NAPLES -  Naples is a place I love and always moves me every time I go there for work or even for pleasure. I am convinced that it is a place that overflows. And, in this overabundance is contained everything that makes Naples loved and hated, unique in its being full, noisy, welcoming, colourful, fragrant.

 It is a city rich in creativity and in its wonderful vibrancy it knows how to create drive that certainly excites, that brings life, that makes it always on the move. But Naples is the land of contrasts and so, in the face of the positive, the opposite emerges. Naples is plebeian, but it is also aristocratic in many of its features.

 It cannot be denied, of course, that Naples is also the city where illegal activity, lawlessness, and heavy traffic are rife, where the mechanisms of clientelism and undertones of servility cannot be ignored. Naples is one thing but also many things; there are a thousand ways in which this city manifests itself and, probably, each one is linked to the other so much so that it is difficult to distinguish, in a decisive and precise manner, one from the other.

 Can art, culture, the ability to create, the will to work be enough for Naples to truly become the majestic and rich city it deserves to be?

 I believe that a way out must be proposed and implemented and, therefore, it would really be the right thing to give life to what I like to call ‘the self-employed community.’ Certainly the state should intervene with appropriate and measured laws to support those who consider it a duty to be freed from any type of obligation, reduced to the need to ask in order to get a job.

 No more serving politics. No more favouritism because it risks creating a real yet hidden dependency. No more believing that it is enough to just make ends meet to live a decent life. No more asking for a permanent job. If we continue in this way, Naples will never improve.

 Today we have a thousand examples of how Naples isn’t working.

 To the many Neapolitan politicians, but also to those acting on a national level, I ask that it is necessary, vital even, for Naples to grow with its strengths and abilities because it certainly has them: they just have to find the right way to flourish.

 It is no longer enough for anyone to think that Naples simply has to be supported, no longer do we just need incentives and trickle funds. It must be built with solid foundations for a productive, economic, financial, social and cultural impetus that will raise it to become a qualified city in all respects. Today Naples does not live, but only survives. It must not be allowed to die.

                                                                                                                                                     THE WAY THROUGH NAPLES

The sun is high in the skies,

the sheep-like clouds trace

trajectories without peace.

Naples!

Naples is a Paradise

where one cries and laughs,

where the rich man is equal to the poor,

where one who has nothing

never goes hungry,

where steps are counted,

where time is equal to space,

where it seems that everything is in motion,

but in reality everything is still

in a never-ending wait.