The southern Italian city has become fashionable for tourists, models and actors in a social media age. Yet it remains merciless for many of its youth.
The southern Italian city has become fashionable for tourists, models and actors in a social media age. Yet it remains merciless for many of its youth.
Reporting from Naples, Italy
As tourists followed the smell of fried pizza, posed by white and blue murals of Diego Maradona on streets lined with dangling laundry, and marveled at the decadent beauty of Naples, an 18-year-old boy and 26-year-old twin sisters were killed as the makeshift fireworks factory where they worked blew up.
Their burned, mutilated bodies were found among the explosives and the cans of detergent they also bottled for a living in a house amid olive trees and orange groves near the ancient Roman citadel Herculaneum, outside Naples.
The deaths in November of the three young Neapolitans, who took the risky jobs for about 25 euros, or $26, a day because they could not find better ones, highlighted how, despite Naples’s recent hype and tourism boom, it remains a merciless city for many of its own young people.
“Naples is like a tomb,” said Adamo Dumbia, 38, after he shoveled dirt on the grave of Samuel Tafciu, his stepdaughter’s fiancé, who died in the blast. “It’s pretty from the outside, but you don’t want to see what is inside.”
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Source: www.nytimes.com