In Search of Panormo: Part One, 'Letting go of the north'.

My husband, Jem and I travelled by train from Caerdydd to London, then on to Paris. From there we stayed in Verona for a week  and then took the train through to Naples where Joseph Panormo, the main protagonist of my fourth novel ‘The Cello’ was born in 1768.

We were leaving the north behind.  To a certain extent, leaving the money and the tourists behind. Verona, like Florence, is enchanting, packed full of marvels from the Roman era, through the wonderful Medieval and elegant Renaissance, to the prosperous present. It felt safe and sanitised of the poor and desperate; catering for everything a ‘discerning’ traveller could possibly want. It was different enough in terms of food, drink, heat, to titillate, but not to challenge.

Past cypress groves and cedar trees; fortified towns and well-tended vineyards with handsome villas, the train moved through central Italy.  As we travelled south, uncomfortable memories of the brutal French agriculture were left far behind. Italian farmers seemed to leave a little more to chance (and nature) with scrubby verges and field margins, copses, tumbled down buildings and rusty machinery here and there.

Approaching Napoli Centrale took time. Naples was the largest Italian city in the 18th Century when the Panormo family of luthiers was operating there, and is even now the third most highly populated city in Italy. We passed industrial plots, then new build, then moved through the historic centre. At the station we walked out into a fog of heat. Suddenly there was noise – traffic, shouting, too many people struggling to sell something, get somewhere, buy something.

The Italian was faster and more staccato. There was a confidence, a swagger even in the direct way we got taken charge of and put in a taxi.  Many people out and about on the streets and in the doorways of small shops were south Asian, like in a big English city. Again, how different from the northern towns we’d visited.

The taxi fought its way through traffic, dodging around pedestrians crossing the zebra lines painted on the street. Motorbikes swerved around us; horns blared from several directions at once. The streets got more and more narrow and the taxi squeezed through; waited for a woman to get up and move her plastic chair, in order to pass.  We drove through a street market, still busy as night fell, and came to a stop outside a hardware stall.