"As complete as she is-with all her goods and her ills-do you know who she reminds me of?... Naples"
- Eça de Queirós, The Illustrious House of Ramires, mutatis mutandis.
"The most beautiful gift is not the most expensive; it is the most fragile."
Marques Rebelo, O Trapicheiro.
As the lights of the nineteenth century faded, Eça de Queirós-the great Eça-painted, through the face of Gonçalo Mendes Ramires, a symbolic portrait of Portugal that, as any good symbol does, contained everything, even when it sometimes seemed to contain nothing at all. Last year, Paolo Sorrentino, the great artist of contemporary cinema, painted with the face and body of Parthenope the symbolic portrait of Naples: yet another of his masterpieces, unveiling a city and a woman that, in the blink of an eye, are one in the lyrical conception of poet Sorrentino. Naples, or Parthenope- a name that evokes the mythological siren whose body is said to have given birth to the city-is not merely a backdrop, but a pulsating character. And Parthenope, the protagonist (portrayed with an ethereal melancholy), is its incarnation: born in the waters of the Mediterranean, like Venus, like Naples, she carries within her the contradiction of the sublime and the grotesque, of desire and death.
Sorrentino, heir to a Fellini-esque sensitivity for both beauty and the bizarre, does not fear excess. In scenes such as the party in Capri-where beautiful faces and bodies dissolved under golden lights-Parthenope, in her melancholy, asks her millionaire admirer: "Lei non pensa che il desiderio sia un mistero e il sesso il suo funerale?" [don't you think that desire is a mystery and sex its funeral]. The phrase echoes like an epitaph, laid bare to reveal the fragility and preciousness of desire and youth: desire as an unfathomable mystery, and sex as the funeral ritual of something that will never be consummated. It is in this interplay of opposites that the narrative unfolds, between the sculptural beauty of Naples' landscapes and the harshness of its forgotten alleys, where the protagonist walks with Roberto, an ambiguous character who unveils to her the other side of the city-a Naples both raw and poetic, where the contrast between the opulent luxury of grand houses and the simplicity of neglected corners becomes a metaphor for the city's inherent duality. Every step, every exchanged glance, carries the tension between the ephemeral and the eternal, between the urgent and the trivial. There, in the interplay of shadow and light, "the irrelevant merges with the decisive," as if chance itself became the silent arbiter of destinies. But is there any sense in speaking of chance? In song, Riccardo Cocciante tells us otherwise-everything was already foreseen.
"Beauty is like war: it opens doors," declares the alcoholic writer John Cheever (portrayed by Gary Oldman) in his brief, ghostly appearance. Drunkenly, he murmurs about the "scent of dead loves," a fragrance he claims to detect in his hotel room, surrounded by bottles of alcohol. So many dead loves in the city, in Parthenope's life. Here, her beauty is a weapon-a weapon that invariably wounds those who wield it: capable of granting access to privileged worlds, yet also imprisoning one in gilded cages. But Parthenope is a woman-city that "sfugge sempre": she flees, escapes, refuses to be deciphered, and always has a retort ready to disarm her interlocutors. What mysteries lie hidden within her?
The narrative delves into a universe where every image is meticulously sculpted to reveal the mysteries of existence. Amid this tapestry of contrasts stands Cardinal Tesorone, with his imposing and perverse figure, his grotesque nature and skepticism-a link in a Neapolitan religiosity divided between the sacred and the profane. His discourse, laden with solemnity and irony, resonates in the scene where, clad only in the adornments of San Gennaro's treasure, he attempts to seduce the city of Parthenope-or perhaps merely the delectable Parthenope herself-with the lubricity of a faun and the cynicism of an old man. Il tempo che scorre insieme al dolore.
In every dialogue, in every exchanged glance, the question echoes: is it possible that by trying to master desire, love ultimately imprisons its own freedom? And in this eternal ebb and flow between wanting and being, the protagonist remains undefinable, always escaping, constantly reinventing herself-as if the very city of Naples refused to be confined by labels or predetermined destinies.
In the twilight of her existence-be it amidst the effervescence of a Capri celebration or in the solitude of a dim alley-Parthenope presents herself as the synthesis of all the opposites that coexist in Naples: the sublime and the grotesque, desire and death, fragility and strength. It is this paradoxical combination that renders her portrait so unforgettable-a mirror, perhaps, of a city whose soul, despite everything, continues to pulse with an indomitable vitality, defying time and destiny with an irony that, in the end, remains its sole certainty.
