School Views

13 October 2006
I’m sitting in the staff room at the Inlingua School in the central business district, Centro Direzionale. It’s 5.30pm, late afternoon. As I look at the window I have a 180° view of the city. Directly below is the prison, a bulking complex of cream and yellow rectangular buildings with flat red rooves. Small windows uniformly dot the walls. I occasionally spy a guard strolling around the top of the perimeter wall. They never look particularly vigilant. I believe that this prison is merely a holding area, as court procedures are finalised and prisoners assigned to permanent locations for incarceration.

To my right is a mirrored skyscraper, reaching up into the smog laden sky. The afternoon sun is glinting erotically off what must by the 15th floor, some two levels above me. As the afternoon wears on the sun moves on to its next target and the building changes colour, first gold merging into aquamarine, then bronze mixing with an olive.

On the opposite side of the expansive window is the sunset. The apricot haze melts into the pollution that habitually settles over Naples after a clear, dry day.

The airport is located in the centre of Naples and from here we can watch the planes take off. It almost appears as though they are taking off from a patch of wood, flying out of the trees at a sharp angle. It’s even stranger watching them land, the planes diving into the city.

One of my colleagues has just booked his flight home, and I’m thinking that Gigi and I need to finalise our Christmas plans. We are hoping to train north with his mother and sister to visit other family. After the ‘strain’ of Christmas I think we might jump on a plane from Venice and head off somewhere for New Years. We both need some sort of mini break to look forward to, and with both the school and the clinics closed for that period we might as well enjoy the time off.

Centro Direzionale is a suburb that has a modern urbanite edge to it, but is tainted with controversy, gangster money and now government incompetence. It was planned by the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange in 1982 after some twenty years of bureaucratic indecision and delay.

“The skyscrapers of the Centre, even if they are not among the tallest ones, stand out very much from the fabric of the city (mainly horizontal) and are perfectly visible from each point in Naples”, as quoted on a Naples website. Ironically one of these skyscrapers stands burnt out and empty following an attempt at insurance fraud. Some 25 years after its completion many locals now consider the CDN an eyesore, out of context and lacking in character.