Quartieri Spagnoli

Once upon a time there was Montecalvario area, that is 800 thousand square meters of misery and tangled alleys in the softest underbelly of Naples, narrow between the Vomero hill and the trade of the port. They call them Spanish Town (Quartieri Spagnoli) since the ' 600 when they were used by Spanish soldiers. In '80 and '90 drugs, prostitution, racketeering, arms traffic were the stakes.Today there are non more mafia clans there but neither Police enter the place, so among those alleys is reigning insecurity and chaos. Of the 15,000 inhabitants very few have a regular job, the others try to arrive at the end of the month with odd jobs in black, smuggling cigarettes or drugs, kidnapping. Young, almost all with parents in jail or under house arrest, live according to their own rules based on violence. Very few kids end primary school and becoming parents at 16 years is normal there. All this happens just a few steps away from via Toledo, Naples center. In the end it would be more correct to refer to “Quartieri Spagnoli" as a place apart, a city within the city, with well-defined borders that it is virtually impossible to pass. It's this little world that I wanted to investigate.A little piece of Italy in which time seems to have stopped and found ways and its rhythms, whose inhabitants feel like on a faraway island, isolated and abandoned by the authorities and that are unable to fit into their time and even in their own city.