It Started In Naples Quotes

Everyone knows the story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. this traveler was on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. I hope that, after reading the following pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain.

Life can have an ironic geometry. Starting from the age of thirteen or fourteen I had aspired to a bourgeois decorum, proper Italian, a good life, cultured and reflective. Naples had seemed a wave that would drown me. I didn’t think the city could contain life forms different from those I had known as a child, violent or sensually lazy, tinged with sentimental vulgarity or obtusely fortified in defense of their own wretched degradation.

The pilgrimage of Italy, which I now accomplished, had long been the object of my curious devotion. The passage of Mount Cenis, the regular streets of Turin, the Gothic cathedral of Milan, the scenery of the Boromean Islands, the marble palaces of Genoa, the beauties of Florence, the wonders of Rome, the curiosities of Naples, the galleries of Bologna, the singular aspect of Venice, the amphitheatre of Verona, and the Palladian architecture of Vicenza, are still present to my imagination. I read the Tuscan writers on the banks of the Arno; but my conversation was with the dead rather than the living, and the whole college of Cardinals was of less value in my eyes than the transfiguration of Raphael, the Apollo of the Vatican, or the massy greatness of the Coliseum. It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind. After Rome has kindled and satisfied the enthusiasm of the Classic pilgrim, his curiosity for all meaner objects insensibly subsides.

We start our meal in the kitchen, right beside the blazing oven, where one of Franco's cooks chops a filet of local grass-fed beef into rough cubes and dresses it with olive oil and wisps of lemon rind. A puffy disc of dough emerges from the oven, which Franco cuts into wedges before heaping it with mounds of this restrained tartare. The union of warm, smoky bread and cool, grassy beef is enough to make me want to camp out in the kitchen for the rest of the night.

In 1934, strongman Fulgencio Batista forced President Grau’s resignation. Then in 1940, Grau lost his bid for the Presidency to his adversary Batista. Four years later in 1944, he did win the election and took office for a four-year term starting on October 10th. After Grau won the election and was the President elect, Batista still in office, blatantly attacked the National Treasury, leaving the cupboards bare by the time Grau was actually sworn in as President. Since Grau and Batista were staunch adversaries, it is highly unlikely that any deal could have been made in 1946 to allow “Lucky” Luciano into Cuba, especially with Luciano having been exiled to Sicily by the United States government that preceding February. Still, Lansky had enough political pull within the Cuban government to prepare for a strong Mafia presence in Havana. In October of 1946, in an attempt to keep his whereabouts a secret, “Lucky” Luciano covertly boarded a freighter taking him from Naples, Italy, to Caracas, Venezuela. Then Luciano flew south to Rio de Janeiro and returned north to Mexico City. On October 29, 1946, he arranged for a private flight from Mexico City to Camagüey, Cuba, where Meyer Lansky met him. Having the right connections, Luciano passed through Cuban customs unimpeded and was whisked by car to the splendid Grand Hotel. Luciano, having just arrived in Cuba, was looking forward to setting up operations. Cuba would actually be a better place than the United States for what he had in mind.

The Coming of the Greeks The southern part of the Italian boot is close to Greece, and several Greek cultures influenced he cultures of Italy. People from the Greek city of Corinth settled on Sicily. Starting about 734 B.C., they built a city called Syracuse on the island’s east coast. The Greeks ruled this city, and the Sicilians were enslaved. The Greeks established other cities on the mainland, in a cluster known as Magna Graecia, which means “Great Greece” in Latin, the language of ancient Rome. A later Greek city, called Poseidonia after Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea, flourished in about 550 B.C. When Italic people conquered the city, which was located south of Naples, they changed its name to Paestum. The ruins of Greek temples there are among the best-preserved Greek structures anywhere.

What you hear from other Italians is that Naples isn’t even Italy. “But that’s a very Italian attitude to start with, a not-quite nation of city-states for whom the next village over will always be the worst place on earth.

Naples, however, did not need buskers: the cacophony of frenzied traffic made its own music with melodic beeping of horns in a repertoire of rhythms and beats reflecting drivers’ moods. Stravinsky might have composed the music as a choreographer might have choreographed the vehicles’ dances – zigzagging, twisting, turning, stopping and starting.

Don Disbro's professional inspirations include his father, Russ Disbro, musician Lars Ulrich and businessman Donald Trump. He hopes to start and sell a business within the next five years. Don Disbro also plans to own two homes, one on the East Coast and another on the West Coast.

That's the way it always starts. By the third day of the convention, half of the delegates were having whispered conversations about which of the others were agents of the Knights of Malta or Opus Dei. There was even a rumor (I couldn't get it confirmed) that some of the delegates hired food tasters, gaunt pitiful children from the slums of Naples, even when they traveled to the other end of town for a sandwich.

Vespasiano was, as Ferrante told Piero de’ Medici, someone on whom the king relied for “information and experience.” Though Ferrante may not have initiated these reports, he certainly welcomed and encouraged them once they started arriving. In November 1467 he wrote Vespasiano to thank him for a letter sent ten days earlier, saying he was gratified to receive his news and urging Vespasiano to be diligent in reporting “the things happening there.”33 In another letter written a few weeks later, Ferrante thanked Vespasiano for supplying “a great deal of diverse news,” then wrote of making a great effort against “those who have disturbed the peace of Italy”—a reference to the Venetians and the ruler of Ferrara, Borso d’Este, who supported the Angevin claim to the throne of Naples, and who was, like so many other involved parties, Ferrante included, one of Vespasiano’s customers.

As I went out of the room Lila started in her half-sleep, she whispered: "Watch me until I fall asleep. Watch me always, even when you leave Naples. That way I'll know that you see me and I'm at peace.