ErN
21, entry Jan. 2003
The Confederate Flag in Naples
If you let your eyes
wander along the display of flags mounted over the
entrance to one seaside restaurant in particular, down
at the small port of Mergellina,
you can test your vexillological prowess: Let’s see...
that one is Brazil, there’s France…hmmm, the
Scandinavian ones are confusing, and did you ever notice
that Belgium is the same as Germany except on its side,
but not quite? Say, they even have the new European flag
up and waving. Wait, what’s that? A blue St. Andrew’s
cross with white trim, 13 stars arrayed within the bars
of the cross, all on a field of red…a Confederate flag!
Well, maybe they just
found one and put it up because it’s a nice design. Not
quite. It’s up there for the same reason that it was
painted on the entrance to a bar not far from the
restaurant, a club with the delightfully
oblivious–to–American–idiom name (written in English) of
“Southern Bull” (their translation of toro del sud) The
bull, in this case, is to be understood not as in “What
a bunch of…,” but rather as in “raging," one fine, prime
specimen of which species is superimposed, snorting,
pawing the ground and swollen with pride, on the flag,
itself —a raging bull from the south (of Italy, of
course)! (Alas, as of this writing, that bar has gone
bull-belly up. Maybe it has moved.) Also, now that
Naples has climbed out of the sub-basement of the
Italian soccer leagues, enough fans to form rooting
section are showing up again at home games at the San Paolo soccer stadium
where you will see a number of such flags fluttering in
the breeze. These will have an interesting variation:
the circular logo of the Naples team is positioned at
the center of the cross and inscribed —in English!—
around the perimeter of that logo is the phrase, “The
south shall rise again.” If there was ever a surrogate
symbol for the old Bourbon crest that waved over Naples
for the 130 years before the unification of Italy, the
flag of the Confederate States of America is it.
You don’t need a
degree in cross-cultural anthropology to figure this one
out. As losers in their own war against their own north
in 1861, Neapolitans identify with the defeated south in
the US Civil War. They watch “Gone With the Wind” and
know who the good guys are. Unlike some places in the
southern US today, there is no doubt in Naples as to
whether that flag stays up or comes down. It stays up
—and they ain't just whistlin’ ‘O Sole Mio.
[note: The Neapolitan affection for the Confederate flag also has some other not-so-trivial history behind it. See "Fighting for Two Souths"."
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