The Serpent Coiled in Naples

THE NEW YORKER ‘BEST BOOKS 2022’

THE ECONOMIST ‘BEST BOOKS BOOKS 2022’

‘To write about Naples, you really need to be a poet ― or, even better, an antiquarian bookseller. Mr Kociejowski is both and has produced a delightful work that is as eclectic, labyrinthine, ironic and shocking as the city itself.’
John Hooper, The Economist

‘Kociejowski’s book (which takes its title from the Sicilian proverb ‘Never fear Rome ― the serpent lies coiled in Naples) is one of the best I have read on the ramshackle Mediterranean outpost (and I have read a few). In pages of scholarly but engagingly droll prose, Kociejowski conjures a death-haunted city, where the meaning of life is everywhere connected to what it is to die.’
Ian Thomson, The Spectator

‘[A] sprawling, labyrinthine, exuberantly discursive book … to be dipped into at leisure (whether in an armchair at home or on a terrace overlooking the Bay of Naples). And it is a holiday in itself, with all the ingredients of a first-rate one: natural wonders, the evocative remnants of a many-layered ancient culture, unfamiliar food, haunting music and an edge of scary strangeness, all of it explored in excellent company.’
Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Times Literary Supplement

‘Marius Kociejowski is one of life’s great questioners [and] The Serpent Coiled in Naples takes on some of the largest questions that come with searching for this stupendous city’s soul…The experience is more of an intellectual joyride than a standard history.’
Claudia Roth Pierpont, The New Yorker

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In recent years, Naples has become, for better or worse, the new ‘destination’ in Italy. While many of its more esoteric features are on display for all to see the stories behind them remain largely hidden.

In Marius Kociejowski’s portrait of this baffling city, the serpent can be many things – Vesuvius, the mafia-like Camorra, the outlying Phlegrean Fields (which, geologically speaking, constitute the second most dangerous area on the planet). It is all these things that have, at one time or another, put paid to the higher aspirations of Neapolitans themselves.

Naples is simultaneously the city of light, sometimes blindingly so, and the city of darkness, although often the stuff of cliché. The boundary that separates death from life is porous in the extreme: the dead inhabit the world of the living and vice versa.

The Serpent Coiled in Naples, is a travelogue, a meditation on mortality, and much else besides.

MARIUS KOCIEJOWSKI is a poet, essayist and travel writer. Among the books he has written are The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool: A Syrian Journey, the sequel The Pigeon Wars of Damascus, and most recently A Factotum in the Book Trade. He lives in London, England where, until recently, he worked as an antiquarian bookseller.