Changes

|date=November 2017

|isbn=9781911508069

|cover=Pugliese_Malacqua

|aznuk=1911508067

There's another thing that the book is not, and if you know the cinema of Pasolini you'll get the reference. This is certainly not one of his scathing Italian reports on how awful Italy is. The city here certainly seems to be giving humans a rum time, but there's no moral here as to how or why. The cover quote, from Calvino – ''this is a book with a meaning and a force and a message'' didn't ring true for me. Yes, there is yet another oddity about the place here that made me think of Calvino's ''Invisible Cities'', but there's no comparison. And with the added modernism, with the style getting stronger and stronger, and without Pasolini's sacrilegious dismissal of all that makes Italy great, the book both spoke too much to the original local audience and didn't give me as strong a picture of the place as I expected. Added to all that, the author got instant reward from this book being a huge success in the 1970s, only to demand it be withdrawn from print, and it has stayed out of the public eye since. That suggests something acerbic or embarrassing, neither of which this is. I have to declare this an initially intriguing misfire, and assume that either it spoke only to the Neapolitan, or has had its cutting edge washed away over the decades.

[[Falling Palace by Dan Hofstader]] is for lovers of Naples – and, in fact, just for lovers.