Only in Naples Read Free Page A

waterfront of Mergellina, the port where motorboats leave for Capri and Ischia. It is surrounded by palm trees, and guarded by several open tanks where smiling Italian soldiers with Uzis keep an eye out for terrorists. In 1996, an enormous American flag and a photo of a very pink President Clinton welcomed visitors to U.S. territory.
    My job at the Consulate was low stress, to say the least. I was working in the political office, and fortunately there wasn’t much political tension between the United States and southern Italy in the late 1990s. Plus, I was unpaid, and the only intern at the Consulate. My co-workers were a mix of Italian locals with those sweet no-end-in-sight contracts, and U.S. foreign service employees, who were thrilled to be posted in a place like Naples, where they could relax and breathe easy before they got sent to Darfur. I usually came in around 9:30; the first cappuccino break started at about 10:15.
    “Are you planning on taking the foreign service exam?” the Americans in the Consulate asked me. In truth, I didn’t have any idea what I wanted to do career-wise. Both my parents had degrees in international studies, so I thought I might be interested in becoming a diplomat (or, in my less ambitious moments, becoming the ambassador to some small tropical country where I could throw really fun dinner parties with staff). But neither economics nor politics was my thing. What I loved to do was perform. Growing up, I studied acting at Washington’s most important theaters and took private voice lessons with esteemed classical musicians. I participated in every monologue, poetry, and singing competition in the D.C. area. In college, I performed the leading role in nearly thirty plays. I combed bulletin boards for play tryouts, packed snacks for rehearsal breaks, and did homework during tech runs.
    Onstage was where I was most myself.
    But, according to my family, acting wasn’t really a job. It was a great hobby, but I had to have a backup. I’d majored in cultural anthropology at college, which got me no closer to figuring out what profession to pursue—it just reassured me that I was open-minded, and wasn’t it fascinating how Inuit women’s rituals surrounding childbirth reflected their complex role in society?
    My internship in Naples wouldn’t give me answers, but it would give me a break before I returned to the States to figure out what I was going to do with myself.
    My boss at the Consulate, an imposing, full-figured African American woman from Chicago, took me under her wing. She was smart, funny, spoke excellent Italian, and, I soon realized, had the best life I’d ever seen. In addition to the cappuccino breaks, our days were made up of two-hour lunches with Italian businessmen at yummy fish restaurants near the Consulate. Cynthia would talk most of the time, stopping only to dig into a plate of
calamari fritti,
and the handsome southern Italian magnates who hoped to win American support for some industrial enterprise would sit silently, not really knowing what to make of this Tina Turner with her loud laugh and the chubby little white girl who accompanied her.
    My working day ended at 5:30 P.M. , at which point I would walk the winding coastal road back to Posillipo. I didn’t hear the whistles and catcalls of men on motorbikes—inevitable when a young woman is walking alone in Naples—because I was listening to early nineties rock on a cassette Walkman with fuzzy earphones.
    I would get back to my dormitory just in time for dinner.

    The Istituto Denza was a Catholic boys’ boarding school that didn’t have enough Catholic boys boarding to pay its bills. In fact, since it was September when I arrived in Naples and school started in mid-October, there were
no
Catholic boys boarding when I arrived.
    The campus was lush, with pine and olive trees, magenta bougainvillea, and illuminated statues of the Madonna sitting at the intersections of the walkways. To keep it all up—the