Il Dopocolera

The scene was Naples, but a Naples that few would recognize. The cafes, the hotels and the markets were eerily quiet and empty. For infection-wary prostitutes, it was never on weekdays as well as Sundays. Sullen crowds milled in the streets, and people eyed each other with suspicion. A placard outside the Zi' Teresa restaurant -- closed by a strike, although there were no customers to speak of anyway -- explained the city's unsettled mood. CHOLERA BROUGHT us TO OUR KNEES, it read, NOW WE ARE WAITING FOR THE COUP DE GRACE.

Normally one of the gayest and most cheerful cities in Europe, Naples has been paralyzed by a cholera epidemic that killed 16 people in a month and hospitalized 822 more. As the epidemic itself waned, misfortune has overwhelmed the city. First the lucrative tourist trade dried up. Then the port was all but quarantined. Fishmongers who sold the sewage-contaminated mussels that spread the infection were virtually ostracized; their livelihood was ruined as police frogmen systematically uprooted the mussel beds. Afraid of contagion, Neapolitans, the most gregarious people in Italy, began to avoid one another, literally like the plague. In the birthplace of the pizza, even mozzarella cheese became an object of suspicion.

At the best of times, Neapolitans are looked down on by Northern Italians as lazy and unwashed ("Africa starts at Naples" is a prejudicial commonplace). Since the epidemic began, Neapolitans have been treated with all the warmth and feeling usually accorded lepers. In San Remo recently, a Neapolitan family was turned away from a hotel when 100 other guests threatened to check out en masse. Most mortifying of all, the Genoa soccer team forfeited an Italian championship match rather than play in infected Naples.

Rejected by their countrymen, Neapolitans are looking at the shabbiness of their city in a new, unfavorable light.

In the teeming slum quarters of the bassi -- the cellar houses known in the city as "the low places" -- the malaise has brought with it a deep sense of humiliation. "Around here at night, you have to walk with a whip because the rats are so big," complained one aging woman as she looked with disgust into an ancient sewer. "Here everything remains the way it was before."

Worst Crisis. In search of a scapegoat, Neapolitans have turned on the politicians, who are being blamed for doing nothing to improve Naples' woefully antiquated sanitation system. With typical Italian overstatement, the city officials are being referred to as "that band of cuckolds and brigands." Last weekend a mob of unemployed mussel fishermen assaulted the car of Naples Prefect Domenico Amari as it approached city hall, setting off three days of rioting that resulted in a dozen injuries and eight arrests. Politicians of all shades loudly began accusing one another of negligence and corruption, tossing the blame around like an infected mussel. Exhausted by the uproar, Mayor Gerardo De Michele abruptly resigned last week, taking his administration with him. In the midst of its worst crisis since World War II, Naples found itself without a municipal government.

The Italian courts have launched a massive investigation that could lead to indictments of several past and present city officials for criminal negligence.

That may answer the public's need for a villain, but it will do little to solve the city's long-range problems. It will cost billions of lire, which Naples clearly does not have, to upgrade the sanitation system. Meanwhile, the city's multitude of hard-core unemployed has been swelled by thousands of jobless fishermen, restaurant workers, peddlers and dockers. All are ripe targets for the violent rhetoric of left-wing and neofascist agitators. The disease may have been contained, but it will be a long time before Naples recovers from a more damaging illness: il dopocolera, the after-cholera.

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