IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF LUIGI ALFREDO
Night Train to Lisbon, by Pascal Mercier, is one of my favourite books. Some time after I first read it we booked a holiday in the Portuguese capital, which prompted a reread and a list of locations mentioned. As part of our trip I made a point of seeking out some of these, and felt a sense of physical connection to the central characters of the novel, a way of making their thoughts a little more real.
Tomorrow morning (at some disgustingly early hour...) we head off to Naples for the first time. The choice of destination was arrived at through various factors to do with price and convenience, and to go somewhere we hadn't been before. It was a late decision, a sudden urge to go somewhere different, and the booking was only made on the 17th of this month. Three days before that we had watched the first episode of an Italian TV detective series, Inspector Ricciardi (Il Commissario Ricciardi in the original), and found it interesting. On the 17th we watched the second installment, having booked our holiday, and only then twigged the connection - the series is set in the city we were heading for, albeit in a 1930s scenario.
Since when we have watched an episode every evening, viewing the finale last night (there are fourteen episodes, of around two hours each, spread across three series). Those daily visits to that (fascist dominated) world gained added interest from knowing that we would soon be walking along the modern version of those scenes. (The series was largely filmed in the city itself.) By the end of our viewing we had formed emotional attachments to several of the characters, and here is an opportunity to keep them going. So a part of our thinking now includes taking in some of those sights which cropped up in the drama (our hotel is, coincidentally, located on a street that gets several mentions) and seek out that same sense of connection mentioned above. The streets of Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi. But without the shadow of Mussolini's thugs...
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