I found this book on a browsing expedition. It's written by Penelope Green, a young Australian journalist who, having set out upon one of those adventurous attempts to try living in another country for a while, ended up in her fourth year in Italy with a job in Naples and living in the quartieri Spagnoli - one of those parts that tourists look upon with trepidation. The book is a story about her life during her first year in Naples. Being a journalist she focuses a lot on the Camorra and the crime rate (it is Italy's homicide capital) and not enough on the other qualities of the city - although you can see she's making an effort in that regard. She also manages to convey, mainly through her circle of friends and acquaintances, the extraordinary level of artistic and musical endeavour . I kept expecting to come across people I'd met, but I didn't. Almost as if there's nothing else to do if you don't want to leave the city and you don't want to join one of the camorrista gangs - it's also Italy's unemployment capital! I enjoyed revisiting a lot of places I've been to and finding one or two new things (especially, her discovery, among one of the multitude of roadside shrines to the Madonna, one "sacro capello miracoloso di Diego Armando Maradona"!). She interviews everybody from the mayor down on how to solve the city's problems. There is clearly a consensus view, revolving around educating the young and motivating people to take charge of the problem themselves, but few ideas on how to achieve such a massive cultural change. There's also a consensus that intervention from the central government is pretty useless, focusing as it does on law and order rather than the underlying economic problems.

A good, quick read.