(Richard) Common sense says that when you're going on holiday don't burden yourself with a bag of books.

Pack a tablet instead, it's light and you can read it in the dark.

But I love the feel, the page turning.

Give it a good sniff.

So I got a case for clothes and a bag for books.

These books aren't the usual travel guide.

(adventurous music) All the books I'm taking were inspired by the places I'll be visiting, and I'm hoping that seeing them through the eyes of great writers will give me fresh insights into the life and history of some of Europe's most stunning destinations.

♪ From tales of murder and intrigue... ♪ ...to accounts of mouth-watering local flavors... Mm.

...natural wonders... ♪ ...and natural catastrophe... ♪ ...playground of the rich... ♪ ...to the caves of the poor.

♪ This is Southern Italy as you've never seen it before.

♪ (whimsical music) Southern Italy has inspired a wealth of amazing authors, and I can't wait to walk in the footsteps of some of them, and see the places they brought to life so vividly in words.

♪ From the region's largest city to the great volcano Vesuvius and the ruins of Pompeii, the stunning Amalfi Coastal town of Positano, to Matera, once known as the shame of Italy.

♪ And what better place to start than Naples.

♪ With its crumbling Palazzo, anarchic street life, beautiful coastline, turbulent history, this is my kind of city, and I'm not surprised it's appealed to writers across the ages.

♪ (dramatic music) But the threat of Vesuvius and Naples' association with the Camorra, as the local Mafia here are known, has meant it hasn't always attracted as many visitors as some other Italian cities.

♪ Over recent years it's changed and the city's enjoyed something of a boom, thanks in no small part of the huge international success of a novel by Elena Ferrante called My Brilliant Friend, which has captured the imagination of millions of readers across the world.

And what's so particularly fascinating about Ferrante's Naples is the visceral, warts and all portrait she paints of this intoxicating city.

(whimsical music) Journalist Sophia Seymour has been living in Naples for the last eight years... (whirring) ...and taking Ferrante fans to places related to the books.

♪ (seagull cawing) So you're a young English woman who speaks fluent Italian.

Why Naples?

(Sophia) Well, I had the opportunity to study abroad.

I thought, "Well, I wanna do something a little bit different."

But I was warned that Naples is terribly dangerous, which slightly pricked my interest.

And then when I got here I discovered a town that's rich in cultural patrimony, and I felt like walking around the streets.

I was the first one to be peering behind these doors.

(motorbike whirring) (quirky music) (Richard) Can you give me a bird's-eye history of Naples?

(Sophia) Yeah, well, Naples is an extraordinary place which was fought over by civilizations, populations, inhabited by the Greeks, the Romans, the Normans, the Bourbons, Napoleon, right up until Garibaldi came here in 1861 and freed it from occupational rule and decided to make Italy one country.

♪ (indistinct remarks) ♪ Each of these cultures and people have left their mark on the city in the form of architecture and art, and when we're walking around we can almost see the relics of these really grand times, which are now kind of crumbling in front of us.

It's as though we're almost looking into an old lady's wardrobe and looking at all of her glamorous clothes from her youth, which are moth eaten and covered in spider webs.

But you can see that there was something really powerful and strong there once.

♪ -Ciao bella.

-Ciao bella.

(Sophia) That's my friend Pasquale.

(Richard) Ciao bella.

(speaking Italian) We're starting our tour in one of the city's bustling markets where you get a real sense of the kind of local community Ferrante sets out at the start of My Brilliant Friend.

Sophia has a surprise in store to make me feel like a true Neapolitan.

(Sophia) Okay, so today we're gonna have a very special drink.

Pasquale's family have been managing this water stall, in Italian, (speaking Italian) for three or four generations.

Traditionally you find these in the markets and they give water to the sellers, and now they sell anything from wine to Coca-Cola, to this amazing lemon drink, which the mamas would give their children in the mornings as a kind of vital medicine before going to school.

-So he's gonna squeeze lemons.

-Mhm.

(Sophia) Then he's going to add this water to the lemons, and this is called (speaking Italian).

And this is a sulfuric water that comes from -the mountains around Vesuvius.

-Sulfuric, -so that's liquid fart.

-Exactly, -it smells quite strong.

-Yeah.

Looking forward to seeing your reaction to that.

-Oh, it will be fartacious.

-Yep.

And then he's going to put some bicarbonate soda into it, and then it will kind of explode, and at that point you can neck it, if you don't--if you don't mind the smell too much.

-Okay.

-And then you'll have -all sorts of benefits.

-Which will be?

(Sophia) Your skin will glow, you won't be constipated... -Okay.

-...in case that's the case.

And also it's an aphrodisiac, so it's got everything you could possibly want.

(Richard) So is this one diuretic and erectile?

-Exactly.

-It's the perfect combination.

-Perfect combination.

-I'll have two.

(indistinct remarks) -So drink it right now?

-Yeah.

(dripping) (Sophia) Excellent stuff.

Ohh.

(burping) Just absolutely revolting.

(chuckling) (pleasant music) If I can just keep my stomach from exploding, we're finally off to explore Elena Ferrante's Naples.

Now a major TV series as well as one of the most extraordinary literary successes of this century, a quartet of novels that begins with My Brilliant Friend tells the story of the friendship between two girls, Elena and Lila, as they grow up in a deprived area of 1950s Naples under the shadow of the local Camorra.

♪ Although Ferrante's a pseudonym and the author remains anonymous, it's clear that she, or even he, knows the city intimately.

(peppy music) ♪ (indistinct remarks) As you walk through these alleyways it's impossible not project the community of characters described in the book onto the market sellers.

♪ (indistinct remarks) ♪ Just in the way that the book gives you a view into another world, this doorway, this is the world of the sign writer.

Yeah, we're about to step into this old bottega where Pasquale and his family have been making signs that decorate the market for three generations, and he's one of eight brothers and sisters.

He's been carrying on this trade, and it's almost like the author Ferrante taking us into these worlds where we have these family businesses that've been thriving for years and years, and the traditions still going on despite the world modernizing around us.

I'm pretty sure Pasquale wouldn't mind if you wanted to have a sign painted.

I once had "Sophia: 70 euros a kilo."

But, um-- (speaking Italian) (quirky music) (speaking Italian) Just two euros a kilo, but--but-- Bear fruit.

(chuckling) Old fruit actor.

(laughing) ♪ (Sophia) These little alleyways are a warren of little houses.

If you look on the right here, people are living, eating, sleeping all in one room.

-All in one room.

-And they're called "bassi," or "bassa" is one, "bassi" is plural.

♪ (Richard) Part of the joy of following in the writer's footsteps is that they lead you to places most tourists wouldn't go.

♪ While some of Ferrante's characters worked in the hustle and bustle of the city, fictional friends Elena and Lila grew up in a slightly desolate suburb off the beaten track, but every bit as much a part of real life in Naples.

♪ (Sophia) So we're in the Rione Luzzati, which is to the east of the city, about a kilometer away from the central station, quite isolated from the hubbub of the city center.

And this is where Ferrante decided to set her books, and it's an unexpected location.

Now in the books, the neighborhood is never mentioned by name.

We know that there were parish gardens, that there was a train line that runs across the bottom of the neighborhood.

-Which is over there.

-Which is over there, and a busy road that goes along that side.

And so, as she describes, it's so isolated from the rest of the city.

It's cornered off by the railway and the road and a big hill that rises into the distance behind.

(Richard) The Rione Luzzati is a typical example of 1920s fascist architecture, a world away from the bustling market, and the perfect self-contained area to set a novel about two young women desperate to escape the suffocating powers of the Camorra and break into a bigger world.

It's so brilliantly brought to life in the books.

I find it extraordinary that in this day and age the author's identity has remained such a fiercely guarded secret.

(contemplative music) So the ongoing mystery is, "Is the author female or male?"

(Sophia) The ongoing speculation I think is a part of what's kept these, uh, books in the media and people being interested.

I don't like to speculate because I think Ferrante wants to be anonymous, and so for me I want to respect that and give her the freedom to write the stories that she wants to write without having to expose her.

(Richard) Well, as a male, it's the female gaze.

It feels and reads like female centric.

(Sophia) 100 percent, I like to think that it's a female.

(Richard) So do I.

♪ Maurizio Pagano was born and raised in the Rione Luzzati and has co-written a book about its history and Elena Ferrante's novels.

♪ From the top of the building where he lives you get a bird's-eye view of the neighborhood Ferrante describes in My Brilliant Friend.

Wow.

-Looms so high, doesn't it?

-Yeah.

♪ "Beyond the stradone stretched a pitted road that skirted the ponds," she writes.

"To the right was a strip of treeless countryside under an enormous sky.

But if you climbed up to the railroad tracks on clear days, you could see beyond some low houses and walls of tufa and thick vegetation, a blue mountain with one low peak, and one a little higher that was called Vesuvius and was a volcano."

♪ So the descriptions of this neighborhood in the book, do you feel that they're accurate to where we are?

(speaking Italian) (Sophia) He says, "Definitely.

The neighborhood is played out in the books perfectly."

The life of the neighborhood is so accurate that he can almost smell it.

He can see his childhood unraveling in the books.

(soft piano music) (Richard) The Rione Luzzati neighborhood is linked to the city center by a tunnel... ♪ ...which is the setting of a wonderful scene in My Brilliant Friend, in which, as children, Elena and Lila skip school one day and head for the sea.

♪ So this is the actual tunnel that's in the book and it's of huge symbolic importance.

(Sophia) Exactly, this is the tunnel that separates the neighborhood where they grew up in with the real world.

Their future careers, their dreams, their aspirations, everything is outside of the neighborhood.

Everything inside the neighborhood is closed and isolated and cut off from the real world.

(Richard) Exactly like all those Brooklyn to Manhattan, New York novels.

You go to the big smoke and that's where it all happens.

(Sophia) That's where you make your dreams come true, exactly, and this is what happens with Elena.

-Elena leaves... -Yeah.

(Sophia) ...and manages to make it as an author, but Lila eventually is pulled back.

She doesn't quite have the gumption to leave.

(Richard) Back through the tunnel.

"We held each other by the hand and entered.

It was a long passage, and the luminous circle of the exit seemed far away.

When I think of the pleasure of being free I think of the start of that day, of coming out of the tunnel and finding ourselves on a road that went straight as far as the eye could see, the road that, according to what Rino had told Lila, if you got to the end arrived at the sea.

I felt joyfully open to the unknown."

♪ This desire to explore the unknown is still utterly compelling, and I can only imagine what it must've been like for travelers in the past.

Almost 170 years before Elena Ferrante chose Naples as her backdrop, the city inspired another great writer to pick up a pen: Our very own Charles Dickens.

Dickens had already shown himself to be a brilliant observer of contemporary life in novels like Oliver Twist.

When he decided to take a break from novel writing he set out on a journey across Italy.

Reaching Naples in 1845, Dickens was both fascinated and appalled, and his record of his travels conjures up a city teeming with life and brightness, while rife with poverty, crime, superstition, and a craze for gambling.

Completely intriguing.

I'm standing here beside Porta Capuana, the gateway through which Dickens first entered Naples.

He was 32 years old and at a turning point in his career and wanted to take a break away from writing fiction.

(contemplative music) ♪ Naples and its surrounding area were the furthest south that Dickens traveled, and although he wasn't completely unmoved by the city's charms, as a key campaigner for social justice, he was shocked by its deprivation.

♪ Charles Dickens published Pictures From Italy in 1846, an account of his travels.

"Macaroni eating at sunset, flower-selling all day long, and begging and stealing everywhere and at all hours, you see upon the bright sea-shore, where the waves of the bay sparkle merrily.

But lovers and hunters of the picturesque, let us not keep too studiously out of view the miserable depravity, degradation, and wretchedness with which this gay Neapolitan life is inseparably associated."

Dickens was not a fan of traditional guidebooks and resisted all the set pieces created by writers who followed the tradition of the grand tour.

♪ He felt that the conventional tours of cultural and religious sites undertaken by well heeled young gentlemen and the guidebooks that accompanied them all too often ignored underlying poverty and corruption.

♪ Dickens's particular dislike of Catholicism is one of the recurring themes in Pictures From Italy.

He was critical of what he saw as the greed of the church and believed many of its rituals were simply excuses to extort money from the poor.

♪ For Dickens this was particularly manifest in Naples, and no more so than here at the Cathedral, dedicated to the city's patron saint and its great protector, the Catholic martyr San Gennaro.

(choral music) Three times a year the cathedral hosts an important ritual in which a vial of the dried blood of the saint is brought out, and if it miraculously turns to liquid, good fortune is said to befall the city.

Dickens was suspicious and I'm completely fascinated.

(singing in Italian) I'm meeting a local historian, Amedeo Cuello.

-Buongiorno, Amedeo.

-Buongiorno.

(Richard) So here we are on Saturday the 19th of September, -a very important day in Naples.

-Finally.

-Why?

-Why, because today we--we will assist to the-- the miracle of San Gennaro.

The blood liquefying.

Blood that is taken, um, 1,700 year ago, because this is the day in which the San Gennaro in 305 after Christ he was decapitated in Pozzouli.

This is very good for the city of Naples, because, uh, if liquification happens, uh, it's, uh, very good wishes for the future of Naples, a very, very good omen.

And is this the protection from Vesuvius erupting?

San Gennaro is the man responsible to protect Naples against Vesuvius.

(choral music) ♪ The blood is closed in-- in a safe behind altar in the Chapel of San Gennaro.

♪ When they open the--the safe, they can get out the two bottles.

The archbishop make the first test, turning on the bottles.

-If the blood is liquefied... -Yes.

(Amedeo) ...everybody great-- make a great applause, and everybody takes the exact minute when happens the miracle because everybody goes to the place -to play lotto, of course... -Yes.

(Amedeo) ...and we--we play 66 the miracle, and then the exact time when the miracle happen.

For example, 9:52, we play 952-66.

So this is the three numbers that we may reach today.

(Richard) So the cathedral is a casino?

(chuckling) Dickens may have been skeptical, but for hundreds of years the miracle of San Gennaro has provided the faithful with a beacon of hope in a city which has experienced more than its fair share of suffering.

(speaking Italian) (applauding) (wondrous music) ♪ What?

♪ It's perhaps not surprising that anything that promised a change in fortune was welcomed here in Naples, and the city's taste for gambling didn't escape Dickens's notice.

"There is one extraordinary feature in the real life of Naples," he wrote, "at which we may take a glance before we go.

The lotteries.

They are drawn every Saturday.

They bring an immense revenue to the government and diffuse a taste for gambling among the poorest of the poor."

(Amedeo) When he arrives in Naples he found this city totally destroyed by poverty.

-Mhm.

-So this is why people, uh, had a great illusion to become rich -just with the gambling games.

-Instantly.

(Amedeo) Yeah, instantly, without--without working, and, uh, this was the great pity of Naples.

This is why or so-- the order's monks they always make great battles against--against the-- the gambling games.

It battled against the lotto.

It was the perfect gambling game in a city like Naples.

(energetic music) (Richard) Apologies to Charles Dickens, but I can't leave Naples without trying my luck.

♪ Particularly since Amedeo has come armed with a Smorfia, a famous Neapolitan book in which dreams are converted into numbers to play on the lotto.

♪ He's always presented me with a mysterious board showing two numbers.

♪ So what's the significance of these numbers?

This is the sexual-- the two sexual number.

-Okay.

-This is the one of the man and this is the one of the women.

Tell me your--your dream and I can give you the numbers.

(Richard) Uh, riding on a horse.

-Okay, horse, horse, horse.

-Yes.

You dream about horse.

Horse is, uh, 24.

-Okay, so we put-- -24.

(Richard) ...put 6-29 and 24.

-Sex on the horse.

-Yes.

-Okay, I'll try that.

-Okay.

So we wanna play 6, 24, and 29.

10 euro, you give the--okay.

(Richard) I have the money.

I love this combination that a sexual dream and a Catholic ritual is gonna stop Vesuvius from exploding in my pants.

And I'm gonna win the lottery.

(Amedeo) Oh, we will win 41,000 euro.

-Okay.

-For the--the-- -Grazie mille.

-Thank you very much.

(indistinct remarks) (Richard) And if you don't have the Smorfia with you, don't worry, help is on hand elsewhere.

So for five euros you can buy a number chart with pictures that give you the guide to how to turn your experience into a lotto number.

So whether you're in speedos, topless, showing your backside, all life is here in this little chart, and all of this for a mere five euros.

(peppy music) Time to spend my money on something more reliable: Lunch.

I've been trying to work out why Neapolitan voices, "Uh, uh," are like that, and I think they're born without a volume control button, with the greatest respect.

And of course, one of the great attractions of Naples is the food, and everywhere you go vegetable stands and fish stalls, uh, street food referencing a long and varied history.

Delicious.

So delicious that some writers come here to write about nothing else, including best-selling American author Elizabeth Gilbert, whose memoir Eat Pray Love describes her search for the city's most famous food.

Naples is considered the birthplace of pizza and one of the reasons the pizza here is said to be so good is because of the famous San Marzano tomatoes grown on a rich volcanic soil at the base of Vesuvius.

In Eat Pray Love, Gilbert describes the journey she undertakes after her divorce.

She prays in India, finds love in Indonesia, and naturally, eats in Italy.

(bright music) ♪ In Gilbert's book, her quest to find the perfect pizza restaurant leads her here to Pizzeria da Michele.

-Buongiorno.

-Giorno.

(speaking Italian) Margherita or marinara?

-Marinara.

-Marinara, bella.

(Richard) Thank you.

(romantic music) "I loved my pizza so much, in fact, I've come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me in return.

♪ I'm having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair.

♪ Meanwhile Sophie is practically in tears over hers.

She's having a metaphysical crisis about it.

She's begging me, 'Why did they even bother trying to make pizza in Stockholm?

Why do we even bother eating food at all in Stockholm?'"

(chuckling) ♪ I can't wait.

♪ Drooling.

-Marinara.

-Si.

-Buon appetito.

-Just wow, grazie mille.

(sniffing) God.

Oh, my God.

(utensils clinking) Oh.

(chuckling) How can food make you just so happy?

(phone ringing) That's my agent calling to complain at my lack of table manners.

You can't be sedate and English about this food.

It's absolutely delicious and is borne out by everything that Gilbert has to say.

I don't wanna talk anymore.

Mm, oh.

It wasn't just the pizza that Gilbert loved in Naples.

"A tripped out, dangerous, and cheerful nuthouse," she described it as.

70 years earlier, British writer Norman Lewis arrived here under very different circumstances, but was equally captivated.

Naples had been heavily bombed during the Second World War.

When Lewis was posted here in 1944 as an intelligence officer for the Allied Forces he witnessed many of the rituals Dickens had described 100 years earlier, but saw a greater purpose in them, particularly when the city was experiencing such suffering.

(solemn music) Naples '44 is Norman Lewis's brilliant record of a people living through great difficulty, often forced into a life of prostitution and theft, where religious faith and a belief in miracles were vital tools in their means of survival.

And while he encountered grinding poverty, he was also entranced by the humor, kindness, and generosity of the people, and their incredible joie de vivre and will to survive.

♪ "A year among the Italians has converted me to such an admiration for their humanity and culture that I realize that, were I given the chance to be born again and to choose the place of my birth, Italy would be the country of my choice."

(blasting) Shortly after Lewis arrived in Naples on March 17th, 1944, the city was thrown into even greater hardship when Vesuvius erupted.

(smoldering) ♪ 26 people were killed and thousands were displaced.

♪ "The day Vesuvius erupted," he wrote, "it was the most majestic and terrible sight I have ever seen or ever expect to see.

The smoke from the crater slowly built up into a great bulging shape, having the all the appearance of solidity, like some colossal, pulsating brain.

♪ The books I've read in Naples have helped me to understand more about the huge impact living under the shadow of Vesuvius has on local people.

Whether it's their need for religious protectors, their capacity to live in the moment, or simply that the unique taste of the vegetables that grow on its fertile soil makes their cooking sublime.

♪ Gosh, reaching the summit of Vesuvius, it feels like looking down where the Titanic sank.

♪ It's extraordinary to think that in 1845 Charles Dickens was standing on this very spot, having bravely climbed Vesuvius by night, particularly brave as during the 19th century the volcano was in midst of regular cycle of eruptions.

♪ "There's something in the fire and roar that generates an irresistible desire to go near to it.

We cannot rest long without starting off, two of us, on our hands and knees, accompanied by the head guide, to climb to the brim of the flaming crater and try to look in.

What with their noise and what with the trembling of the thin crust of ground that seems about to open underneath our feet and plunge us in the burning gulf below, and what with the flashing of the fire in our faces and the shower of red hot ashes that is raining down on the choking smoke and sulfur, we may well feel giddy and irrational, like drunken men, but we can try to climb up to the brim and look down for a moment into the hell of boiling fire below.

Then we all three come rolling down, blackened, and singed, and scorched, hot and giddy, and each with his dress alight in half a dozen places."

♪ From up here you can see Capri in the distance and Ischia, and far down below, the remains of Pompeii's city.

(soft music) Pompeii lies about 14 miles south of Naples at the southeastern base of Vesuvius, famously buried under meters of ash when the volcano erupted in 79 AD.

It was once a thriving Roman town.

♪ In 2003, bestselling novelist Robert Harris brought his formidable storytelling skills to the city's obliteration.

Set in the days leading up to the eruption, Harris draws on the writings of Pliny the Younger, who was just 17 at the time, and whose two famous letters recording the catastrophe remain the only surviving eyewitness account.

♪ Harris depicts a decadent world on the brink of destruction.

It's a brilliant example of how fiction can transport you back in time emotionally and bring history to life.

♪ Francesca Del Vecchio is an art historian and Pompeii guide.

Francesca, you are a leading expert and guide about Pompeii.

-Where are we here?

-We are in the forum.

The forum in any Roman city is the heart, it's the main square.

And in Pompeii, you see it.

Can you see the people?

Can you see the dogs crossing?

That's the bustling life of Pompeii here in the city center.

(Richard) And how do you feel that Robert Harris recreated those last days in his novel?

(Francesca) I have to admit, when I received as a present the Robert Harris book, I was quite puzzled and annoyed.

You are giving a Pompeii book to me?

Then I read the book and I was shocked.

This is an amazing book because Robert Harris has been studying about the volcano, about the eruption, about the people, about the Roman history.

So I was looking for a mistake.

Hard to find one.

(Richard) How much of Pliny's information did Robert Harris include in the novel?

(Francesca) Most of it, even if I have to say that Pliny was, on the one hand, describing the scientific eruption.

He was telling about the mountain.

They had no idea it was a volcano.

They just called it "the mountain" and it was exploding.

(Richard) So the Pompeiians had no idea that it was... -No idea.

-...was active.

(Francesca) No.

There had been previous eruptions, but either it happened such a long time before that no one was there to testimony about it, or either the previous people died under an eruption, so there was no one able to keep the memory about it.

♪ (Richard) "It was imposing for a provincial town: basilica, covered market, more temples, a public library, all brilliantly colored and shimmering in the sunlight; three or four dozen statues of emperors and local worthies high up on their pedestals.

Not all of it was finished.

A webwork of wooden scaffolding covered some of the large buildings.

The high walls acted to trap the noise of the crowd and reflect it back at them: the flutes and drums of the buskers, the cries of the beggars and hawkers, the sizzle of cooking food."

♪ Francesca is taking me to the spot where Pompeii's water supply would've flowed from the region's aqueduct.

So the plot of Robert Harris's novel, Pompeii, revolves around a water engineer who discovers that there's a problem with the aqueduct or the water system.

(Francesca) That's right.

He was really finding a thriller that was very well set in the historical events of the eruption.

So he noticed that the level of waters was lowering down, and that's the key point of the book and the fascination of the book because it's all around the aqueduct.

The aqueduct by Augustus, the emperor, a great, great construction that was leading water across the Campagna region for 100 kilometers.

(Richard) Do you think it's true that the water supply did stop just days before the eruption?

(Francesca) I do believe, because this is such a complicated engineering system and, for sure, there was strong earthquakes in the hours or maybe in the previous days attending to the eruption that it's impossible that such a delicate system could just keep on going in perfect condition.

(Richard) How accurate or true do you think the story is of this water engineer?

(Francesca) Of course, we have no knowledge about the real person, so he was just creating an imaginary person that correspond to the real technician on duty, but he's going even ahead and he thinks, "I can even save my characters."

And in the end, this is the exit for his main character.

The water engineer and the young girl escape from the tunnel here.

From a logical point of view, there was no way out, no escape route from the eruption, but being underground in a water tunnel, he managed to escape the blast.

♪ (Richard) So where are we going to now, Francesca?

(Francesca) We are entering the bath, one of the bath of Pompeii.

Look at that.

(Richard) Wow.

This is unbelievable.

And it feels air conditioned.

(Francesca) The Romans were able to give you heating, to give you cool air with no technology, with no energy.

So, this public bath, was this for very rich people -or for everybody?

-For everybody because they had no bathroom at home, but they were very clean people, so they would go into the bath.

I can't get over that this is still intact.

That's a miracle.

And look at the vault.

No matter the earthquake, no matter seven meters of ashes pushing from the top, it didn't collapse.

(melancholy music) ♪ (Richard) Do you think that fiction, at some level, serves history better than actual history because it brings it to life in a way-- (Francesca) I think--I think we need both because, sometimes, scholars can be boring, I have to tell you.

♪ But if you are able to mix real events in a very fascinating plot with real characters, we are emerged into history.

So, Robert Harris is still the king.

-Of Pompeii.

-Yes, because he managed to create a guidebook of Pompeii.

He's describing the eruption, he's following all the specific text, but at the same time, it's not boring.

I can tell you.

♪ (Richard) Having climbed to the top of Vesuvius, the destroyer, then walked amongst the ruins of what it destroyed here in Pompeii has proved to be an incredibly powerful and moving experience while, simultaneously, you're trying to reimagine what life was like here whilst knowing that you're walking amongst the dead.

(birds chirping) An hour's drive south of Pompeii lies the glamorous seaside town of Positano, where the rich and famous holiday today as perhaps they did once in Pompeii.

It's hard to believe this idyllic spot was the inspiration for one of fiction's most notorious serial killers.

(mellow music) ♪ This is the amazing hotel where Tom Ripley first stays when he comes to Positano, which was renamed Mongibello in Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Absolutely gorgeous.

(laughing) ♪ Tom is down on his luck and making a living as a small-time con man when he meets a wealthy New York businessman, Herbert Greenleaf, who sends him to Italy to try to persuade his son, Dickie, to return home to America.

♪ Tom is mesmerized, not only by Italy, but also by Dickie and his idyllic lifestyle.

His admiration soon becomes a dangerous obsession.

♪ (utensils clinking) ♪ "'What hotel are you staying at,' Marge asked Tom.

Tom smiled.

'Mm, I haven't found one yet.

What do you recommend?'

'The Miramare the best.'

Tom took a room at the Miramare.

It was 4:00 by the time he got his suitcase from the post office.

He'd hardly the energy to hang up his best suit before he fell down on the bed.

When he awoke, groggy and weak, the sun was still shining.

It was 5:30 by his new watch.

He went to a window and looked out.

For an instant, he saw Dickie and Marge as they crossed a space between houses on the main road.

Tom realized he was seeing them on a typical day.

Siesta after late lunch, probably then a sail in Dickie's boat at sundown.

Then, aperitifs at one of the cafes at the beach.

They were enjoying a perfectly ordinary day as if he did not exist."

What's particularly fascinating about this whole setting here is that Ripley stays at the Miramare Hotel, as he does in the novel, but not only that, Highsmith herself was inspired to create what went on to be her favorite literary creation in this very hotel room.

In 1952, the 31-year-old Highsmith had been traveling through Europe with her girlfriend, sociologist Ellen Blumenthal Hill, when they arrived in Positano.

Highsmith's first novel, Strangers on a Train, had just been adapted for the screen by Hitchcock and things seemed to be going well.

But she was restless, and she and Ellen weren't getting along.

(indistinct chatter) From the window of the very room I'm staying in now, she saw what she described later as "a solitary young man in shorts and sandals with a towel flung over his shoulder making his way along the beach.

There was an air of pensiveness about him, maybe unease.

Had he quarreled with someone?

What was on his mind?"

From this germ of an idea, she created a new kind of antihero in Tom Ripley.

♪ Tom Ripley arrives from America completely lily white, fish out of water on the Positano coast with this mission to try and find Dickie Greenleaf for his father.

And doesn't have the money, doesn't have the wherewithal to fit into this lifestyle, but is hell-bent on having it for himself.

♪ Ripley's envy of Dickie Greenleaf and his lifestyle is so great that he determines to become Dickie, whatever the cost.

In many ways, perhaps Highsmith was herself trying to become someone else.

Like her fictional creation, she'd had a miserable childhood with an absent father and a bullying mother.

She was also gay at a time when homophobia was rife.

Europe represented an escape.

As Highsmith became increasingly misanthropic and dependent on alcohol, Ripley became a vehicle through which she could vent her own rage, live out her own fantasies.

In many ways, this is the perfect place to fantasize about a different lifestyle, to escape from the real world, to people-watch, to pretend to be someone else.

Having stayed in the room where she invented this character and feeling how beautiful the place is and how aspirational it is that people arrive here in the millions, I perfectly get why Patricia Highsmith set Positano as the meeting place between Marge, Dickie Greenleaf, and Tom Ripley, which then sets in motion this absolutely inevitable serial-killing maniac on the loose.

So, to literary serial killing.

(indistinct chatter) Grazie mille.

Oh, I'm very sad to be leaving Positano.

(singing in foreign language) (uplifting music) ♪ (Richard) No surprise that the late director Franco Zeffirelli had his summer place in Positano.

It's said that only when his climbing steps days were over did he have to retreat back to his house in Rome.

♪ It's now been converted into a hotel that I think the main bedroom costs 5,000 euros a night.

♪ Bruce Robinson based his experience as an actor working on Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet in 1967, uh, then created the predatory Uncle Monty in Withnail & I on Franco.

♪ So, who knows?

Perhaps in some strange, roundabout way I have Positano to thank for my film career.

♪ The books I've read so far have given me a real insight into the cultural and economic diversity of this region, from the aspirational glamour of Positano and the once decadent world of Pompeii to the beguiling anarchy of Naples with all its challenges.

♪ Heading away from amazing Positano... towards Matera, which will really deal with this north-south divide of Italy, where you go from incredible wealth in the north to the poverty of the south by comparison.

(soft music) ♪ Matera is 160 miles southeast of Positano in the Basilicata region.

♪ Despite being named European City of Culture in 2019, until the middle of the 20th century it was known as the shame of Italy.

And what's particularly intriguing is that it was largely thanks to a book that the city's fortunes changed.

♪ Carlo Levi's compelling memoir of his time spent in this area is essential reading if you visit Matera.

♪ In the mid-1930s, Carlo Levi was exiled by Mussolini's government because of his anti-fascist activities, and his punishment was sent to live here in this remote region of Southern Italy.

In 1945, he published Christ Stopped at Eboli, his searing indictment of the way that local villages had to endure the most appalling poverty.

(melancholy music) "The greatest travelers have not gone beyond the limits of their own world.

They've trodden the paths of their own souls, of good and evil, of morality and redemption.

But to this shadowy land that knows neither sin, nor redemption from sin, where evil is not moral, but is only the pain presiding forever in earthly things, Christ did not come.

Christ stopped at Eboli."

(soft music) ♪ Carlo Levi trained as a doctor, but decided to dedicate his life to his art.

He was one of the painters from Turin known as the Group of Six, who exhibited together between 1929 and 1932.

♪ The group shared an interest in Post-Impressionism and Fauvism, a style characterized by strong color and fierce brushwork.

♪ They were also connected by their opposition to fascism and to Mussolini.

♪ When Levi arrived in this remote corner of Italy, he was shocked to find a world of extreme poverty isolated from the 20th century.

♪ These caves were carved out of limestone dating back to Matera's prehistoric era and called the Sassi.

Less than 70 years ago, people lived here, mostly peasants, farmers, and livestock.

"As I went by, I could see into the caves whose only light came in through the front doors.

Some of them had no entrance but a trap door and ladder.

In these dark holes with walls cut out of the earth, I saw a few pieces of miserable furniture, beds, and some ragged clothes hanging up to dry.

On the floor lay dogs, sheep, goats, and pigs.

Most families have just one cave to live in and there they sleep all together: men, women, children, and animals.

This is how 20,000 people live.

Of children, I saw an infinite number.

They appeared from everywhere, in the dust and heat, amid the flies, stark naked or clothed in rags.

I have never in all my life seen such a picture of poverty."

Which is not what you expect to read about in Italy in the 20th century.

I was-- It's pretty shocking.

(piano music) Antonio Nicoletti works for the Basilicata region and his lived in Matera his whole life.

♪ Antonio, can you please explain the title of Carlo Levi's book?

(Antonio) Christ Stopped at Eboli because Eboli was a small town at the border of this region, and this region was far from the modern Italy of the time.

It was like stopping civilization in Eboli and then entering a land which was backward.

And is it true that your father lived -in one of the caves?

-Yes, of course.

My father was born here and he lived here until he was 20.

♪ When he was 20, he moved in a new flat that was built after an interest that grew towards Matera after the book of Carlo Levi, actually.

So the book had a real impact?

(Antonio) Yes, it was one of the most important books after the Second World War, and Matera became a kind of symbol, the symbol of the peasant civilization that had to be transformed into something that was modern.

(Richard) Do you remember what your father told you about what it was like growing up?

(Antonio) Yeah, I asked him, "Tell me something about your youth.

What--how was living in Sassi for you?"

And he described to me something that was really close to the Carlo Levi description.

And I discovered just when I was 17 that my father had lost three young brothers before three years old, and he never told this to me.

-To malaria.

-It was very strange for me.

I asked him, "Why didn't you tell me that I could've had three uncles and I don't have?"

And he said, "But it was normal at the time.

It was normal because there was children mortality in every family."

So, this was the first description of Carlo Levi in the book Christ Stopped at Eboli.

He never left totally from here, and he came back many times from Turin, from Rome and brought many people of national and international intelligenza here to let people understand what was the heart of this old civilization, and Carlo Levi himself discovered and described this precious heart.

♪ (Richard) After the Italian government invested in Matera in the 1950s, the last inhabitants of the Sassi were moved to modern housing.

♪ (Antonio) This was a Benedictine church.

It has more than 1,000 years.

(Richard) How many churches are there carved into the rocks in Matera?

(Antonio) Well, you have to figure out that when Carlo Levi was here, these churches were hardly visible because they were lived as dwellings or as--warehouses or something else from a church.

And even the frescos were covered by layers of dust.

Across the '50s and '60s and '70s, people discovered, and they were able to count more than 150 (indistinct) churches in the surroundings of Matera and in the city center.

♪ (Richard) In 1993, the city received a boost when it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and since then, local people have worked hard to preserve its spirit and ancient culture, transforming caves for a variety of uses.

Michele Centonze works at the Hotel Sextantio, one of a number of cave dwellings that has been meticulously restored so that visitors to Matera can gain a greater understanding of the city's past.

(Michele) The owner, he's a philosopher, is really passionate about history, culture of Italy, and he hired an anthropologist and make a lot of interviews to all the local residents, to people from Matera, carpenters, in order to recreate the original setting of at least 70 years ago, original benches, original furniture, original linens, because we would like that our guests could jump into the past and feel and live the spirits of that time.

(Richard) I see it in every room, there's a copy of Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli.

-Why is that?

-It's important for us to let our guests be aware that there was a history of poverty, but now it's completely different, the situation.

If you could read Carlo Levi's words, you can understand how people used to live in those caves.

(guitar and violin music) (Richard) Although it's incredibly stylishly done and sympathetically restored, it's a big stretch to get your head around the fact that families were crammed in here with all their farm animals, no running water, no lavatory whatsoever, no electricity.

(uplifting music) Everywhere I go in Matera, there's evidence of Carlo Levi's influence.

And it's moving to see how important his memory is to this city.

♪ Here in the historic center, the Palazzo Lanfranchi houses the city's art museum where Levi's paintings are on display, including a monumental depiction of life as he remembered it during the 1930s.

Mariangela Caruso works in the gallery.

(Mariangela) This painting was commissioned by the writer and the movie director Mario Soldati, who thought Carlo Levi would've been the perfect person to paint this land.

(Richard) So did he know all of the people that he's painted here?

(Mariangela) Yeah, he knew everybody.

Actually, he already knew some of them when he came here in 1935, '36 when he was exiled.

He knew their condition of poverty.

He knew their sorrow, their sense of pity, the situation where they lived in.

(Richard) So it's almost like a painful but perfect valentine to his experience of living here in the year of '35 and '36.

(Mariangela) It was a painful experience, but it was full of emotion, of values, of human values that he could recognize in the eyes of the people who lived here.

Poor people, but with a lot of emotion and... -Soul.

-...energy, and, yeah, a lot of soul.

♪ There was poverty, but there was something more inside.

There was the pleasure of helping one another.

-A sense of community.

-Yeah, of course.

There is one main thing, one main aspect in Matera which is the (speaking Italian).

The people used to live very close to each other, and they used to help each other.

So, if I could need to cook something and I didn't have tomatoes, for example, I could come to you, the door was always open, and just take the tomatoes I could need and cook my meal.

The children were the children of everybody.

There was no this is mine, this is yours.

-It was a big family.

-These are positive things that you have pulled out of their acute poverty.

(Mariangela) Absolutely.

This is the main part, the best part of Matera for sure.

This is what the people of Matera still has inside of them.

(soft music) ♪ (birds chirping) I've come to the end of my Italian journey, and like Norman Lewis, if I had the opportunity to choose another country to be born in again, it'd be Italy.

(majestic music) The books I brought with me have given me a far deeper understanding of this extraordinary area, its traditions, struggles, landscapes, people, and past.

♪ And what I've been so struck by here in the south is that, on the one hand, they've embraced tourism for all its economic benefits whilst also preserving, maintaining, and celebrating the soul, spirit, and history of the area.

Bella Italia!

♪ (bright music)