Sunday Short Story: Mischievous Gnomes in the Mezzogiorno, Italy, 1935

In a ‘shadowy land, that knows neither sin or redemption from sin’:

At Grassano there was a young workman, about twenty years old, Carmelo Coiro, a husky fellow with a square sun-burned face, who came often in the evening to drink a glass of wine at Frisco’s inn.  He was a day labourer in the fields or on the roads, but his dream was to be a bicycle racer…at this time Carmelo was one of a group of road-menders who were repairing the road to Irsina along the Bilioso, a malaria-ridden stream that flows past Grottole into the Basento River. During the hottest hours of the day, when work was impossible, the road-menders used to go to sleep in a natural cave, one of many dotting the whole of the valley, and formerly a brigand hideout.

The Short Read: Sicily – a Ball, November 1862

The ballroom was all golden; smoothed on cornices, stippled on door-frames, damascened pale, almost silvery, over darker gold on door panels and on the shutters which covered and annulled the windows, conferring on the room the look of some superb jewel-case shut off from an unworthy world.

It was not the flashy gilding which decorators slap on nowadays, but a faded gold, pale as the hair of certain Nordic children, determinedly hiding its value under a muted use of precious material intended to let beauty be seen and cost forgotten. Here and there on the panels were knots of rococo flowers in a colour so faint as to seem just an ephemeral pink reflected from the chandeliers.

A short Naples story for Sunday

‘It was an unforgettable moment. We went towards Via Caracciolo, as the wind grew stronger, the sun brighter. Vesuvius was a delicate pastel-coloured shape, at whose base the whitish stones of the city were piled up, with the earth-coloured slice of the Castel dell’Ovo, and the sea. But what a sea. It was very rough, and loud; the wind took your breath away, pasted your clothes to your body and blew the hair off your forehead. We stayed on the other side of the street in a small crowd, watching the spectacle. The waves rolled in like blue metal tubes carrying an egg white foam on their peaks, then broke into a thousand glittering splinters and came up to the street with an oh of wonder and fear from those watching.’

From My Brilliant Friend by the cult Italian writer Elena Ferrante who writes on Naples.  As this article, Italy’s Great, Mysterious Storyteller, explains:

That Ferrante is a pseudonym, has no public presence, has never been seen, gives her a strange place in Italy, a country obsessed with image, where if you aren’t on television, you barely exist’.

Image:  Storm on Naples seafront during the America’s Cup 2013.