Commedia del arte on the bus

Had a wonderful performance of commedia on the bus from Napoli to Pozzuoli last week. A grumbling roar which could have signalled the vocanic crater underneath the tyres we were travelling over was moving, was in fact the women of the bus harranguing a twenty year old guy who had decided to start smoking. He was in no condition to respond to any subtlety. I don't believe that Neapolitans know much about subtlety in speech anyway. Anyway the cigarette smoke was getting stronger and the women's roar of complaint was getting louder. The driver stopped the bus to deal with the situation which was getting ugly. He brought the bus to a halt and the old man opposite me looked as if he would go flying off his seat. He was pretty drunk and it was only 11.30 in the morning. He looked as if he had fallen over once too often and had a bloodshot eye which may no longer have been working. The flaps of his skin on his face folded over one another and his big nose stuck out. He smiled blearily at the situation precariously perched on the edge of his seat. The mamas were in full uproar and the bus driver came to talk to the young man. He coaxed him to the front of the bus -probably for his own protection. The smoker threw the cigarette out of the door and the bus went off. The young man complained and laughed and giggled and the driver smiled. The young guy was obviously on some strong substance and was unsteady on his feet. He had hair on the top of his head but the sides and back were shaved which added to the strange performance. And the old guy nodded and smiled knowingly and yet totally uncomprehendingly. When the old guy reached his stop he got up, took two rhytmic steps forward, one back, one forward, two back, one forward, one back one forward and eventually he got momentum going to get off. The Bedlam bus seems to typify so much of life on the street here. People really are living on the edge. Graffitti even covers the pedestals of the famous statues. Shop windows are cracked. Dog shit is conspicuoulsy in the very middle of the pavement and everyday communication sounds like the prelude to a physical assault. It is difficult to believe that civilisation has been around here for two and a half thousand years but it is easy to understand why Holmer and Virgil located the gateway to Hades here.You can smell the sulphur bubbling through the fissures in the earth at certain points smelling like rotten eggs. Monte Nuvento - the new mountain or hill is new because it was suddenly thrown up overnight one night in the sixteenth century. This area is probably the most volcanically active and seismically unstable in the whole of Europe. It could blow at any time and nobody would be able to predict it. As you go about your daily business you can't help but think of the citizens going about their normal daily business totally oblivious to their imminent suffocation, petrification and incineration as Vesuvius, just around the corner blew its top and submerged them all.