The study of history is littered with myths, half-truths and downright falsehoods. The first duty of any historian is to navigate his or her way through this labyrinth and find a way to the truth. But it is not always straightforward. Sometimes even professional historians can be duped.
For some reason this seems to be especially the case with the history of Naples. This ancient city is built, quite literally, on a foundation of myth. According to legend, Naples was founded more than 2,500 years ago when the body of the demi-god Parthenope washed up on the beach here. Parthenope was one of the sirens in Homer’s Odyssey. Mesmerising, irresistible, she lured men to their deaths on the rocks as they were drawn towards her haunting song.
The myth of Parthenope has resurfaced many times in the history of Naples. But it was during the Second World War that this mythological figure made one of her most significant appearances – and began to sow all kinds of confusion amongst historians of the period.
It began with a novel written by one of Italy’s greatest twentieth-century writers. La pelle (“The Skin”) is Curzio Malaparte’s brilliant and disturbing depiction of life in Naples under the Allied occupation.
In one particularly memorable scene he describes a banquet held by General Cork—a caricature of Mark Clark, whom Malaparte had come across in real life. The general, he explains, frequently used to hold banquets for visiting dignitaries, and liked to serve fish: but since fishing was banned by the Allied navies, Clark’s chefs were reduced to raiding fish from the world-famous Naples Aquarium instead. When Eisenhower visits, for example, they all dine on the aquarium’s giant octopus. Churchill is served up an electric torpedo fish; and the Soviet diplomat Andrey Vyshinsky is honoured with the aquarium’s Arabian pearl oysters.
Soon, according to the novel, the aquarium is emptied of everything except its most precious animal – the manatee, “a very rare example of that species of ‘sirenoids’ which, because of their almost human form, gave rise to the ancient legend about the Sirens”. In Malaparte’s banquet scene, this is the dish served up to honour the arrival in Naples of a matronly WAC officer called Mrs. Flat. When it arrives on a huge silver platter, all the guests are pale with horror, because it looks so much like the body of a young girl. “Are you sure it’s a fish—a real fish?” asks the general; and Malaparte’s narrator reassures him that it is indeed a fish: “It’s the famous Siren from the Aquarium.”
Since the end of the war, the serving of a manatee at General Mark Clark’s banquet has become something of an urban myth in Naples. Norman Lewis mentions it in his memoir of the war, stating boldly that “All Neapolitans believe that at the banquet offered to welcome General Mark Clark… the principal course was a baby manatee—the most prized item of the aquarium’s collection—which was boiled and served with a garlic sauce”. In Lewis’s account, the story is symbolic of the desperate shortage of food that gripped the city in the autumn and winter of 1943–44. But in Malaparte’s hands, the myth is something much more disturbing. The manatee is not merely the last item of food available in an already-exhausted city; it is a “siren”, the ancient symbol of Naples itself, which is about to be ritually consumed by the American military.
Just as significantly, Malaparte’s siren takes the form not of a powerful and dangerous demi-god, capable of luring soldiers to their death, as she was in the Homeric original. Instead she is a helpless little girl:
She was naked; but her dark, shining skin… was exactly like a well-filled dress in the way in which it outlined her still callow yet already well-proportioned form, the gentle curve of her hips, her slightly protruding belly, her little virginal breasts, and her broad, plump shoulders. She might have been not more than eight or ten years old, though at first sight, owing to the precocious development of her body, which was that of a grown woman, she looked fifteen… It was the first time I had ever seen a little girl who had been cooked, a little girl who had been boiled; and I was silent, gripped by a holy fear.
The sexualised depiction of a little girl served up on a silver platter for American soldiers to eat, is just one of the many grotesque images in a book that is packed with similarly disturbing scenes. It is supposed to be a metaphor for the wholesale exploitation of women and girls in the hundreds of brothels that dotted the Neapolitan back streets.
This story is a perfect demonstration of how myth and reality become inextricably entangled with one another in people’s memories of wartime, particularly in a city like Naples. In Norman Lewis’s memoir of the war, he mentions that “most Neapolitans” believe the story of the manatee to be true—but he also asserts as a fact the disappearance of all the other fish, which were stolen to be eaten by hungry Neapolitans.
Taking him at his word, many historians have repeated this claim. Rick Atkinson, for example, states in his otherwise brilliant history of the Italian war that, “All the tropical fish in the municipal aquarium were devoured.” I myself made the same mistake in my 2012 history of Europe in the aftermath of the liberation.
And yet just a quick glance at the Allied newspapers of the time shows the story to be untrue: the aquarium stayed open after the Allies arrived, and continued to charge soldiers/tourists 20 Lire to come and marvel at the fish, which were all still very much alive. Lewis, who wrote his memoirs in the 1970s, seems to have absorbed the story as a memory of his own, despite the fact that it never happened. Such is the process by which fiction becomes myth, myth becomes recollection, and recollection becomes history.
Anyone can make mistakes, even historians. But when we do, it is important that we hold our hands up and acknowledge them. In my new book I have made a point of correcting my earlier blunder and put to bed the myth of the raiding of the Naples aquarium. Along the way I also puncture a whole variety of other myths. The true history of Naples during World War II is shocking enough—it does not need embellishment.
History is a precious thing. It is too often abused in pursuit of a good story or a political agenda. So it is incumbent on historians, as seekers of the truth, to make sure that our own narratives are always based on provable facts.
