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The Monocle Daily
French prime minister survives two votes of no confidence – but at what cost?
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You're listening to the Monacle Daily, first broadcast of 16 October 2025 on Monaco Radio.
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Sebastien Lecorgneau's second stint as French Prime Minister closes in on its first week. Can anything stop him now? Does Europe have anything to contribute to the rebuilding of Gaza beyond one former British Prime Minister? And is your city really ready for self driving taxis? I'm Andrew Muller. The Monocle Daily starts. Hello and welcome to the Monocle Daily. Coming to you from our studios here at Midori House in London. I'm Andrew Muller. My guests Nina dos Santos and Vincent Mcevany will discuss the day's big stories and our weekly letter from reaches us from Naples. Stay tuned. All that and more coming up right here on the Monocle Daily. This is the Monocle Daily. I'm Andrew Muller and I am joined today by Nina dos Santos, international broadcast correspondent, former CNN Europe editor and Vincent McEvany, journalist, broadcaster, regular politics commentator. Hello to you both. Hello, Nina. First of all, I understand that you have been attempting to learn a whole other language which is a noble but daunting endeavour. Which whole other language is it?
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A
Arabic.
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B
So one of the easy ones.
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A
Well, I've never really managed to cross the threshold of learning another language successfully if it's got a non Latin Alphabet, have TR of things like Russian before and the Alphabet just confounds me. So this is going to be a real test of endurance and I'm not expecting results soon.
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B
How far into it are you? Because genuinely this is week one.
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C
Week one.
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B
What do they teach you in week one of Arabic?
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They teach you how to say nice to meet you, Tasharafna. They teach you how to say good evening Sabarhayd. Okay, stuff like that. It's me, Nina. My name is Nina.
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B
Sounded pretty, sounded pretty convincing to me. Shukran. I have picked up, I did have cause reporting in a couple of jurisdictions to try and learn the Arabic for don't shoot, which I have now forgotten. But it has always struck me as like a genuinely beautiful language to listen to.
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A
Yes, absolutely.
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B
I've never got the least idea what people are saying. Possibly a good thing in one or two instances that I can recall, but it does, it does sound weirdly soothing. We will test you on your progress in coming weeks. Vincent, I understand that you have been voluntarily attending musical theatre, which is a baffling thought right there, but beyond that, actually somehow contrived to enjoy it.
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D
Yeah, I was. I decided to escape the preparations for my mock exam by doing a little trip to the theatre. I saw Operation Mincemeat which if anyone has heard of it was a book and it was a movie.
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B
The book is very good.
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D
The book is fascinating. The true story is about how they sort of played a game using a dead body with fake plans to suggest to the Nazi Germany that the Allies were going to go from North Africa to. They claimed Sardinia rather than Sicily, and they diverted Nazi forces to Sardinia, which allowed for the invasion of Sicily. It's a really fascinating story and it is now a musical. It is sort of done by sort of five actors sort of swinging different roles and it is a real delight if you are in London the next few weeks. It is also in New York now as well. So if you're in either of those two cities in the Christmas and you're looking for a show, I think that works for all the family. It. It's a great recommendation.
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A. A real delight despite being a musical.
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D
A real delight despite being a musical.
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B
Extraordinary. We will start in France where just when he thinks he's out, they pull him back in and so forth. France's Prime Minister as of this broadcast, Sebastian Le Cornu, who has already resigned once only to be reinstated, has now survived two votes of confidence in the National Assembly. One on a motion filed by the far left, the other on a motion filed by. Right. Honestly guys, just get a room. Le Corgniu would nevertheless be wise not to get too bogged down in plans for redecorating the office. His survival may now depend on placating the Socialist Party, which may involve agreeing to let French people continue spending the last 20 years of their lives on a state sponsored holiday. Nina, how long do we give him?
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A
Oh, that's a really expensive and difficult question. I'm not going to be drawn on given the fact that obviously he. His last government only lasted something like 14 hours. This is obviously, obviously a step in the right direction. I think the events today, particularly with regards to the vote of no confidence that France unbowed the far left movement tabled first because that one was the tighter one where he managed to scrape through by a margin of 18. Essentially what he's done here with Macron's blessing is he's gambled that the Socialist Party does not want another parliamentary election because they would lose seats, probably based on polling numbers. And so he's had to get there support by trashing Macron's economic agenda and legacy so far. So what he's done is he's promised to repeal or at least delay the very controversial 2023 retirement reform, which would have seen another two years added onto the retirement age in France that was pushed through by presidential decree amid great furori a couple of years ago. And he's also said, as a result, I will not push through any kind of budget with that same type of presidential decree.
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B
I do want to come back to that question of pensions and retirement in France, because that has applications not just to France, but to most of the richer and developed world. But in terms of just the brute politics of this Vincent, should President Macron, at least for the moment, feel like he's gotten away with it?
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D
I think he should. I think it is a bit of a trick of survival. He has been busy this week. He's been in Sharm El Sheikh. You know, he had another big, long, awkward handshake with Donald Trump, and he's talking about what comes next. He is, as ever, trying to be the sort of big man for the European Union on the international stage. At home, things are incredibly tricky, but, I mean, they're in a situation now where he essentially just needs to sort of run down the clock. It doesn't all end in total embarrassment for him if he manages to survive in the Elyse palace and is being sort of torn out by a sort of collapse of government. He really just is trying to wind things down. And I think he knows that legacy wise domestically, he can't do much now, but internationally, he has a shot at it. And so with his eyes on the future, I think he's just focusing on.
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B
That because this was a bold move on Macron's part, and it seemed like a quite bizarre one. Nina, first of all, you have Lecorgny heaved backwards through the window and into the horse trough by the National Assembly. And instead of finding another prime minister or calling another election, Macron sort of picks him up, dusts him off and says, you get back in there.
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A
Yeah, but they kind of focus tested this about a week and a half ago when you already saw the former Prime Minister, Elizabeth Berne, who, if I'm not wrong, was the one who actually presided over this 20, 23 pension reform, start to say, look, guys, maybe what we should do is we should start talking about, you know, some kind of pause on this retirement reform, this pension reform, which is so controversial as an olive branch to the Socialist Party. I think my bigger question is whether or not the demands on the left will end there, because there's great appetite now and a much bigger conversation among the French elector about wealth taxes that could target some of the big rich business community in France. And what you're already starting to hear from the ratings agencies is that the combination of that pension reform, having been now maybe not abandoned, but very much delayed, is going to sour the French finances even further. If they start alienating wealth in France, that also will have an even bigger economic impact too.
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B
Is there any way, Vincent, that any government can make this case or ask its voters to get to grips with a couple of realities on this front? Because this is not just France. This is everywhere that has things like a state pension and a retirement age. The French pension in its current form was introduced in 1945 with the retirement age of 65. Life expectancy was 63. That the pension was never intended to enable people to basically take three decades off.
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D
Well, the fact is, France is now an outlier because it hasn't grasped this nettle. I'm just going to give you essentially, if you were French, French, and you went into the workforce in 1980 and you're coming up to retirement now, the average life expectancy when you started working was 74. Now in France, it's 83. Across the span of your working life, it has gone up by almost a decade there. And in terms of how they rank, I mean, retirement age In Denmark and Sweden, 68. Iceland, 67. Netherlands, 67. UK 66. Ireland, 66. You know, they are now in the same category as Slovenia and Greece, and it is a failure systematically. You have to start ticking this up over a period as the UK has done, as these other countries have done, particularly in France, where you've got a really generous welfare state and a really complex and expensive, effectively universal healthcare system as well. They've really sort of buried their head on the sand in this one and not been grown up about it. And the argument that governments need to make is one that's very simple, is that life expectancy is up. But also we need you to keep working because we need to guarantee that the generation coming into work now who are paying this will be able to enjoy anywhere near the kind of retirement that you're getting. That's your children, your grandchildren, otherwise you're going to bankrupt the country.
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B
I mean, I think just finally on this, Nina, there's certainly a case you can make to carve out exemptions for people who have spent most of their working lives, you know, swinging an ax and doing something which is likely to have an effect on their physique, as people used to 100 years. How is there any way at all that any political leader or political party can make the case like people? Seriously, it's 2025, we live until we're 90 and we spend most of our lives working in air conditioned offices.
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I think without France either going bankrupt or having some big problem, this is not something that the electorate is going to get behind. For the main reason that steadily over the last 15, 20 years, the period Vincent's talking about here, where this life expectancies continue to tick up and the sense of expectation and entitlement expect in the French welfare state hasn't kept pace. You've had a challenge from the far right and also a growing far left. And both of those two movements are economically populist and they're speaking specifically to that sort of emotive contingent among the community, the electorate in France, which is the agricultural community that is hugely vocal in France, the manufacturing community that is very intensely unionized. And so I think successive governments, I remember Nicolas Sarkozy trying to tackle this, they never really managed to push through the important, not just welfare reforms, but also labor reforms as well. Because the other issue that French people have to deal with, particularly youngsters, is they can't get on the job ladder with a proper job and a proper contract when they're young. So they have even shorter official working spans. But again, as I said, with the kind of, you know, post war economic mindset and 1968 mindset, by the way, that really dominates the thinking in France. Being French educated, I do remember that, you know, the problem is successive governments from the centre, right, centre, left, centre, Macron, whatever, they just never been able to grasp this falling knife, I think, for the pressure on the right and left.
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B
Well, to Gaza now, where halting the fighting and freeing the hostages, infernally difficult and complicated, though that was, was always going to be the relatively easy bit. The really tricky part starts now. That is the rebuilding of Gaza in a fashion that ideally enables both its people and its neighbours to live pleasantly and peacefully. And an especially vex tenacious part of that is going to be finding anyone willing to take responsibility for a ruined environment, a traumatised population and a feral terrorist government, which so far at least seems notably disinclined to disarm. Vincent. The big idea, or one of the big ideas, is the Board of Peace, this kind of panel of international grandees who will oversee the rebuilding of Gaza before we get onto the people who might be on it. President Trump certainly perceives himself as the chairman of this board. Is this necessarily the worst idea we could possibly have?
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D
I don't think it's the worst idea. I think they're all difficult ideas. And obviously you would hope and wish that very quickly the Palestinian people would be able to organize and run themselves. But you have to accept that this is an area which has had a higher intensity bombardment than Berlin in the Second World War. You're talking about around 200,000 buildings either destroyed or damaged. That's almost 90% of buildings. There are really critical needs here. If the infrastructure isn't fixed, you're going to have waterborne diseases rampant. If the education system isn't fixed, you're going to have entire generations missing out on their education if you don't sort of get working quickly. And you need people like those that are being suggested for this board that have the international connections that can go to any capital in the world, that can go to any organisation like the EU and the un, have first name recognition and be people who know how to pull levers of power quite quickly. And there are groups, you know, there's the group that Richard Branson helped set up with Nelson Mandela, these sort of elders group, which is kind of leaders from that have had distinguished times running countries as head of state or prime ministers. Those kind of voices are the people that you need right now. As difficult as it is to say no, you can't run yourselves, but people from in this part of the world need those connected outside it right now.
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B
I mean, that is very much a description, Nina, of Sir Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the United States, United Kingdom, whose position on the Board of Peace seems not quite a done deal, but getting there are the benefits he brings in terms of his obvious, you know, ability and connections. Do they balance out the fact that for obvious enough reasons, in the Middle east in particular, he may receive a somewhat mixed reception?
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I think mixed reception is the operative word here, because the reality is it depends who you ask, doesn't it? You know, there are some people who are staunchly against his name being floated. One of the reasons why there's still some push back here and it isn't a done deal, but for the moment, as far as I can see, his name is the only one, isn't it, on this board? So there's clearly a lot of back and forth going on behind the scenes about who else could be included, particularly from the Palestinian side, to give some legitimate recognition to this Board of peace. And one of the things that doesn't help is the fact that Israel has changed the names on the names of Palestinians on the list that it had agreed to release because there were some key figures on that. That list originally, it appeared, who could actually have played a much bigger role and have been recognized both by people in the west bank and by people in Gaza as well. And until you break that impasse, the problem is, is that Hamas is still going to be in a position to be able to say, well, look, we don't recognize this government, so why should we disarm? We're certainly not going to give our weapons up to the Israelis. Who are we going to give them up to? And so you're still in that vicious cycle, I think, until you figure out who exactly all of these parties are going to agree to, to put on the board, apart from Tony Blair.
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B
Vincent, is there a role that wider Europe could or should be playing here? Because, again, on the subject of mixed receptions to do with, you know, events, you know, you don't need to spend too long in the Middle east to meet Arabs who will tell you that all of their problems have been caused by borders imposed upon their region by Europeans in the first place.
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D
Well, Europe is doing a lot to bankroll the continuing aid to Palestinians in the west bank and in Gaza. And it has earmarked tens of billions of euros for the potential reconstruction of Gaza. So it is very much providing the money for it. I think what has been shown in the past two weeks is whilst he is in power, and that is until we think the 2028, and hopefully, if he observes the rules as they are in the US Constitution, term limits, Donald Trump is all about people and institutions like the EU befuddle him because he doesn't know how to play them. And they have a lot of rules and a lot of systems. And for better or worse, he managed to, by his own unique style, get this deal, or the first part of it anyway, over the line by sheer willpower, a form of manifestation and just playing. People like Jared Kushner, like Steve Witkoff, like individuals themselves. And that is the world that is operating, overseeing all this right now. And that's not something the EU can play that easily with these sort of very much backroom deals, strongmen, leadership. That is not something. And Ursula von der Leyen, of course, being the leader of the EU at the moment, we know that Donald Trump has difficulty with women in positions of power, apart from the likes of Giorgia Meloni, who we can stand up and say, oh, she's beautiful. He didn't respond well to Angela.
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B
Again, returning to the subject of mixed receptions.
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Indeed, indeed.
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I'm not sure how delighted Giorgia Maloney was by that.
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D
No, I'm not sure how delighted she was at all, although I believe he has done the forward to her new autobiography, I Think I Saw the Other Day. So, you know, she's obviously got a strong relationship with him. And you know, for its part, Tony Blair is one of the biggest figures of the past 50 years in European politics. And he is someone who knows with the organization that he has behind him with his history in Northern Ireland, which I think often gets overlooked. You know, he's done a lot of work, a hell of a lot of work, not just in the 90s, but subsequently on it being a post conflict society. A lot of work in Kosovo as well. He does have expertise, as difficult as reputations he has in the Middle east because of Iraq. He does have expertise in post conflict societies.
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B
Just a final thought on this one, Nina. Another there's a lot of easier said than done aspects to the immediate future in Gaza, but one of them is that at some point somebody is going to have to attempt to impose some sort of order which is not Hamas's order. And there's already fairly well documented reports that Hamas are attempting to reassert themselves with their customary brutality. Who on earth is going to want to send their police or their soldiers into Gaza?
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A
This is the other big question that hasn't yet been answered because we know that obviously some troops from the United States and other countries around the world are going to temporarily be sort of, at least part of the suggestion is that they'll be temporarily rerouted to try and guard the borders. But I mean, they're not going to step one foot inside somewhere like Gaza. Now, Europe, as Vincent was just saying before, has been doing a lot to financially support the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. And they've also said that they're happy to cough up about $50 billion towards Gaza now to help with this sort of reconstruction event. And Emmanuel Macron himself has again floated the idea a little bit like in Ukraine of France getting involved in some kind of peacekeeping troop. This is all very, very premature at the moment. And of course you've got Hamas reasserting its reports of summary executions and so on on the ground there. It's a very volatile and dangerous environment. I suppose they'll be relying upon Arab countries, peacekeeping forces maybe.
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B
I'd be highly surprised.
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D
You know, on that point though, we've had multiple incursions in the last few weeks by Russian forces into Europe, Europe's militaries, their priority is on defence on the eastern border. And we've also had a change in equipment type, you know, after Iraq and Afghanistan, where we had had a lot of equipment which was for that part of the world, that kind of climate that has been sold in favour of getting stuff that can work in the winter and the sort of European climate. And that is the kind of training that they've been on for the last five, six years. So shifting them to this kind of zone and in a destroyed city, it's something that would take away capacity, operational training, focus from the new mission, which is defence of Eastern Europe.
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A
Obviously, it'd be hugely challenging and obviously Germany expect probably bristled quite significantly at Macron's suggestion that, you know, he's got another one of his grand visions. But I think, as we were saying before, it's an extremely volatile environment and it's very, very premature to see at the moment how exactly Gaza will be secured. Obviously, the first step towards that will be Hamas handing over its arms. And there's this question mark, politically over, you know, the impediment of whoever's going to be running this peace board in the first place. That hangs over all of that, that.
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B
Well, here in the uk, the collapse of the prosecution of two British men, a parliamentary researcher and an academic accused of spying for China has raised a number of awkward questions about how big and pervasive an operation the People's Republic is running in this country. While everybody blames everybody else for the implosion of the one particular case, security officials up to and including the head of MI5 have picked the moment to remind that China is, as Sir Ken McCollum put it, a daily national security. He said, indeed, that MI5 had acted just this week to disrupt an instance of Chinese espionage, or something of that variety. He was operationally vague, Vincent. As I've been able to understand it, the case in question collapsed partly because the Crown Prosecution Service could not get the government to confirm that China is a national security threat. Is that as weird as it sounds? Because obviously you can have a nuanced relationship with China, which can be productive and mutually beneficial in some respects, while obviously observing that, yes, clearly in some respects it's a national security threat.
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D
Yeah, it is very complicated and it's compounded by law changes in the Official Secrets act being changed and a change of government as well. That's sort of clouding this in a sort of political battle as well. I think we've already heard frustration today from the chief of MI5 over this case. That's Sir Ken MacCallum, who was making his annual lecture where he identified China as being a sort of a daily national security threat. To the UK talking about having disrupted another operation just in the last week. What is really complicated about this case is that the way the UK has tried to play China over the last 15 years has changed so dramatically. We had the so called golden era under David Cameron and George Osbor where it was all about getting Chinese investment in opening Britain up. Then you had a sliding because of security concerns, things like the Huawei incident where the UK sort of then banned Huawei from national infrastructure here in the UK on telecoms ripped what Huawei had put in out that upset noses in Beijing, but it was seen as a priority, particularly from pressure from the US as well. And then this sort of interesting softening at the end where you basically had Keir Starmer yesterday stand in Parliament and say, you know, the Conservatives are now saying that we should be declaring them a threat. Well, here's what Kemi Badenok said. She said they weren't a threat, they were a challenge economically. But she says herself she wouldn't describe them as a foe. And you had the Foreign Secretary, James, cleverly as well at the time, now on the backbenches or just back in shadow cabinet, also refusing to declare that they were a threat. So there's the sort of public game of what we're trying to do with China and Labour again slightly opening the doors to investment. Not a sort of full on new golden era, but needing that investment in the public game is that. But then there's the private spooks and shadows game of needing to protect intellectual property, needing to make sure that people aren't being compromised. And the two sort of worlds are kind of clashing right now in an awkward branding essentially exercise of what China is.
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B
I mean, Nina, it's easy enough to see why UK governments would prefer not to think that China was a national security threat, because the UK over the last 20 years has been China's third largest recipient of outward investment, behind the United States and Australia. Probably naive to assume that all of that is entirely commercial, but it does strike, I think it would strike most people as quite weird. And these statistics have now been put back into the public domain by this case to discover that Chinese interests own 10% of Heathrow Airport, all of UK power networks, which maintains electricity supply in London, southeast and east of England and 75% of Northumbrian water, among others. And, and we can have obviously a commercial relationship with China, but they're not the United Kingdom's friend.
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A
There's been a bit of a blind spot over China, hasn't there? I mean, just Remember, only a few months ago we were talking about how a Chinese owned company might have been able to shut down permanently the last blast furnace that is crucial for steel making in the uk. So, you know, if, say, for instance, the UK finds itself in a situation of war where it needs to make weaponry, we're scaling up defence in this country. Quite significant because we appear to be in a new sort of cold war with our neighbors over in the east. Maybe not as far as China yet, but in Russia you would need to make things like steel, but strategically, guess what? Well, that one was almost snuffed out. So that was a lesson already, that China is a strategic challenge. And when it comes to espionage, as Vincent was just saying before, the head of MI5 is very clearly saying they should be viewed as a threat in those circumstances. I would say, though, with regards to this particular case, what's quite interesting is the oxygen that it is sucking up, because previously we have seen other allegations of people being accused of being Chinese spies before the cases have been dropped and they haven't become quite so political. But in this case it doesn't look as though it's going away. And I think that speaks to the fact that obviously you've got a Prime Minister who himself was the chief prosecutor in this country and if it's felt that he's not being forthcoming coming on this issue, whether it's China or anything else, then the UK can't really stand up to China and say, look, the rule of law here is really, really important and it stands. We're going to be transparent.
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B
Well, now for our lucky panelists, a musical interlude. Liquid producing. Chris, back to London, where over the decades many taxi passengers, especially those in the old school lond black cabs, will have fantasized grimly about driverless taxis. Generally about the 35 fifth minute of the seething monologue from the driver's compartment vis a vis the merits of hanging them, flogging them and sending them all back. That dream may be realised as soon as next year. Driverless taxi concern Waymo has announced plans to take to London streets, possibly followed by Uber and wave with an annoying Y, among others. The General Secretary of the Licensed Taxi Drivers association, which represents black cab drivers, has sneered that the autonomous vehicles are a fairground ride. A fairground ride, Vincent, which I put it to you, you have taken. What was it like?
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D
It was brilliant. I went to San Francisco last year and we landed, we went for dinner, we took an Uber and went with my partner and I was. And we saw them driving around and I was immediately like, I must do this. Downloaded the app, registered all prickety, quick and smooth. And when we came out, we ordered one. And it sort of pulls up. It's got this. This sort of bubble at the top, like a sort of police sort of siren flashbulb thing. And it's sort of your name spinning around. So you clearly know it's your vehicle pulling in. And then you get in and you go. And it was. I can.
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B
Sorry.
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D
Just, just.
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B
Just to pull you up there. Do they know? It's definitely. It has to be your name. You can't summon a taxi for, you know, alcoholic or.
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D
I don't think so. I don't think you can have that much fun with it.
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B
But, I mean, rod clutcher, like. No, no, nothing. Nothing of that. That's a shame.
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D
Yeah. But you do get in and I would say I'll talk about the ride experience first. Was. It was after sort of a moment or two, you can relax. And I think it helps in the way that Waymo works, unlike, I think, the Tesla taxis in that you can see the wheel moving, you can see it anticipating things. And it's not sort of vegan. It makes calculations correctly and rightly. It's not sort of too slow blocking traffic. It does taking over a parked bus at one point if it needed to, and it was incredible. So much so that we took them for the rest of the trip there. By the. I think the third one, my partner fell asleep on the way back. That's how relaxed you can quickly become by this. And I think for me, I can only think of another technological experience in my life where I've used something and thought, this changes everything. It's like nothing I've done before. And it did change the world. And that was the smartphone coming around. And for me, I was like, this really changed everything. And when we came back, we were like, as you say, stuck in a taxi, having to listen to a rant or, you know, not a particularly nice environment or anything like that. And this felt safe, it felt secure, and the vehicles themselves were incredibly intuitive. That said, US cities are on grid patterns, predominantly. London is like dropping spaghetti in terms of looking at a map. It is a very different city to have to drive around.
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B
Nevertheless, Nina, this does feel like kind of inevitable, doesn't it? This is the future.
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A
Well, it clearly is in London, because we're the first European city that's going to be trialing this coincidentally. Do either of you know why London streets are curved?
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B
I don't know. I assume that just because this city has been built more or less at random over a period of hundreds and hundreds of years.
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A
It's to stop runaway horses, apparently in the old days, so they would tire out and wouldn't be able to see the end of the street.
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B
Yep, fair.
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A
Okay, so. And that's the Luddite days. And I'm your resident Luddite and I'm also from central London and as somebody with young children who live in central London and a very elderly parent who also insists on remaining in central London, I'm slightly nervous about a city like London, which is, look, I wouldn't say it's the most pedestrian friendly city in the world, but the traffic doesn't go all that fast. I'm slightly nervous of these type of electric taxis. You know, how they would cope with a young child stepping out, how they would cope with an elderly person who possibly can't hear properly. I mean, Vincent, is that something that you thought about, you were worried about when you saw the streets of San Francisco?
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D
I didn't think so because I think that the way that the Waymo works with LIDAR sensors, I mean, these are vehicles that are heavily adapted with very strong radar and I think that Waymo has done really good testing compared to the kind of testing that Tesla has done with its full self driving, it is pretty safe. But I think that that is a concern. But I do think for what I did, you know, in terms of if you're an elderly person, getting out and about is a, is pretty easy if you can summon one of these, you know, because if, if they're in such a frequency that you're sort of not waiting, not sort of dealing with surge pricing like on Uber, potentially, if you've got sort of teenage children that need to go somewhere but a parent isn' available, you can put them in one of these and feel comfortable and safe about it. It kind of can change sort of travel, I think for people that are too elderly, people that are too old to drive now but want to get.
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A
Around.
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D
It is pretty cool.
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B
Nina Dos Santos and Vincent McAvany. Thank you both for joining us. It's time now for our weekly letter from. And this week it's from Naples. Here is Isabella Orlando.
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C
Most stories about Naples start with some reference to its unassumingness, its chaos, its pollution, its reputation for a danger and wildness that is as deterring as it is alluring to a curious outsider. But Naples has experienced a resurgence in recent years and I think perhaps visiting no longer needs this justification. Despite the fact that all these Tropes are true to some degree, referencing the city's challenges with organized crime, poverty and marginalization throughout history, some of which persist today. I wouldn't dream of starting this letter from Naples by saying anything other than Napoli is full of life. I arrived on a sweltering Friday afternoon in September, swarmed by zooming mopeds and the rumble of a city. I soon discover it is always in conversation. Elderly women shouted gossip across the street at one another from their balconies draped with bedsheets that give the tall, narrow apartment blocks the palazzi the illusion of being shrouded in cloth. Frutivendoli fruit sellers camped in the archways of Sanita rattled off rhymes spreading word of their stock. A car stopped in the middle of the crossroad so the driver, calling out to a familiar pedestrian, could deliver to their cheeks a characteristic double kiss. People of all ages gathered at street corners, napped in their urban front gardens, greeted their neighbors so loudly it was difficult to discern anger from joy. The intensity of Naples is part of its magic. It's an energy I know well from growing up in a southern Italian home. But to experience it on such a scale in this metropolis in the shadow of Vesuvius brought what I thought I knew about Italian passion to a new level. Neapolitans seem to take pride in this outward facing approach to life. One of the first people I met, a bartender called Enzo, who comes from quieter nearby Caserta, told me Napolitani lives their life in the streets. Everything is on display, so there is something to look at everywhere. It's clear why storytellers like film director Paolo Sorrentino and enigmatic novelist Elena Ferrante have been inspired to tell the city's stories and have helped it to re enter cultural dialogue and consciousness. Over the last few years, the streets are home to countless vignettes, each complete with their own cast of characters and one backstories that spark the imagination and are reflected in films, TV series and novels like the Hand of God, the Lying Life of Adults and My Brilliant Friend. North of the historic center, you'll find the district of Sanita. Long ago, the area was a Roman burial ground outside the walls of the historic center. It still carries a long history of existing on the urban fringes as a home to the city of poorest people and has remained marginalized until recent efforts to subvert the stigma that associates Sanita with danger, disquiet and organized crime came onto the scene. In Sanita, I found not only the most characteristic Neapolitan scenes But also my favorite meal and cultural visits in all of Naples and a stay that far surpassed my expectations. On Saturday morning, I took a steep walk up to Capodimonte, the hill that crowns Naples northern edge, to visit the catacombs of San Gennaro, the city's patron saint. These catacombs are special because they were built horizontally rather than vertically, stretching far and wide rather than deep beneath the city. Their tunnels of frescoed rooms and ancient burials reach across the hill and underlie lively Santa. A perfect mirror of life and death. The catacombs offer one small window into the underworld of Neapolitan lore. The saints who visited fleetingly but remained present through symbols and talismans scattered across the city. The aristocrats and competing powers who have wrestled for dominion of the metropolis for millennia. Though I managed to pick up a copy of Pietro Tracagnoli's Cartolina da Journeys Through a Hidden City from one of the booksellers of Via Portalba and got through over half of it over a cocktail at a bookshop bar, Libreria Berizo, I preferred to hear about the beliefs and rituals of a more esoteric, ancient side of Naples from the tour guides in the catacombs, 80% of whom are youth from the Sanita neighborhood itself. Co operativa la Paranzo is to thank both for the tours and in part for Sanita's region resurgence. It started with five kids and a local priest, Father Antonio, who sought to share the catacombs with visitors while creating opportunities to encourage the district's young people into paid, regenerative cultural work. Today the guides offer cheeky multilingual tours, while the proceeds support the cooperative's continued growth. Now made up of more than 80 young people amid a weekend filled with noise and movement, I managed to find some peace in the truly exquisite Casa Dana, a boutique hotel on Via Cristalini in the heart of Sanita, a historic five bedroom residence filled with art books and the quiet luxury of a private house turned characterful stay. I thoroughly appreciated returning from long days wandering the city to a candlelit sitting room where I'd flip through photo books capturing art and life in the city throughout the centuries. As a final farewell to Naples, I paid a visit to the Ipodeo DEI Cristalini, a rich Hellenistic burial site home to four rooms of illustrious painted tombs found just below Casadarna and only recently open to the public. The archaeological site is currently being researched and restored, but like the rest of Naples, invites visitors along along on that journey through past and present to experience the grandeur of an earlier time. The lifetimes come and gone between then and now and an eternal rustic beauty that in Napoli, carries on. This is Isabella Orlando for Monocle Radio.
- [39:15]
B
Isabella Orlando, thank you for that. That is all for this edition of the Monocle Daily. Thanks to our panelists today, Nina dos Santos and Vincent Mcevany. The show was produced by Chris Chermack and researched by Joanna Moser. Our sound engineer was Step Chungu. I'm Andrew Muller here in London. The Daily is back at the same time tomorrow. Thanks for listening.