Naples

Spirited Away: Alcohol Distillation’s Unlikely Birth on the Amalfi Coast

On a stormy night sometime in the mid-9th century, as the legend goes, a Greek pilgrim named Pontus sought refuge underneath a Roman aqueduct in Salerno, some 50 kilometers south of Naples along the Amalfi Coast. With rain pounding down on the town and debris flying everywhere, Pontus took a terrible blow to his arm and found himself gravely wounded. Just as he sought treatment for his wound, Pontus noticed that a fellow Italian traveler called Salernus was also wounded, but applying seemingly innovative dressings to his injury. Fighting back superstitions and embracing his medical curiosity, Pontus approached Salernus to inspect his bandaging technique. As Salernus explained his methods to the Greek, two additional travelers, Helinus, a Jew, and Abela, an Arab, passed under the same aqueducts.

Naples

Building Blocks: In Naples, There’s Something in the Air

In the early 18th century, before there was the Spinning Jenny, the Cotton Gin and the steam engine, a new machine was making waves in Gragnano, the grain capital of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies. It was the torchio, the pasta extruder. And it would radically and permanently change the diet of Italy. Just beyond Naples, the ancient Roman town of Gragnano, whose very name indicates an abundance of grain, was tentatively beginning to mechanize the production of dried pasta, theretofore a luxurious oddity throughout the Italian peninsula. Local entrepreneurs gradually capitalized on what their forbearers had known for several millennia – not only was Gragnano ideally situated due to its storied cultivation of durum wheat and semolina, but it also offered access to thirty water mills. Perhaps even more curiously Gragnano offered something very rare at the time: the perfect air for drying pasta.

Naples

Building Blocks: Naples’ Rare Earth

Several thousand years ago, or so the story goes in Naples, Lucifer and Jesus had a massive showdown in the rarified kingdom of heaven. After a raging session fueled by sibling rivalries, and which likely included satanic petulance and the occasional errant lightening bolt, God, as any parent of battling children can grasp, had had enough of the celestial brawling. One can almost imagine Jesus yelping, “He started it,” as Lucifer tosses a fireball in his direction. So God cast Lucifer into the depths of hell – consigning him to an eternity of fire, brimstone and heat. (In the original pagan legend, this quarrel was between Bacchus and Pluto; after Christianity swept across the region, Neapolitans changed the names of the main characters, but the story remained the same.)

Naples

Building Blocks: In Naples, A Taste for Fire

Once the Christmas nativities are packed away, after the New Year’s cotechino sausage and good luck lentils have been eaten and the Befana witch has filled epiphany stockings with candies, something strange happens in the old center of Naples. It erupts in flames. As the January sun sets, just as the days begin to lengthen, Neapolitan men light small bonfires in the dark alleys and decadent piazzas that lurk beyond Via Foria, the ancient boulevard that slices through the town’s Forcella and Rione Sanità quarters. The fires begin small. Men merrily douse bits of the Gazzetta dello Sport with gasoline, searching specifically for errant wrinkled pictures of Higuaín, loathed former Napoli footballer traded to Juventus.