Naples has long had a special place in the imagination of the Left. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote a famous 1924 essay on the Mediterranean city, describing its “poverty and misery” and the control the mafiosi of the camorra had on Neapolitans’ daily lives. Here, “nothing is enjoyable except the famous drinking water.”

But to stop at these descriptions would be unfaithful to Benjamin’s intentions. Having described the gritty grayness of Naples, he then explains how its misery and disorder gives life to a vibrant openness, rarely found elsewhere. “Building and action,” Benjamin writes, “interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades, and stairways. In everything, they preserve the scope to become a theater of new, unforeseen constellation. The stamp of the definitive is avoided. No situation is intended forever.”

For Benjamin, as for many before and after him, Naples represents a rather vivid image of urban disorder, but one which has its own internal logic. This is a logic of unchastened, sporadic movement and organic forms of sociability which evade any schematizing analyses, whether sociological or political.