On Baggage
J and I are crammed in a Neapolitan taxi with a Norwegian couple that we met on the high-speed train from Rome to Naples[1]. Kind and brilliant, Lars and Cara were pediatric orthopedic surgeons[2] in Italy for a friend’s wedding. On the train the four of us realized we were all headed to Sorrento via the same ferry across the Bay of Naples, so we decided to share a cab from the train station to the port.
Two of the most chaotic things known to man are a beehive struck with a baseball bat and a Neapolitan taxi ride. Bill Bryson once wrote that Italian drivers “park the way I would if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.”[3] This apt description can be extended to how they pilot moving vehicles, too. There has never been a traffic jam in Naples. If one began the Neapolitans would simply broaden their definitions of “navigable roads” and continue driving. Across sidewalks. Across yards. Across the Bay of Naples itself. When it comes to matters of Neapolitan road travel, where there’s a will there’s a way—and in Naples there’s no shortage of will. Or car horns.
And so J and I found ourselves crammed in a Neapolitan taxi with Lars, Cara, and a taciturn driver of late middle years that I at first assumed had either a death wish, a rational hatred of American tourists, or an irrational hatred of Norwegian tourists. We pulled out of the taxi queue at Stazione di Napoli Centrale to make the 2.5 mile journey to the port at Molo Beverello expecting a… well I don’t know what we were expecting but it wasn’t what we got. In relatively short order we learned a few important details:
Traffic lanes in Naples are theoretical rather than applied
Crossing the line that divides you from traffic going in the opposite direction can be transgressed at will to overtake a slow car
People on Vespa scooters or bicycles are part of a massive underground game of Frogger that only the taxi drivers are in on
Our internal gyroscopes struggling to adjust to the massive oscillations between acceleration and deceleration, lane changes, and questionable life decisions of our taxi driver, the four of us were reduced to communicating using wide-eyed stares and ragged facial expressions as we barreled down the Corso Umberto I. I get carsick easily and was concerned—although not more than J—that I was going to vomit on my husband.
After careening through the roundabout Piazza Giovanni Bovio we hurtled to a stop on the Via Augustino Depretis amongst a confused jumble of cars, transit vans, scooters, and cyclists. A contingent of cyclists packed together in front of our taxi. The cars in front of them advanced and our taxi driver, in a move that would’ve made Jeremy Clarkson proud, just accelerated through them without a second thought. Miraculously the cyclists parted like the Red Sea and no one was injured.
A pause. Then—
“That not only violated several traffic laws in my country, but also the laws of human decency.”
Lars’ one liner is one of those utterances that defines a place and moment in time and marks it indelibly on your consciousness, the Norwegian-accented lilt of the perfectly articulated English making it just that much more memorable. J and I still quote Lars to this day when we encounter anything that remotely violates the laws of human decency. At the time it also threw the larger question of what you can and can’t take with you when you travel into sharp relief.
What can you take with you when you travel? Toiletries, some underwear, a plug adapter, your own preconceived notions and breathtaking ignorance, sure. Perhaps the more interesting question is what can’t you take with you. Nitroglycerin, emotional support peacocks, and agricultural products are out if you’re flying (but not, it turns out, antlers or cremated remains). That information is all available to you before you pack. The full list of things that you can’t take with you oftentimes only becomes apparent well after you’ve arrived at your destination. And the full list includes things that you can’t take with you includes non-material things that, it turns out, are much more important parts of your everyday existence than that set of antlers or the shampoo bottle larger than 3 ounces. You can’t take the thought systems that structure your everyday life and instead have to rely on the systems of your hosts. These include:
Natural law
Traffic law
Laws of human decency
What are your assumptions about navigating a traffic jam? Have any of us ever even considered that our navigation of traffic jams contain assumptions? To the four of us in that taxi the laws of the road did not include “kill or be killed”. But even that characterization of our taxi driver’s comportment is laden with a normativity that doesn’t translate and certainly isn’t universal. When we consider that not one cyclist or Vespa driver was harmed in the making of our arrival at the Molo Beverello port, one has to consider that the laws of the road in Napoli are simply different than the laws of the road that we packed in our bags when we left the USA and Norway.
The chances that no harm came to anyone during that taxi ride just by sheer luck are minimal. The lack of injuries suggests that cyclists and Vespa drivers understand Neapolitan traffic mores a lot better than I do. They parted, after all, like the Red Sea. The laws of human decency in Napoli, it seems, include a pecking order of the road and an understand that those at the top of the automotive food chain will not simply run over two wheeled contraptions that fail to move out of the way— they’ll just come close. The cars (and the bikes and the scooters) understand the boundaries a lot better than we did.
The understanding of boundaries that we have at home is simply not something we can pack in our bags when we travel.
[1] More accurately: Napoli, a contraction of Neapolis, Greek for “new city” and a legacy of the Magna Graecia colonies of antiquity that were spread throughout southern Italy.
[2] Orthopaedic for those of you who are Anglo-Irish and have randomly retained the Latin “ae” in various and sundry words
[3] Bryson, Bill (1992). Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe. NYC, NY: Harper Collins Publishing, Inc.
