Just kids

Patti Smith has just published a touching memoir about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe when - just kids - they were both struggling artists trying to make it in New York City. We are talking 1967 to 1975, the year when Patti Smith recorded her landmark album Horses and Mapplethorpe had his first exhibition at a serious art gallery. Patti Smith recreates their love story, their total commitment to Art, their fumbling beginnings, their bohemian life style, what the Chelsea hotel was like, the spirit of those years, how they slowly broke through , her encounters with Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and the circles around Andy Warhol, and how they found their respective ways, she as a poet and a rock'n roll star, he as a great photographer. I, who arrived in Manhattan in 1977, remember well her amazing concerts at CBGB's. She was a goddess of rock n' roll. We love you Patti!, we used to scream from the audience. It's still true.

The prestige of antiquity

For someone born in the XXth century, it is difficult to understand the immense prestige and influence of the antique world until the XIXth century. Only then, and only to a certain extent, did Europe achieve a level of sophistication and urbanization comparable to the Roman world. In its heyday, Rome had at least one million inhabitants. London, then the biggest city in the world, only achieved this population in the early 1800's. Latin and to a lesser extent Greek were the mainstays of a proper education: the classics were, by definition, the writers of antiquity. A visit to the ruins of Pompey, a provincial backwater home to only about 20 000 people when it was hit by the eruption of the Vesuvius in 72 AD makes this clear. The wealth of paintings, mosaics, and sculptures unearthed in that city, now preserved at the Naples archeological museum, makes one wonder about the incredible splendor which made Rome, for so many centuries, the capital of the world.

Naples

One gets the feeling that the people of Naples have been there forever. These teeming masses, which fill the space between the bay and the slopes of the Vesuvius, seem to be the direct descendants of the Roman "populus". They own the place and they live as they see fit - as they have always lived, with as few rules as possible. They have seen it all: Tiberius, Belisarius, the Ostrogoths, the Spanish, the French, the Habsburg, the Bourbons, Mussolini, the Americans sitting in their military base, Berlusconi. All these rulers come and go. They stay and go on in their immemorial ways. The family; the clan; the mafia. That's real. Those who don't like it leave: to the north, to America, to Argentina. Most stay. Not many newcomers arrive. Perhaps now, from Africa.