated, because existence is a movable, continuing feast.

I came to know the city better in the faces of its people, in their bearing, and in the flow of their speech. Faces were unmasked to me in Naples, fragile or tough, young, or else old, smooth or rough, with no room for middle or blurring categories. Returning to me always were the looks of the old women, hunched and suspecting, with their black steeled eyes glistening with hostility and warning. The sore of poverty was upon Naples, and the marks of age. Broken things littered all the streets of the old quarters, broken doors and furniture, broken walls, broken bicycles and toys. Everywhere I looked, bent, twisted old people moved painfully up the narrow, climbing lanes. Some moved in slow, throbbing, rhythms, and some with light, comically distorted motions. Some moved with bowed somber dignity, and some moved with the birdlike grace of children.

The language of the poor was expressed in shout and song as much as in ordinary talk, and seemed different from the conversational flow I was picking up in restaurants and bars. In effect there are two languages in Naples; and Italian, for the lower classes—if it is spoken at all—takes a low second place to the Neapolitan dialect. One day I went to the rocks by the port to get some sun. All around me there were groups of boys, of all ages, scattered in pairs and clusters. They were stretched out over the rough scorched rocks or diving into the cold blue water, shouting and calling to one another in the elusive, and to me, totally secret language of the dialect. If Italian, as I was learning it, seemed studied and clear and, in its crystalline grace, evocative of feminine beauty, Neapolitan struck me as primitive and flowing and masculine. In Neapolitan the voice is thick and husky and low. It makes women sound mannish. It streams outward, rough and fast, a veritable rapids of speech. Playing within it is a music, a faraway, languorous water music. In even the simplest cry and certainly the commonest, the oft-repeated “Guagliu’, vien’ ‘a ccà” (Boy, come here), there is a complex orchestration of jubilation and longing and grief. For the call begins with an impulsive glad outburst of sound. It falls midway into a plea. It fades and dies in a low grieving moan. I realized intuitively that day, as I was to learn later, how the dialect as an exotic language enhances the fact of community, closing off outsiders. At the same time, it reaffirms, in its exuberant, rising crescendos, the imperative of sociality, while brooding, in its wearied, almost agonized descents, on the inevitable dilemmas of individual isolation.

The poor boys of Naples are the living symbols of its history and the carriers of its traditions, much as altar boys intermediate the flow of grace from deity to worshipper. In the elegant park by the sea, the Villa Comunale, they arrange themselves in circles on the sun-beaten green to play soccer or cards. They jump wantonly into the fountains; they strip naked, comparing and experimenting, heads tossing, their feet dancing as if on hot coals. In the luxuriant late-afternoon haze, a balloon-man floats by like an image from a dream. Wealthy women stroll, serene-faced, with their maids and baby-carriages, like Parisian matrons in a painting by Seurat. All are oblivious to the boys. It is part of divine order that all should be as they are, and it is left to the boys to protect the integrity of the scene. So to my foreigner’s intrusive glance, one young fellow, wet and shivering, looked up at me and laughed and shook his penis furiously, imploring me to come closer for a better look—his companions around him doubling over the jets of water, hopping with glee!

The pulsation of life impressed itself upon me in Naples as it has nowhere else, and not only in the teeming, romantic quarters. I recall walking, a few days after arrival, through the blighted periphery of the city—a confusion of gas stations and junkyards, warehouses and new and old apartment buildings. I came upon a large vacant lot, dusty and barren, circumscribed and enclosed as if it were a prison yard by a disintegrating wall of broken tenements. I noticed some children playing in a corner, when suddenly, appearing as if out of nowhere, a small carnival was in process of setting itself up, a clatter of poles and bells. And no sooner was one ride up, a small, circling ramshackle swing, than it was rushed into operation before any of the others could be assembled. As the children clambered on, their mothers gathered around, laughing and cheering for this diminutive spectacle, in one suddenly animate corner in that barren desert of a place, with the whitish sky above, and the strewn tires and the dust, and the crushed and shattered fragments of glass, like salt, below.

The spirit of place in Naples is the living force of the place. It is resolute and passionate, but it is also unconscious, and insensate to the prod of awareness and reason. As such it can enrage, or it becomes hypnotic. The movement in Naples—the traffic jams, the pushy, shoving crowds, the absence of lines forming for anything, the endless barrage of shouts falling like arrows on the ears, the simultaneous clash of a million destinations and petty opposed intentions—combine into a devastating assault on the senses. Or else the entire scene retreats, slowing and setting finally into a brilliantly colored frieze depicting a grand, if raucous, Commedia. One could pass a lifetime just watching the show and contemplating; and pass away into one’s own contemplations. The tendency of the soul in Naples is toward forgetfulness, to let consciousness fall into abandon, into the simpler mode of unexamined living. But perhaps it was only the yearning of my inner self, removed from the pressures of past and future. How often I wanted to lose myself in Naples, in the endless procession of light tones passing, in the sunsets of rose gold with their light pressed from roses; the city at dusk, set like a fading ivory reliquary, beneath Vesuvius on the sea.

chapter two

Fieldwork in Naples

Journal entry, 7/20/74

. . . they don’t let you be. The self has to fight for survival here, or it strangles in the grip of a hundred stronger wills. How I hate them!

IN THE BEGINNING, the world of the Neapolitan poor seemed impenetrable to me. The whole society seemed impenetrable, but the world of the poor was especially private and self-contained. In my walks through the lower-class districts, I was an unobtrusive observer, a receiver of impressions quietly passing through. But I always felt like an unwelcome intruder and made no attempt to settle in alone. I knew that I would have to find someone from within to serve as a diplomatic intermediary, someone who could introduce me and explain me and reassure people, in their own language, that my intentions were honest.

Ordinary people going about the business of their daily lives aren’t likely to have time for disoriented anthropologists. Strangers far from home tend to encounter strangers closer to home, a kind of meeting of lonely with estranged minds. Since the exogenous stranger is, very often, in his home environment, one of the “endogenous estranged,” the chances for anthropologists and expatriates to make native friends abroad are probably related to the degree of alienation present in the host society. I had cause for optimism.

At first I thought I would find my salvation in a young man (whom I met in a trattoria), with a lean, hawklike look, who told me he was a disillusioned Communist intellectual and promised to help me settle in a poor zone. Giorgio impressed me in his contradictions. His intelligence was keen and incisive but his chronic boredom was depressing to me, and I often had the uncomfortable impression that my main function with him was to provide relief from tedium vitae, a social disease among the allowanced sons of the southern Italian middle classes. Giorgio was intensely concerned with political matters, but he had lost his young man’s will to have a political impact on the world through either politics or sociology. When I last spoke to him, he was impressing himself into the service of a wealthy industrialist as a kind of general factotum.

Giorgio’s English improved over the month we spent chatting together, and I became familiar with middle-class Naples, but to my exasperation he evinced little enthusiasm for the real issue at hand, which for me was establishing myself in my research. He was simply unwilling to mingle with lower-class people in any way. But if he was hesitant to rub shoulders with the poor in an intensely class-divided society, he did want to help me as he could, and introduced me to a great number of people, mostly students and professionals. Through him I met my major field assistant and partner, who became, for the duration of my stay in Naples, my blessing and my curse, my sternest teacher and one of my dearest friends.

Carlo was like Giorgio in many ways. I suppose that was why they didn’t get along; each of them mirrored too well the societal irresponsibilities of the other. (Both were in their late twenties, living on parental money, and neither had completed his university degree.) But if Giorgio was lean like a bird of prey, Carlo was massive like a bull. His size and sheer bulk were menacing, but he laughed at himself often, like a rotund medieval friar. One easily laughed with him.

Carlo was almost as interested in my research as I was. He offered concrete help immediately. He was broadly educated, well-read, and politically sophisticated, but never far from his roots in rocky Lucania. He was ribald and coarse and totally at home in the Neapolitan dialect. He had friends in one of the largest lower-class zones, and wasted no time introducing me and explaining my research intentions to them.

But despite Carlo’s introductions, my first attempt to make entry in a Neapolitan poor district failed. Although I succeeded in making friends with three young working-men and became quite a celebrity at their nightly hangout, I attracted the attention of other people in the neighborhood who decided that my anthropologist pose was a clever disguise. I had to be a police agent or a spy of some sort. There was enough illegal activity going on to make people afraid of me. My new friends were criticized for associating with me, and I was threatened with beating if I persisted in my attempt to live in the area. At the height of the suspicion, when I would arrive nightly at the local bar, my new acquaintances used to sit me down for a caffè and fire questions at me, meticulously interviewing me as to my whereabouts during the preceding twenty-four hours and, it seemed to me, the preceding twenty-four years. My answers only confirmed their worst opinion of me.

“Nice try, Tommaso; you’re a smart operator. If we weren’t Neapolitans, you’d have fooled us easy.” The bartender spoke his slowest, clearest Italian for me, conjuring visions of my skeleton dissolving in a lime vat. Everyone laughed heartily. But Neapolitans always convey unpleasant truths via jokes. I congratulated them all on their peculiarly Neapolitan astuteness and agreed that it would be better for all of us if I limited my fieldwork in their area to an occasional caffè and game of cards.

Both Carlo and I were surprised at my rejection. But we were also struck by the powerful, defensive sense of community which my stranger’s threat had incited—the rapidity of closure in the face of danger, and the refusal to risk and suffer the presence of anyone from the outside who could not be easily accounted for. I was discouraged, but I respected these people for their caution. I thought they must have learned some painful lessons from history.

I was therefore surprised soon afterward when I managed to settle into one of the most infamous corners of Naples, notorious as a foul-smelling den of thieves and whores. I had been walking one night with Carlo, and he showed me the area on a whim, a kind of enclosed, plebian compound, dating from the seventeenth century. Neither of us expected to discover that an apartment was available, a damp little grotto of a place with low, arched, curving walls and a balcony looking down onto the street space and courtyard below. Carlo introduced me as his student-cousin, come from America to study local customs on a scholarship. I agreed to pay the somewhat exorbitant rent. When I signed the lease the next afternoon, I was sure that the landlord, a shrewd local shopkeeper, thought me stupidly naive to commit myself to live in a place like Fontana del Re, so named for the battered remains of a fountain carved into one of the corners. He warned me in somber, paternal tones not to speak to anyone. But no sooner had I finished signing than a young fellow in his late teens leaped up into my room, bounding over the balcony railing, to find out who I was and ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Broken Fountain in Retrospect
• Foreword: The Anthropologist as Humanist Ida Susser
• Chapter 1. Paean to the City
• Chapter 2. Fieldwork in Naples
• Chapter 3. The Neapolitan Personal Style
• Chapter 4. Tragedies of Fellowship and Community
• Chapter 5. Family Life-Worlds
• Chapter 6. The Interpretation of Family Feeling
• Chapter 7. The Triumvirate of Want
• Chapter 8. Reactions to a Disordered World
• Chapter 9. Conclusion: The Poor of Naples and the World Underclass
• Epilogue: Return to Naples
• Notes
• Afterword: Dangerous Supplement
• Index