Naples, it is forbidden to hang clothes on the street “if there is dripping”

Luciano De Crescenzo would have shook his head a little, with his look of a mocking seducer: “I want to understand this well”. I think who knows that he would not have dribbled: “No, I am discreet on my underwear. Do you want to see that every Neapolitan must expose his weaknesses? ”

But by now the reactions will also be more basic and less literary, the great social (stadium) game has started. Will clothes hanging really be banned? Is it possible that the new administration dares to intervene on a piece of iconography, among the most popular and (once: now no, now there are also bad fake clothes hanging) involuntary of the citizen’s DNA?

And instead three lines in the new Regulation cause the fire. These are the new provisions on decorum and safety.

Which should come into force from July 1st: indications that, as often happens to the rules that regulate the balance between freedom and respect for others, may appear pleonastic, see article 6, in Chapter II: “It is forbidden to anyone to cause with their behavior, in public places or places open to the public, disturbance to the orderly civil coexistence “. Thirty pages. Who try to affect even the most conflicting and difficult sectors of trade activities, nightlife, sanctions.

But inside here is the indication on the prohibition not to hang the laundry where it causes “dripping” and therefore discomfort or damage for those who pass or live under those threads.

Letter “E” of the new Urban Safety Regulations of the Municipality, always to be approved by the municipal council. The text says: to “protect public hygiene and decorum” it is forbidden to “hang or hang linen, cloths, clothing and the like beyond outside private places, as well as at the windows, on the terraces and balconies overlooking the public street when this causes dripping on the public area “.

A step that cannot fail to raise the hot controversy of social media. “But how? A blow to our identity! ”, Thunders the municipal councilor Pino De Stasio. And the journalist blogger Laura Guerra launches the hashtag: “#iostendo”. Is it possible, she argues, “that with expensive energy we should buy a vacuum cleaner?”.

We are very far from De Crescenzo who described, with sincerity but perhaps also emphatically, the clothes hanging “like flags, like a party”. But perhaps also from Troisi who would have overthrown every supporter, with an indolent cross of his. The hanging clothes are not removed by municipal edict: also because many have only the sun, and not even a balcony, but only illegal threads in front of a low to hang the sheets, grazed by cars and scooters that splash in the alleys.

So better break away from the weight of iconography. Thinking of laundry as a simply human, ancient activity. As the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai invited us to do: “Where the laundry hangs to dry people do not die, they are not at war, they will stay at least two days or maybe three. It will not be replaced by other people, or blown by the wind.
It is not like withered grass ”.