While tourists followed the smell of pizza, posed next to blue-and-white murals of Diego Maradona in the streets with their laundry spread, and admired the decadent beauty of Naples, an eighteen-year-old boy and twenty-six-year-old twin girls died when the makeshift pyrotechnics factory they were working in exploded.
Their burned, mutilated bodies were found among the explosives and detergent bottles they had also packed to make a living in a house among olive and orange trees near the ancient Roman citadel of Herculaneum near Naples.
The deaths in November of three young Neapolitans who took dangerous jobs for around €25 a day because they couldn't find better ones highlighted the fact that, despite Naples' recent rise and tourism boom, the city remains unforgiving for many of the young people who live there.
"Naples is like a tomb," said Adamo Dumbia (38) after he threw a clod of earth on the grave of Samuel Tafčiu, his stepdaughter's fiance, who died in the explosion. "It's beautiful on the outside, but you don't want to see what's inside."
Since the pandemic, Naples has become an Instagram sensation. Tourism has grown rapidly, especially among foreigners, many of whom got to know the city through Elena Ferrante's novels. Hollywood actors visited him. Model Emily Ratajkovski was photographed in a Napoli jersey. Countless Instagram posts show older tanned Neapolitans with tattooed chests, heavy make-up and crosses in the hot summer sun. Charli XCX sang about these scenes in the song "Everything is Romantic". All this contributed to building a seductive image of Naples, which attracted masses of millennials.
However, if Naples' sleazy decadence is popular on social media, the city is simultaneously going through a much less romantic, permanent and cruel degradation that grips the youth of its poorer neighborhoods.
Despite the money from tourism, the city has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Italy - 43 percent. Armed violence flared up again, and this fall three teenagers were killed within 20 days. About one-sixth of the jobs in the region are illegal, and young Neapolitans leave school and the city en masse.
Naples, once again, stands out as a kind of symbol of Italy. Its pizza, sun, dialect and manners have long represented what many imagine when they think of Italy. Now, Naples also symbolizes one of the country's most painful paradoxes: so attractive to foreigners, yet so terrifying to its own youth.
"Naples is the city with the most contradictions," said Luca Bianchi, director of the Svimez research center, which studies the south of Italy. "And those contradictions explode."
Twins Aurora and Sara Esposito, who died in the pyrotechnics factory explosion, grew up on the outskirts of Naples with a single mother. Videos from the TikTok profile show Aurora with bleached hair and a wide smile with braces, singing and dancing to Neapolitan songs.
Like many other teenagers in the area, they left school at the age of 14. They worked part-time jobs, as housekeepers and in a bakery, but money was running out. They sometimes went to bed without dinner and were threatened with eviction from the apartment they shared with their mother and Aurora's five-year-old daughter, said their older sister Đuzi Esposito.
When they found a job producing fireworks on the black market, they took it because they had no choice.
Their employer, who was arrested and imprisoned after the explosion, put them up in a house without electricity in Ponticelli, an eastern suburb of Naples, and drove them to work every morning.
The twins had no experience handling flammable materials, and the makeshift factory had no safety systems, police said. There wasn't even a toilet.
Samuel Tafčiu, the eighteen-year-old son of Albanian immigrants, also worked with them. About a year and a half ago, he met Rosita Giorgetti, a seventeen-year-old Neapolitan who also lived in Ponticelli, an area affected by poverty and the violence of the Camorra mafia. Both Samuel and Rozita left school at the age of 14.
In June, their daughter Ana Kjara was born. The three slept together in a bed in the flat they shared with Rosita's mother, her partner and two of Rosita's four siblings. In July, when he turned 18, Samuel proposed to Rozita. Every Sunday, Rozita's father said, he set aside 50 euros for their wedding.
However, at the end of November, Rozita put her hands on Samuel's white coffin in a cemetery north of Naples and whispered: "It's not Samu, it's not Samu."
"I would have preferred if he had gone to steal," said Rozita that afternoon.
"He could have ended up in prison. But prison is easy. Now I can't see him, I can't touch him, I can't talk to him," she said. "All our dreams burned with him."
Despite the money from tourism, the city has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Italy - 43 percent. Armed violence flared again, and this fall three teenagers were killed within 20 days. About a sixth of the jobs in the region are illegal, and young Neapolitans leave school and the city en masse
Three days after Samuel's funeral, in the cemetery at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, Giuzi Esposito collapsed to the ground as undertakers lowered her sisters' white coffins into their graves. A few years ago, she said, she lost both her husband and brother-in-law while working illegally.
"Why do we have to love people to lose them?" she asked. "Why do we have to live like this?"
Her uncle, Rozario Esposito, watched it all. "This is how you live in Naples," he said.
His son, 21 years old, plans to move to Sweden, he added. "He must not end up like this," he said, pointing to the graves.
The main reason for the prevalence of undeclared work, according to experts who study the region, is the persistently high unemployment and low level of education, especially among young people, which gives employers enormous influence.
A failed experiment with industrialization, poor political governance and the dominant presence of the Camorra mafia have hampered the economy, and many available jobs are low-level in the service sector, experts said.
Now tourism is transforming the city center, and the dark, dank "basi", or ground-floor apartments, are being turned into short-term rental units. And while some find illegal jobs as waiters or tour guides, experts say tourism does not bring a significant increase in higher-paying jobs.
Gun-related crime is on the rise among Naples' disenfranchised youth, according to police reports, and Italy's interior minister recently announced a special operation to disarm the city.
However, all this rarely reaches the visitors' social networks.
Instagram and TikTok, said Ciro Pellegrino, head of the Naples editorial office of the information portal Fanpage, are key to the appeal of Naples, because they allow its flaws to remain out of the frame.
"If you narrow your field of vision and show only parts of the city," he said, "there are parts of Naples that are extremely photogenic for Instagram."
On the Neapolitan coast, where luxury hotels are located, Antonio Maimone maintained public gardens with palm trees and giant cacti overlooking the Mergelina promenade, a popular nightlife spot.
It was there last year that his 18-year-old son, Francesco Pio Maimone, was killed by a stray bullet that hit him in the heart. A 20-year-old man has been charged with murder. Both came from marginalized areas of Naples.
When the bullet hit him, Francesco Pio, who dropped out of school at 16 and worked part-time as a garbage can cleaner, had just finished training as a pizza master.
"Too often, young people in Naples have only a few choices: drugs, dealing or shooting," Maimone said.
"As beautiful as Naples is," he said, "it is also so ugly."
Next to the Naples train station there is a huge mural of Maradona, the Argentine football legend who brought Napoli championships and became one of the city's greatest folk heroes and a symbol of hope and Neapolitan pride. In the part of Maradona's eye, the artist painted a portrait of Francesco Pio.
Prepared by: A. Š.
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