单选题
Something about Naples .just seems made for comedy. The
name alone conjures up pizza, and lovable, incorrigible innocents warbling "O
Sole Mio"; a nutty little comer of the world where the id runs wild and the only
answer to the question "Why?" appears to be "Why not?" Naples:
the butter-side-down of Italian cities, where even the truth has a strangely
fictitious tinge. One day a car rear-ended one of the city's minibuses. The bus
driver got out to investigate. While he stood there talking, his only passenger
took the wheel and drove off. Neither passenger nor bus was ever seen
again. Then there was that busy lunch hour in the central post
office when a crack in the ceiling opened and postal workers were overwhelmed by
an avalanche of stale croissants. As the cleaners hauled away garbage bags of
moldy breakfast rolls, the questions remained: Who? Why? And what else could
still be up there? But Naples actually isn't so funny. Italy's
third largest city, with 1.1 million people, has a much darker side, where chaos
reigns: bag snatching and mugging, clogged streets of stupefying confusion,
where traffic moves to mysterious laws of its own through multiple intersections
whose traffic lights haven't functioned for months, maybe years — if they have
lights at all. Packs of wild dogs roam the city's main park. Nineteen policemen
on the anti- narcotics squad are arrested for accepting payoffs from the
Camorra, the local Mafia. To many Italians, particularly those
in the wealthy, industrialized north, none of this is surprising. To them Naples
means political corruption, wasted federal subsidies, rampant organized crime,
appallingly large families, and cunning, lazy people who prefer to do something
shady rather than honest work. Neapolitans know their
reputation. "People think nothing ever gets done here," said a young
professional woman. "Sometimes they say, 'Surely you come from Milan. You come
from Naples? Naples?" Giovanni Del Forno, an insurance
executive, told me about his flight home from a northern Italian city, the plane
waited on the tarmac for half an hour for a gate to become available. "And I
began to hear the comments around me: 'Well, here we are in Naples,' "he said
with a wince, "These comments make me suffer." Neapolitans may
complain, but most can't conceive of living anywhere else. The city has the
intimacy, tension, and craziness of a large but intensely devoted family. The
people have the same perverse pride as New Yorkers. They love even the things
that don't work, and they love being Neapolitans. They know outsiders don't get
it, and they don't care. "Even if you go away", one woman said, "you remain a
prisoner of this city. My city has many problems, but away from it I feel
bad." This is a city in which living on the brink of collapse
is normal. Naples has survived wars, revolutions, floods, earthquakes, and
eruptions of nearby Vesuvius. First a wealthy colony founded by the Greeks (who
called it Neapolis, or "new city"), then a flourishing Roman resort, it lived
through various incarnations under dynasties of Normans, Swabians, Austrians,
Spanish, and French, not to mention a glorious period as the resplendent capital
of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. It was a brilliant,
cultivated city that once ranked with London and Paris. The Nunziatella, the
oldest military school in Italy, still basks in its two centuries of historic
glory; the Teatro San Carlo remains one of the greatest opera houses in the
world. The treasures of Pompeii grace the National Museum. Stretched luxuriantly
between mountains and sea along the curving coast of the Bay of Naples, full of
ornate palaces, gardens, churches, and works of art, with its mild climate and
rich folklore, Naples in the last century was beloved by artists and writers.
The most famous response to this magnificence was the comment by an unknown
admirer, "See Naples and die." Today that remark carries less
poetic connotations. The bombardments of World War Ⅱ were followed by the
depredations of profiteers and politicians — for-rent who reduced the city to a
demoralized shadow of itself, surviving on government handouts. Until five years
ago city governments were cobbled together by warring political factions; some
mayors lasted only a few months. A cholera outbreak in 1973 was followed in 1980
by a major earthquake. Its famous port has withered (though the U.S. Sixth Fleet
command is still based just up coast), industries have filed, tourists have
fled, natives have moved cut — it seems that only drug trafficking is booming.
"Unlivable," the Neapolitans say, "Incomprehensible," "Martyred".
单选题
The first sentence of the second paragraph implies that
A. Naples is in a mess where truth and fault are mixed together.
B. compared with other cities, Naples is not an excellent city.
C. no truth can be talked about in the public place in Naples.
D. people feel very strange to stay in such a disorderly city.