Issue Nine

    This crumbling, private chapel lies at the end of the Via Latina in the tiny town of Pantuliano just north of Naples at the foot of a dusty mountain range.  Only 1,000 people live in the town, but these days, more are coming.  They are attracted to its simplicity and proximity.  At night, on the top of the roof of a typical Pantuliano home, you can see the lights of Naples, reminding people that though the ways of the town are old and traditional, the modern world is just a short commute away.  There is a dusty vineyard across the street from the chapel.  A long time ago, in the early part of the last century, the owner of the vineyard built the chapel so that long after he died the people of the town would remember him.  He was considered a rich man. In this part of the world, you display your photograph in the family mausoleum.  When you visit your departed loved and hated ones, they stare back at you and remind you of where you come from and to where you are going.  The owner of the vineyard, no one remembers why, got into an argument with an old goatherd.  The rich man challenged the goatherd to a duel and the goatherd killed him.  The rich man’s family draped his fine clothes in the chapel along with his picture.  For many years, the clothes flapped in the breezes that blew through the chapel’s windows, until the end of World War Two.  Trying to block the advance of the Allies, the Nazis occupied Pantuliano and blew up several homes.  They would give the families only a few minutes warning to evacuate and then they would blast the houses so that they crumbled into the narrow streets.  After, the Americans arrived, bearing peanut butter and chocolate.  The English were not so nice.  They appeared to be very hungry.  Everything seemed to change and the chapel was ransacked and the rich man’s clothes were stolen.  The chapel was forgotten and over the years it has deteriorated and crumpled.  For a time last summer, I lived by the chapel.  It was one of the first things I saw each morning.  It seemed crippled and heroic all at once.

    –Keith Frome

    By the mid-1930’s the area in and around St. Anthony’s had, at least according to a growing number of authorities at City Hall, become “a slum.”  City officials and downtown “pezzi novanti” had high hopes and elaborate plans for the area, which, along with the whole waterfront, was designated for renewal.  After all, a new City Hall had just been built and Niagara Square, with the location here of the Federal and State office buildings, had recently become the massive and imposing “Civic Center” of the whole metropolitan area.  Walter Behrendt, a city planner retained by the City to advice them on the waterfront, was dumfounded when he found an Italian immigrant neighborhood so close to the newly-built, majestic City Hall.  The neighborhood, he said in 1938, “Is an unsuitable approach to the waterfront… I found Court Street behind City Hall continued in a rather dilapidated form, bordered on both sides with poor residential structures.  It is a most striking and unhappy contrast to the architectural dignity of Niagara Square.”  A German from the correct and orderly world of The Bauhaus, Behrendt was shocked and confused by the homey randomness of the Italian neighborhood, the grapes and tomatoes that grew in peoples’ backyards and the animals he found wandering about.  “About one or two blocks down from City Hall,” he continued in a speech he gave to his downtown supporters, “at its back door, so to speak, (Behrendt would then have been standing in the heart of the parish of St. Anthony’s) I saw, believe it or not, a goat nibbling at some weeds along the curb.”

    –Mark Goldman

    –photos by Keith Frome and Mark Dellas