Napoli revisited

The year was 1960, I was 13 years old and had traveled across America in a car three times but I came of age in Naples, Italy. I transformed into a “scugnizzo” roughly translated as a Neapolitan street kid. That’s what I was. Too young to drive, I was regulated to riding the trolleys in Naples. While in Napoli do as the “scugnizzos” did, I jumped on the back hitch of the moving trolley so as not to have to pay the five lira to ride inside. If I was lucky the collector would try to play tag with my hands “left one up, right one up, left-right." I wonder now if the collectors were issued sticks to bat our hands or they picked a nice one up on the way to work. They must have been bored like us.
Our family’s local education was derived from our maid, cook, and live-in babysitter. Lina spoke “a gooda English” and showed us off to her local friends and acquaintances in the market place as her “boys.” She lived in a room in our apartment Monday through Saturday. On Sunday she visited her two daughters who boarded at a convent school. Lina was not a disciplinarian and four boys were a handful especially when two were teenagers and only the youngest hung to her skirt. He was the “Golden boy” with freckles and strawberry blond hair in a country of dark haired, olive skinned men and women. He drew crowds in the local piazza and had permanent dimples in his cheeks from the pinching that inevitably occurred on his and Lina’s daily shopping rounds. We older boys were more aloof and headed out by bus, ”funicular” and trolleys to the more exotic parts of “Napoli.”
After a few games of foosball in Luna park it was time to jump on another trolley past Pozzuoli (Sofia Loren’s hometown) to the beach. My Dad was in the Navy and stationed here so we had access to the Armed Forces recreation area and beach.
The beach was a young boy’s European education as men of all sizes and shapes paraded around in “speedos” and the women didn’t shave under their arms. Wow, was I torn between beauty and the beast.
Although the majority of Americans lived in a string of high rises on the hilltop our family lived in a large villa (we rented a whole floor) overlooking the Bay of Naples. Following a path along the cliff past the guest house where the "contessa" now lived (I imagined her wrapped in a white flowing dressing gown with her hair stuffed into a turban looking desperately at Sorrento for her lost love. She never came out.) you wound around until a cave appeared where a boat builder worked. We immediately bought a row boat with a sail to learn what we could about the bay (three brothers, one older two younger). Later that year with a three dollar set of plans sold to us by a new company called Sunfish, my Dad built us a wooden surfboard with a mast and sail. Like its future fiberglass siblings this sunfish could be tipped over and popped back up by standing on the center board. The usual trick if a sightseeing boat came close (ok so we sought them out, I was thirteen and looking for excitement) was to tip the boat in front of the unsuspecting tourists. Vintage mahogany speed boats would come over to offer help after we had intentionally tipped over along side the tourists. Everyone looked on in horror until we stepped on the center board and took off on our own. What better way to spend a summer day?