Teatro Sannazaro

Two weeks ago in Naples, Brian, Beth and I stopped at a café to get a cappuccino. We were on the Via Chiaia, and it was great to sit outside because the street slopes downwards so you sit at an angle, like you're gently rocking back in your chair. At one point a smiling woman came towards me making eye contact, and I was nervous that there was some Italian custom I didn't know about concerning sitting with strangers at outdoor cafes. She was pleasantly plump and well-dressed, but I think she might have been homeless because when the owner of the café saw her he came out and shouted at her, shooing her away. This was all done in Italian, so I'm not sure that she was definitely homeless, she could have been an ex-girlfriend of the ex-owner's for all I know. She good-naturedly shouted back at him and moved away from our table, but lingered after he went inside and approached another table and beseeched them with questions. Again this was all in Italian, so she could have been asking for money or to go out on a date in order to make her ex-boyfriend jealous. We will never know. When the owner saw her talking to a new table, he came out again, this time brandishing a small kitchen knife. He shouted some more, she shouted back, but in the end she walked away.

We paid our bill and crossed the street to look at some shoes for Brian. When we came out of the shoe store the café owner was standing outside, waving us over. We thought we must have messed up with the bill, and not wanting to get stabbed, we crossed back. He had a big smile on his face and asked us a lot of questions in Italian, which even Brian couldn't make out. But then another guy who worked in the café came up and said, "He wants to know if you would like to see the theater in back."

Up until this point I had been under the impression that this had just been a simple café. But when we followed the owner and the new guy, whose name turned out to be Carmini, to the back and through a marble hallway, we discovered that the café was merely the front of a beautiful theater, the Teatro Sannazaro. Carmini told us that the theater was modeled after Teatro San Carlo, which is Napoli's opera house. I can't remember how old the theater was, but it was used as a brothel after World War II and then renovated and turned back into a theater in the fifties.

Carmini was a great host, answering all of our questions and continuously apologizing for his English, which was flawless. He told us that he had worked for the theater for ten years, and they mainly do comedies, as "comedy is in the blood of the people of Napoli." Beth and Brian took a ton of pictures (don't worry, I left my camera on the ship that day), we talked some more with Carmini, and then left, content with our unexpected adventure in Napoli.