Description
Book SynopsisIn recent years Naples has become, for better or worse, the new ‘destination’ in Italy. While many of its more esoteric features are on display for all to see the stories behind them remain largely hidden. In Marius Kociejowski’s portrait of this baffling city, the serpent can be many things ― Vesuvius, the mafia-like camorra, the outlying Phlegrean Fields (which, geologically speaking, constitute the second most dangerous area on the planet). It is all these things that have, at one time or another, put paid to the higher aspirations of Neapolitans themselves.Naples is simultaneously the city of light, sometimes blindingly so, and the city of darkness, although often the stuff of cliché. The boundary that separates death from life is porous in the extreme: the dead inhabit the world of the living and vice versa. The Serpent Coiled in Naples is a travelogue, a meditation on mortality, and much else besides.
Trade Review‘To write about Naples, you really need to be a poet – or, even better, an antiquarian bookseller. Mr Kociejowski is both and has produced a delightful work that is as eclectic, labyrinthine, ironic and shocking as the city itself.’ The Economist; ‘Kociejowski’s book (which takes its title from the Sicilian proverb ‘Never fear Rome – the serpent lies coiled in Naples) is one of the best I have read on the ramshackle Mediterranean outpost (and I have read a few). In pages of scholarly but engagingly droll prose, Kociejowski conjures a death-hunted city, where the meaning of life is everywhere connected to what it is to die.’ Spectator ‘Certain books may be likened to monuments. Just such a one is The Serpent Coiled in Naples by Marius Kociejowski. A Serpent Coiled in Naples makes for excellent armchair travelling. And it may well tempt one to visit this effervescent if dangerous hive of the South of Italy.’The Fortnightly Review
