A SECULAR SAINT

Quite recently we were staying near Sorrento. We decided one day to go to Naples, only to find that there were excursions to everywhere but Naples. Strange! We talked to other Britons in our hotel. None would risk going to Naples. In the end we went on our own and had a wonderful time there.

Why don’t people go to Naples any more? They used to. Once Naples was a prime destination on the Grand Tour, together with Florence and Rome. But the visitors stopped and they have never come back. That’s a shame because Naples ought to be as popular as Barcelona, having a finer natural setting and at least as many man-made riches. Yet Naples is as unvisited as Barcelona is overrun. Puzzling.

We went of course to Capri, with everyone else. We visited the Villa Michele. There I bought a book I’d known about since childhood: Axel Munthe’s The Story of San Michele (John Murray pb.). This was a great classic of the interwar years. My parents had it but I had never once looked at it.

The Story of San Michele is a brilliant book by a brilliant but deeply contradictory man. Axel Munthe was a Swede who was drawn irresistibly to the south. A charismatic man who was loved and pursued by women but never married any of them. A writer of great talent, who in a long life wrote only one book. A man of action, who was also a profound psychologist. Someone who devoted his life to people, but seems to have been happier with animals. A doctor who spent much of his career treating high-society patients whom he despised. He even became doctor to the Swedish royal family. Yet he also worked in the slums of Naples.

In 1884 the cholera struck Naples. The tourists fled. High society fled. Many doctors fled. The city was more or less sealed off and its inhabitants were left to their fate. Axel Munthe was in the far north of Sweden when he heard the news. He made at once for Naples.

In his harrowing account of Naples during the cholera two things stand out. The authorities poured carbolic acid into the sewers, where since Roman times the city’s notorious rat population had lived. The acid drove millions of half-crazed rats, with bloodshot eyes and blackened teeth, up into the streets, where they terrified passers-by and bit many of them. The rats were worse than the cholera, Munthe recalled. But the cholera was terrifying enough.

Near his lodging there was a convent of Buried-Alive Nuns (Sepolte Vive). The nuns, many of whom entered the convent as young women, would never pass through its gates again except as corpses. The cholera struck there. The convent’s doctor had already died of the disease. Axel Munthe was summoned by the father confessor. Panic-stricken nuns were running to and fro. He ordered an immediate evacuation. But the stern old abbess refused point blank. The rule of the order would be obeyed to the last. All of the nuns, young and old alike, died in the convent. That Axel Munthe himself survived these weeks in Naples seems a miracle.

The Story of San Michele explained the puzzle. The cholera polished off what remained of Naples’s reputation as a place for tourists. For that and other reasons (the Camorra, street crime, sanitation, perhaps even Vesuvius), Naples came to be seen as far too dangerous for ordinary tourists. They have never gone back.

As for Axel Munthe, he surely belongs among the company of non-churchgoing saints.

John Gooding