Anna Maria Ortese returns to Naples, a city from which she has been absent for many years.
Officially, she was commissioned to interview young Neapolitan writers, some already renowned, others destined to become so: Prisco, Rea, Incoronato, and La Capria.
A long chapter recounts, precisely, her visits to these authors, and we come to understand how the city’s immediate postwar cultural and political awakening had by then dissolved, leaving behind disillusionment, resignation, and pessimism, and driving an exodus toward Rome and Milan.
When she meets Prunas, the guiding spirit of the review Sud—by then defunct, yet around which so many intellectuals had once gathered full of ardor and hope—Ortese perceives

an infinite grief and curiosity: you must have pity, those extinguished eyes seemed to say, you must avoid looking.
Is it true that we are dead?, he asked, is it true that we have been absorbed by the city, and are now at peace? (...) The city had destroyed him.
And why should it not have destroyed him? All had fallen here, those who had wished to think or to act; all tongues had grown confused and had gone to swell the sorrowful human vegetation.
This nature (Naples and its people) could not tolerate reason, and against man it mobilized its armies of clouds, of enchantments, so that he might be dazed and submerged.

The journalistic inquiry is merely an expedient: the author wishes to lose herself, to become disoriented, to seek out a “vision of the intolerable,” possible only in a city, like Naples, in which everything is

conceived, imagined, dreamed, and even artistically realized, but not real: a disquieting representation

.
The book opens with several sketches of Neapolitan life, the most accomplished of which is undoubtedly the first, Un paio di occhiali.
In a putrid, foul-smelling district, the sun touches only the highest balconies, while the rest is nothing but shadow and filth; yet the people joyfully greet the sunny day, as though

that air, that celebration, and all that azure suspended over the paupers’ quarter were also

theirs.
A poor girl, nearly blind, anxiously awaits the eyeglasses that her family has purchased for her with their meager savings.
Yet can someone who has never seen what reality is truly like bear the sight of it? Is it not better to see everything blurred?

Eugenia, still holding the eyeglasses with her hands, walked as far as the doorway.
(...) Suddenly the balconies began to multiply (...) the vegetable carts were tumbling down upon her; the voices filling the air, the shouts, the whipcracks, struck her head as though she were diseased.
(...) So many holes, so many ants

; a sense of bewilderment seized her, reality was too intense to bear.
Following these sketches—brief, elegant, and evocative—comes the account of a visit to a massive tenement building, which houses families who can no longer afford a decent apartment.
The author is guided through the long corridors, from the first floor, composed of dark, foul-smelling dens, up to the third floor, where the dwellings are cleaner and brighter.
The trajectory of those who enter the building is always the same: at first they reside on the highest floor, only to descend, inexorably, lower and lower.

The children, once neat and cheerful, in that darkness became covered in insects and their faces grew ever more somber and pale, the young women took up with married men, the men fell ill.
No one ever climbed back up from down below.
(...) There was something calling from down below, and whoever began to descend was lost, but only realized it at the end

.
The vast tenement is a metaphor for the anthropological, social, and existential condition of Naples, where the plebeians and the bourgeoisie coexist, mutually indifferent, like

shadow, weakness, neurasthenia, resigned fear, and impudent gaiety

In the preface to the 1994 edition, Ortese admits that

the writing of the Mare has something exalted, febrile about it; it tends toward a high pitch, borders on the hallucinatory: and almost everywhere on the page it exhibits, despite its rigor, a certain excess: in it, all the signs of an authentic neurosis are manifest

.
This judgment is the perfect diagnosis of the book: the individual pages, sentences, and words are often magnificent, rich, and capable of fully rendering situations and emotions; yet the whole remains disordered, confused, and unresolved, such that any conclusions must be drawn from the author’s own words.
It is an outcry, a desperate indignation against a reality that is, for Ortese, “incomprehensible and hallucinatory”: the demise of the dream of Naples’ rebirth, and therefore a defeat.

Why read it? It is exceptionally well written, and above all, the visit to the vast tenement possesses an astonishing vividness: a true masterpiece.

The sea does not bathe Naples