Naples communicates while awaiting its coronation

The crowd presses, stamps, laughs, smiles, shouts, sings. We barely move forward, we stop and start again, telephones brandished above our heads along a narrow, deep street, under a band of white and blue sky, barred with blue and white ribbons between the weathered facades of buildings in the Spanish Quarters. The gaze, wherever it is, is saturated with the two colors of Napoli. As the club flew from victory to victory over the 2022-2023 season of the Italian football championship, they overwhelmed the city and provided the backdrop for the enthusiastic bubbling that rose from the bowels of the city as the obtaining of the title, the scudettothere is no longer any doubt.

Hundreds of tourists line up to reach the Maradona mural in the Spanish Quarters, in Naples, on April 25, 2023. GIUSEPPE CAROTENUTO FOR “THE WORLD”

Historically deprived, perceived as chaotic, criminogenic and embarr***ing by the powerful and clean regions of the North, Naples sinks with its streets full of people in a festive atmosphere which reaches its climax before the official result is proclaimed for good. Before the 32e Calcio day, Napoli are 17 points ahead of their runner-up, Lazio Rome. A victory for Napoli against Salernitana on Sunday, combined with a draw or a defeat for Lazio, who face Inter in Milan, would mathematically guarantee the league title.

On the side of the authorities, such popular gatherings are expected that the meeting against Salernitana, initially scheduled for Saturday, has been postponed for twenty-four hours to avoid a spread of the festivities which would have mobilized twice the police forces.

The heady taste of revenge

While waiting for celebrations that promise to be historic in their magnitude, Naples is finally renewing with a pride that its club embodies, thirty-three years after its last title, in 1990, the second offered to Naples by Diego Maradona following the first scudetto obtained in 1987.

Here, in this city whose historical strata overlap and mingle everywhere in a landscape where the ancient and the trivial are permanently side by side, the player who died in 2020 at 60 is not an icon but a martyr, a saint, a prophet, even a god. With the approach of a new title that the champion will not see, the crowd comes to pay homage to him, in the deep heart of the Spanish Quarters, this popular enclave of the historic center which has installed within it a place of worship dedicated to the Argentinian, whose omnipresent, sanctified face watches over the ongoing festivities.

The small square towards which the crowd converges and which was not much more than a wild car park before the death of Diego Maradona has been transformed into a place of pilgrimage after the restoration of a high fresco representing the divine player on the side of one of the buildings bordering it. At its feet, we can see a votive chapel, similar to the innumerable ones dedicated to the worship of the Virgin or Saint Padre Pio.

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