Of course, other cities are louder, more fragrant, more stinky, narrower, faster, wider, more unpredictable — Calcutta, Sanaa, Cairo, Rio. But those are foreign cities, and whether I love or hate them, they remain foreign to me. Naples, however, is my world — but at the far end of it, in much the same way that a black sheep in the family is more annoying than some crazy at the train station, or a gorgeous aunt or niece more fascinating than any pin-up girl.

Apparently there were no strikes in Naples, or at least no visible signs caught our eye. There was no problem with the taxi. We took our luggage to the hotel, rode back into the city, met up with the rest of the group from the Villa Massimo — who arrived late because truckers had blocked the highway with their rigs — in the Pizzeria del Presidente, and then headed up to the
National Museum. Just to describe our walk through the narrow streets — the rich dark colours of walls and doors, the lights strung for Advent, the mild air, the bright streaks of sky between roof gutters, the clotheslines, the gulls and pigeons you might have taken for handkerchiefs that the wind had ripped free and set spinning in the sunless blue — a real description of that walk would require far more time and space, and still not come close to capturing the happiness I felt with every step I took, a happiness that seemed as unfounded as it was perfectly natural.

Once inside the National Museum, we stood for a long time gazing at the Farnesi Bull. Paula wanted a story to go with each work of art. We puzzled over the Alexander mosaic, wondering who the man behind the mounted Alexander might be and felt sorry for the soldier left to lie in the dust while the fleeing Persian king's chariots rolled over him. Ralf carried Anna piggyback almost the entire time.

I was in a hurry to get upstairs to see the Tadema exhibition. The few paintings by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema that I was familiar with had always left me more amused than anything else. As a master of his craft he was without parallel. Every detail, every shifting shadow across polished marble, every ornament of a robe draping the knee of a seated figure, was perfection. Tadema's pomegranates lay there in such physicality that you thought they might fall out of the painting. And yet I found him infinitely boring. And not just because you can hardly tell the difference between one face and the next. I saw his paintings as the epitome of a zeitgeist — the various academies of the late 19th century had fought tooth and nail to win Tadema's membership — as the work of a man who shunts his glistening processions back and forth along a sidetrack. I find it an interesting phenomenon that in the era of photography someone held fast to a version of veduta painting and populated his canvases with his own salon guests — who had probably arrived by train — clad in classical garb. In the case of a man who was born in 1836 and died in 1912 one might plead mitigating circumstances for his attempt to flee an accelerating world into one of ostensibly eternal classicism. And yet: weren't such paintings already an anachronism by the date of Tadema's birth? Or was I on the wrong track? I wanted to find that out from his paintings.

From the second floor, I could see Vesuvius. Gazing at it from the same room where the model of Pompeii is displayed, you realise what others may smile at as a commonplace: without Vesuvius there would be no Pompeii, no Herculaneum, but then also no mosaics, no Alexander mosaic. This museum wouldn't exist either, and even a Tadema would have painted differently.

No wonder then that we also think of Vesuvius as a museum piece. Distance and a higher elevation might save the museum and us from the lava that had destroyed Pompeii. But death from the air was a possibility, too. Herculaneum had been buried by billowing small chunks of lava and a rain of ash, while toxic gases, which are said to make excavation risky even today, did the rest. Just a wind from the wrong direction, and a new eruption would take far more lives than the one of 2,000 years ago.

"Actually," Natalia said, "people shouldn't be let into the city without a
reserved seat on the evacuation train."