If Naples took an example from Sanità (one of the coolest neighborhoods in the world)

The neighborhood is very different from the one with no hopes of “Nostalgia”. A Sunday morning to discover that reality is far better than fiction

Medical malpractice, but health care….

No, don’t hope for it. Today you won’t read about medicine, clinics or lawyers and suspicious deaths. No, that would be too easy.

The title? It’s just a play on words.

Today we talk about art. Of cinema and Nostalgia.

Naples has always been written and talked about, Goethe and Dickens have drawn the streets with their Travels in Italy, the pages of Saviano and dozens of contemporary directors have told about its rawness.

Odi et amo, quare id faciam nescio, sang Catullus. Naples is not a woman, but in many ways perhaps it inspires the same feelings. On the other hand, in her soul there is a mermaid.

Mixed feelings, a deep love mixed with anger and pain that I recently found in the last film I saw at the cineforum: Nostalgia, by director Martone.

Two hours of projection that hit me and almost knocked me out, like the wave of a raging river, merciless and overwhelming.

A passionate, beautiful and very painful insight into the heart of Naples. A photograph of a people who have no hope and redemption, a neighborhood that, suffocated by its own miasma, also kills the nostalgia for a denied youth.

I am not here to review the film, which I repeat, it is very beautiful, but it describes the Sanità district with dark and cruel colors, without opening any glimmer of possible salvation. I came out of the cinema, embittered and resigned to the fact that time passes, everything changes in order not to change anything.

Yet cinema tells stories, which are not true, at times they are plausible, they resemble reality, they imitate it, or they distort it, exaggerate it, or subvert it.

So much is cinema, it is fiction.

For this reason, yesterday morning I took the courage in both hands and I decided to take the family to explore the health district. I wanted to see with my own eyes what Martone had described.

I walked down from Via Salvator Rosa, and took the lift that leads directly from the Capodimonte bridge to the Sanità district. I had a hint of fear, of doubt, it was the first time I entered that neighborhood, because as a young man I had no friends from that area, and therefore it was not part of my usual tours.

Well, I arrived directly in the square where the first scenes of the film took place, and I immediately experienced a short circuit, I had images in mind and I saw others, I remembered the grim and desperate atmospheres and I was faced with a throbbing heart of busy people together with hundreds of curious eyes observing in ecstasy a world unknown to them. Tourists. Dozens, hundreds of tourists from all over the world with their eyes turned upwards to admire the Basilica of Santa Maria della Sanità, the alleys, the palaces of the eighteenth century, or sitting at one of the many bars or restaurants to enjoy a glass of wine or a pizza.

Something was wrong.

But is health care something else?

I entered the Basilica, and I met the boys of the La Paranza association, a group of young people from the district who focused years ago on culture and love for the artistic heritage of the district, with the aim of relaunching the image of health. I saw an industrious people, proud of their origins, who had in their eyes the joy of sharing with the world the beauty of their city, the secrets of the catacombs, the wonders of the effigy of Mary who cured the physical and spiritual ills of the faithful and who in fact, he gave the name to the whole neighborhood; the curiosities of the nobles buried and depicted as skeletons in their most significant poses before greeting our world. These guys are the emblem of a society that, despite all the premises, manages to change, to redeem itself, these guys, helped without doubt, by priests and lay people of good will, are the engine of a wind of renewal that represents a valid alternative to the underworld. They managed to make the Rione Sanità one of the coolest neighborhoods in the world, as Time Out magazine wrote. of tourist guides that show the wonders of the Palazzo dello Spagnolo or Palazzo Sanfelice. I saw all of this, I saw the locals with the tourists sitting at the bars, and others doing the shopping, I ate fried pizza in the street with my children and my wife, I bought spices and a bit of fun at a of the many market stalls. I enjoyed the real life of a people too often the victim of prejudices and their own original sins. And then, after a good coffee, I went home.

Reassured.

Thinking, what if Healthcare could heal the whole city?