ITALY: Neapolitan Street Song

For years guidebooks to Europe have warned travelers to Naples to keep a firm hand on their luggage and an eye peeled for pickpockets. In the openly larcenous days of World War II, a pack of local thieves once made off with a whole shipload of sugar—ship & all. Last spring when Achille Lauro, Naples’ wealthiest shipowner, took office as mayor, he promised to clean up the permanent Neapolitan crime wave. “We must operate like surgeons,” he told his police force, who promptly went to work rounding up hundreds of pickpockets. Plainclothesmen roamed the streets in squads of three to watch for second-story men and the light-footed correntisti, hit & run thieves who rely on their fleetness to escape the law. By summer’s end, the mayor’s campaign had paid off with hundreds of arrests and the recovery of millions of liras’ worth of stolen property. But curing Naples of crime was a labor not for Dr. Kildare, but for Hercules.

Last week a Neapolitan street railway official phoned the police to report the distressing theft of a half-ton of trolley tracks and overhead trolley wire from an abandoned line in a Naples suburb. Naples’ police rounded up the thieves (they had worked for three weeks in the bright Neapolitan sunshine ripping up the rails, even recruiting hired laborers to help), and wearily set to work on a new chore—patrolling the miles of trolley track still unstolen.