Naples gang film entrances Italy

Italians hate films with subtitles and are accustomed to Brad Pitt, Scarlett Johansson and the rest speaking immaculate Italian for their benefit.

But this month they are making an exception: the new film Gomorra, which won the Jury's Grand Prize at Cannes last month, is on an Italian subject, the Camorra gangs of Naples; but the cast, mostly plucked from the city's streets for the project, speak in Neapolitan dialect which has to be rendered into proper Italian subtitles to make it comprehensible.

This has not deterred film-goers who have been packing cinemas to see it. Freeloaders in Naples have been reported trying to barge into cinemas for free on the basis that they appear in the film. Very Naples, that.

Living in Italy you get accustomed to the fact that there is nowhere else in the

peninsula remotely like Naples - thank God. No other city has such an astonishing location, with Vesuvius, the bay, the isle of Capri hazing the horizon. Or such an intense concentration of huge, ancient, pompous buildings, a fusty imperial presence to rival Istanbul or Calcutta. Or such a tragi-comic historical legacy, such an antique sense of self-importance related to the alien and long-dead monarchy, the Bourbons, who ruled the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies up until Italy's unification.

The concept of Italy meant little in Naples. Loyalty to the distant past is understandable: the city's history since unification has been a long saga of unrelenting decline. The recent spectacle of the city's streets clogged with piles of uncleared refuse for weeks on end is merely the latest low.

The Neapolitan lament is that the north has been screwing them ever since unification. The burden of Gomorra is that, while it is true that the toxic waste of the industrial north has been finding its way to illicit disposal grounds around the city for