—Small Earthquake.
It went unnoticed except among the geologists who
watch for such things up at the observatory on Mt. Vesuvius,
but a few days ago there was a lowly 2.6
earthquake, these days reassuringly called a "seismic
event"—directly
beneath the cone (!) of the volcano. No cause
for alarm. Repeat after me: No cause for alarm...No cause for
alarm...No cause...
—Eastern Naples. So much attention is
given to the urban blight plight of the western suburb
of Bagnoli, that we
forget the problems in the east, the areas of Poggioreale, San Giovanni
a Teduccio and a few other communities. Historically,
they have had their own development, or lack thereof,
and disasters, including the bombardments of WWII.
Post-war development turned the area into the
"industrial part" of Naples, including the
construction of oil refineries. At least some of that
territory is now up for sale; to wit, 38 hectares (95
acres) belonging to Kuwait Petroleum (yes! that's what
the Q8 sign on those filling stations stands for. Get
it?) is up for sale to anyone who will rejuvenate the
area along the lines of a more modern high-tech
industrial park, all the while "greening" the area as
much as possible. Lots of luck.
—University News. There's good news
and bad news. The good news is that six Italian
universities come off rather well in a recent Ranking
of World Universities published by Jiao Tong
university in Shanghai. It is not the only ranking
report in the world and, indeed, such rankings
fluctuate wildly depending on academic discipline
under scrutiny. Nevertheless, the sciences,
information technology, medicine, agriculture and
social sciences are well regarded at the following
Italian universities: La Sapienza in Rome, the
Universities of Milan, Torino, and Pisa, and the "Frederick II" university of
Naples. (Wait for cheers to die down.) The bad news is
that hundreds of freshly printed and bound university
theses were found yesterday, dumped in the rubbish
bins on via Medina, directly in front of the offices
of the commission that is supposed to be dealing with
the current, disastrous garbage crisis in Naples. All
of the theses were from the new "Parthenope"
university. Each thesis represents a few years
of hard work in the life of a young university
student. The episode is already being punned upon
(since "rifiuto" can mean either "refusal/rejection"
or "rubbish") as "il
rifiuto della cultura". No one knows who
dumped them or why. Round up the usual suspects.
—Murder Map.The
Academy of Fine Arts has caused a stink by
coming out with a tourist brochure that shows—instead
of the usual churches, museums and oases for culture
vultures— the locations of the six prominent gangland
murders in 2007 in the eastern section of the city,
now known as the Wild West.
—WWI "Graphic Novel". And don't you
dare call it a "comic book"! Whatever it is, the book
is La Grande
Guerra, Storia di Nessuno—(The Great War, the Story of No
One) and will be on shelves tomorrow to commemorate
the 90th anniversary of the cessation of hostilities
in the War to End All War in 1918. Dialogue is
by Alessandro di Virgilio; the panels are drawn by
Davide Pascutti; the publisher is BeccoGiallo. The aim
is to reacquaint Italians with WWI by following the
adventures of a Neapolitan artilleryman, Corrado Degli
Esposti, nicknamed "Nessuno" because (1) no one can
understand his southern Italian dialect and (2) he is
a "no one" in the ironic sense of the final lines of All Quiet on the Western
Front, when the death of the young German
soldier was so insignificant that it went unnoticed
"All quiet..."). Italy joined England and France on
April 26, 1915 against the Central Powers of German
and Austro-Hungary in order to "get back" Italian
territory from Austria in the north. The young soldier
from Naples goes north to the infamous Carso Front,
where some of the bloodiest battles between Italy and
Austria took place. He is then and there fused into
Everyman, meaning All Italians, the terrible irony
being that it took the slaughters of WWI to fuse Italy
into a nation state.
