“It is in our DNA,” the journalist and author Michelangelo Iossa said. “It is a tradition, a way of connecting us to the story of our city, all the way back to Greek and Roman myth. We have absorbed aspects of a lot of different cultures over the last 2,000 years. It is part of our identity in southern Italy in general, but in Naples in particular.”
At some point this season, though, Neapolitans seem to have collectively decided that it was all a load of hokum. Quite when that happened is disputed. “It was a few weeks ago, early in March,” said Michela, another vendor outside the Maradona. (Like Mariano, she declined to offer a surname.) Daniele Bellini, better known as Decibel, Napoli’s stadium announcer, dates it back further. “Everything changed after we beat Juventus, 5-1, in January,” he said. “That scale of victory had not happened since 1990.” That, to his mind, broke the seal.
After that, the shibboleths started to melt away. The flags and shirts and scarves celebrating what was to come appeared for sale outside the stadium and across Naples. “We’re all loyal fans,” Michela said. “But now we’re comfortable selling them.”
Mariano was a little more blunt. “È già fatto,” he said in Italian. It’s already done.
No Time to Waste
In 1987, the year Diego Maradona dragged Napoli to its maiden championship, the celebrations were so frenzied that an iconic piece of graffiti appeared at one of the city’s graveyards. “You don’t know what you’ve missed,” it read. Naples has waited long enough to recapture that spirit. This time, it did not want anyone to die wondering.
Naples does not so much have the air of a city waiting for a party to start as one of a place that is several drinks in. Napoli’s colors, sky blue and white, have been splashed not just in Fuorigrotta, the suburb where the stadium sits, but across the tight, winding alleys of the ancient districts that act as Naples’s heart: the Spanish Quarter, the Centro Storico, Rione Sanità.
