Naples

NAPLES - It’s Christmas every day on Via San Gregorio Armeno in the heart of the city’s historic center. Although the tradition of Nativity scenes dates to the 13th century, Neapolitan artisans of the 18th century elevated the form to dramatic tableaus populated with saints, angels, animals, and figurines representing the trades. In the process, they launched a cottage industry that’s still going strong. The tradition of the “presepe,’’ literally “crib,’’ but meaning a representation of the entire Holy Family, is such a big business that an entire street is filled with artisans...

As he campaigned for attorney general in 1960, touring Massachusetts with his family in a 23-foot aluminum recreational vehicle, George Michaels had harsh words for the potential corrupting influence of campaign contributions. Turning down contributions from what he saw as questionable sources, he said he was surprised "to find so much tainted money available. " "I may have been naïve, but I never before realized it was as powerful as it is," Mr. Michaels, the Republican candidate, told the Globe in October 1960.

A Naples hospital says a Puerto Rican tourist who was knocked to the ground by muggers trying to grab his Rolex has died, nine days after he was hospitalized with severe head injuries. Police said 66-year-old Oscar Antonio Mendoza was pushed to the ground by two muggers aboard a scooter after he resisted their attempt to grab his watch shortly after he arrived in Naples aboard a cruise ship on May 18. Dr. Maurizo Postiglione, head of intensive care at Loreto Mare hospital, told the AP by telephone that Mendoza never regained consciousness after suffering multiple cerebral contusions and despite...

NAPLES, Fla. – Mitt Romney today accused Newt Gingrich of making excuses about a pair of flat debate performances last week and once again reminded voters about the former House speaker's consulting contract with Freddie Mac. After rarely referring to Gingrich at events yesterday, Romney appeared determined to resume his line of attack despite new polls that show him with a significant lead. Romney mocked Gingrich as "Goldilocks," a new line he has adopted to suggest that the former House speaker can't decide why he appeared to struggle in the debates.

"The Miracle at Naples," a play by David Grimm that is receiving its world premiere in a Huntington Theatre Company production directed by Peter DuBois, arrives with many of the trappings of commedia dell'arte: the stock characters, the bawdy banter, the slapstick. But don't let that fool you. This is not Italian Renaissance commedia; it's closer in spirit to a medieval morality play. That is, it is intended not to delight but to instruct, not to embrace its audience but to stand apart from it - and just a little above.

CASAL DI PRINCIPE, Italy - The paratroopers' armored vehicles had barely taken up position in this fiefdom of the Casalesi crime clan when the mobsters decided to show who was boss. On a sleepy Sunday, a few hundred yards from where the crack Thunderbolt brigade was deployed with automatic rifles, two gunmen drove down the town's main street and pumped bullets into a 60-year-old man at a table just inside the entrance of a card parlor. The murder of an uncle of a crime syndicate turncoat left blood oozing across the stone sidewalk and a...

*** PASSIONE: A Musical Adventure Directed by: John Turturro Starring: Turturro, Max Casella, Peppe Barra, Misia, Massimo Ranieri At: Kendall Square Running time: 88 minutes Unrated (as PG: profoundly masochistic love songs, booty-shaking in the streets) "Passione: A Musical Adventure" is a deeply felt, sumptuously filmed love letter to the popular song of Naples. It's also actor-director John Turturro's version of "What I Did on Vacation. " His personal enthusiasm lifts this oddity - half documentary, half Eurovision music video -...

NAPLES, Italy - They go by such nicknames as “Fat Cat’’ and “Tomboy.’’ Their simmering power struggles once drove them into the streets, guns blazing. They rule their crime families with steely determination, and also raise the kids and stir the pasta. Move over, Don Corleone. Godmothers are rising in the ranks of the Camorra, the crime syndicate in Naples. Women have long played a strong role in Camorra crime families, muscling, sometimes murdering, their way to the top. Their influence stretches back as far as the 1950s when a pregnant former...

A kiss is just a kiss, perhaps. But what does a smooch mean when it’s planted on the lips of an alleged mobster by another man? Observers of Italy’s organized crime syndicates have been trying to trying to figure out the meaning of the kiss earlier this week by a young man in a crowd of onlookers outside Naples police headquarters as Daniele D’Agnese was about to be hustled into a squad car. D’Agnese was captured Wednesday, after...

NAPLES - Mounds of garbage piled up on the streets of Naples yesterday, and officials across the country blamed organized crime and red tape for the city's refuse crisis. Effigies of city officials, suspended from lampposts and trees, reflected the fury of Naples's citizens, who have had to live amid their own refuse since Dec. 21, when collectors stopped gathering it because there was nowhere to take it. Residents have resorted to setting trash on fire, raising fears of toxic smoke.

*** PASSIONE: A Musical Adventure Directed by: John Turturro Starring: Turturro, Max Casella, Peppe Barra, Misia, Massimo Ranieri At: Kendall Square Running time: 88 minutes Unrated (as PG: profoundly masochistic love songs, booty-shaking in the streets) "Passione: A Musical Adventure" is a deeply felt, sumptuously filmed love letter to the popular song of Naples. It's also actor-director John Turturro's version of "What I Did on Vacation. " His personal enthusiasm lifts this oddity - half documentary, half Eurovision music video - close to the sublime, especially if...

THESE DARK THINGS By Jan Merete Weiss Soho, 217 pp., $24 MISERY BAY By Steve Hamilton Minotaur, 304 pp., $24.99 PURGATORY CHASM By Steve Ulfelder Minotaur, 304 pp., $23.99 Where better to set a noir police procedural than in streets awash in uncollected trash, against a backdrop of smoke rising from Vesuvius? That is the Naples of Jan Merete Weiss’s debut novel “These Dark Things.’’ Held in the firm grip of the criminal organization the Camorra, the city looks “like something out of Dante,’’ the stench...

A kiss is just a kiss, perhaps. But what does a smooch mean when it’s planted on the lips of an alleged mobster by another man? Observers of Italy’s organized crime syndicates have been trying to trying to figure out the meaning of the kiss earlier this week by a young man in a crowd of onlookers outside Naples police headquarters as Daniele D’Agnese was about to be hustled into a squad car. D’Agnese was captured Wednesday, after...

A Naples hospital says a Puerto Rican tourist who was knocked to the ground by muggers trying to grab his Rolex has died, nine days after he was hospitalized with severe head injuries. Police said 66-year-old Oscar Antonio Mendoza was pushed to the ground by two muggers aboard a scooter after he resisted their attempt to grab his watch shortly after he arrived in Naples aboard a cruise ship on May 18. Dr. Maurizo Postiglione, head of intensive care at Loreto Mare hospital, told the AP by telephone that Mendoza never regained consciousness after suffering multiple cerebral contusions and despite...

NAPLES — After a harrowing ride, our taxi driver turned around and warned us that the feast of San Gennaro, patron saint of Naples, was approaching, and that if his blood, kept in a vial in the cathedral, did not liquefy on that day, the city would be destroyed by an earthquake or an eruption of Vesuvius. With a menacing gesture he deposited us in a dark, cobblestoned street festooned overhead with laundry. We were in the heart of the Decumani, the old Greco-Roman streets laid out 2,500 years ago, where a friend had lent me his house on the Via San Paolo.

NAPLES - It’s Christmas every day on Via San Gregorio Armeno in the heart of the city’s historic center. Although the tradition of Nativity scenes dates to the 13th century, Neapolitan artisans of the 18th century elevated the form to dramatic tableaus populated with saints, angels, animals, and figurines representing the trades. In the process, they launched a cottage industry that’s still going strong. The tradition of the “presepe,’’ literally “crib,’’ but meaning a representation of the entire Holy Family, is such a big business that an...

NAPLES, Fla. – Mitt Romney today accused Newt Gingrich of making excuses about a pair of flat debate performances last week and once again reminded voters about the former House speaker's consulting contract with Freddie Mac. After rarely referring to Gingrich at events yesterday, Romney appeared determined to resume his line of attack despite new polls that show him with a significant lead. Romney mocked Gingrich as "Goldilocks," a new line he has adopted to suggest that the former House speaker can't decide why he appeared to struggle in the debates.

NAPLES, Italy - They go by such nicknames as “Fat Cat’’ and “Tomboy.’’ Their simmering power struggles once drove them into the streets, guns blazing. They rule their crime families with steely determination, and also raise the kids and stir the pasta. Move over, Don Corleone. Godmothers are rising in the ranks of the Camorra, the crime syndicate in Naples. Women have long played a strong role in Camorra crime families, muscling, sometimes murdering, their way to the top. Their influence stretches back as far as the 1950s when a pregnant former beauty queen dubbed...