WHEN THE NEAPOLITAN INTELLECTUAL LUCIANO DE CRESCENZO wished to capture the spirit of his birthplace, he picked up his camera. The shots De Crescenzo published in the resulting volume of photographs, La Napoli di Bellavista (named after his most famous character, a Socrates-like professor), survey just a few things that unfold daily in modern Naples. We peer into ground floor apartments, called bassi, where families squeeze into what were once the stables of grand palazzi, using the main room as kitchen, dining room, and living space. Emotion explodes from the packed stadium of San Paolo, where Naples exalts in a rare moment of victory. At the packed tables of game houses, women and transvestites hunch over cards as they play tombola, Neapolitan bingo. In showcasing Naples's remarkable (and even notorious) public life, however, the most numerous and striking photos of De Crescenzo's book represent the street. People converse heatedly, they sell contraband, they carry coffins, and eat pizza (see Figure 7). The images are deeply evocative for anyone who has visited this idiosyncratic place, and, as such, they echo something Jane Jacobs once wrote: “Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets.”

De Crescenzo's photographic eye tends to focus on individuals or pairs of streetgoers. When we look at specific intersections, the action and cast broaden and grow richer. Figure 8 shows a segment of Via San Biagio dei Librai, also known as Spaccanapoli since it divides Naples in two, north and south. People stroll, they see one another, they move goods, they catch up with friends, they hawk wares, they pray to the Virgin. This is an undeniably lively scene, and it transpires on a street at least 2,200 years old, for the modern streets in this part of Naples maintain the orientation and dimensions of their Greco-Roman predecessors. Via San Biagio was, it seems, the decumanus maximus of Roman Naples.