This “melting pot”: this tangle, this mixture of cultures, races and experiences which characterize the very life of the two cities, both from a historical point of view and from the current one of everyday life.

Naples was founded as “Parthenope” by the Greeks; it was one of the most flourishing colonies of Magna Graecia, long before Rome and its Empire was created. From its Greek founders it has inherited a certain sense of destiny, or rather a fatalism and an attitude that is a combination between tragic sufferance and an acceptance of life and death as an irremediable and irreversible fatality. This has moulded its spirit into a kind of acquiescence, of tolerance and a surrender to destiny which has played such an important role over the centuries.

An incredible succession of dominations has turned it, since the fall of the Roman empire, into a place where everything, and more, can happen.

Angevins, Swabians, Aragonese, Normans, Turks, Spaniards, Austrians, French until the Germans of the Nazi occupation. Not to mention the Piedmontese, who descended to the south by virtue of a unification of the peninsula, endured but not truly wanted by the Neapolitans.

The melting pot of Naples dates from very ancient times; its population, never autochthonous, has mixed with its “invaders” and colonizers of the centuries, including all these peoples and in their turn “colonizing” them spiritually and culturally, to create a true coexistence of cultures, spirits and spirituality which has perhaps never been realized elsewhere. Naples has “offered itself” to the peoples of the world, and at the same time it has accepted and phagocytised them in an embrace that has never been mortal, but has brought life and vitality. It has never rejected anyone: the motto has always been “where there’s room for one, there’s room for many”, and “live and let live” because after all we are all children of God. There is no lesser God, and greater God. It has exported cultures and it has absorbed any culture, any spirituality without ever refusing or rejecting anyone.

And now, in the globalized reality of today, it continues to accommodate, in its own way, the migratory flow of new poor and of new emigrants: Africans, people from Eastern Europe, South America, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, China. the Middle Eastern and many other places; the East of the world meets the West, Buddhist spirituality and Catholic religiosity meet and coexist with Confucian pragmatism and with the rigour of the socio-politico-religious rules of the Islamic world: no-one is excluded, but all dialogue according to the rules of a possible coexistence dictated by a city which, paradoxically, lays down its very own rules, that are not governmental but local.

Los Angeles was founded as: ”El Pueblo de la Iglesia de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles sobre la Porciuncula de Asís ” on the basis of a Mexican and Indian plan. Native Americans under the domination of Latin Americans from Mexico: an invasion which still continues, in an infinite history of migration. And a white community, result of a colonization within the colonization of the New Continent; final destination of the “gold rush” of the mid-Nineteenth century which evolved, in the early Twentieth century, into another source of “gold”: that of celluloid. And this is where the dream merges with reality, everything becomes possible, reality and fantasy become sides of the same coin, indistinguishable and indistinct parts of a whole, that of this city where everything can be said, where everything can be told.

And then a black community of people escaping the suffocation of the American South, in search of a possibility of life and freedom; Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese communities which, after all the wars from the Forties to the Seventies of last century, joined forces among them and with all the “different” people of the world, including the gay community.

In this magnificent and enormous melting pot everything becomes possible, everything begins and everything is developed: the struggles of Black Power, the student revolt of the Sixties, the battles of the gay community; the city as haven of differences and at the same time temple of the ephemeral, illusion and glamour!

This is where everything begins, just like everything good and bad in the world seems to begin and end in Naples: social struggles, criminality, corruption, and at the same time culture, history, philosophy and art; both ancient and contemporary art, which are superimposed and interact, like everything else, in a pacific coexistence.

To conclude, two cities that are “extreme” in every aspect of good and evil: places where the excessive becomes the rule, where the rule is never completely asserted.

But perhaps, for both, a single true and solid rule: take it easy, and tir’a campà.