Safest: Naples or Rio???
May 23rd, 2002, 08:21 AM
#2
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Just back from 8 days in Naples. I am a cautious but not paranoid traveler. Naples was incredibly safe. Had heard the reputation and was trying to keep an open eye. We spend a lot of time strolling for miles. Never was "jostled" in a crowd. Did not see any of the pick-pocket types that got my wallet in Barcelona a few years ago. Drivers are much better than rumor has it. They stopped for pedestrians in a lot of unmarked intersections. I actually felt "safer" there than I have in many of the cities that I have been to in years. The greatest danger in Naples is not to your wallet or safety, but to your waist line. <BR><BR><BR>
May 23rd, 2002, 08:36 AM
#3
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Dave, <BR><BR>so glad you had a wonderful, safe time in Naples. But please....a bad habit of posters here is to retort what others have posted in the past. Naples is notorius for petty street crime, amongst other things. In the three visits that I have taken there, each time I was a witness to "an incident". By the way, there aren't "pick-pocket types", you'll not know it was done until it is over. I don't mean to diminish your good time, I'm very happy that you enjoyed yourself. Naples may have been incredibly safe for you, but consider yourself lucky. Did you go anywhere else in Italy?
May 29th, 2002, 02:41 AM
#4
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The headline news Monday was sadly familiar for most Italians -- a high speed car chase in southern Italy ends in a deadly shootout between rival Mafia families. But these were not the usual suspects.<BR>The gun-toting clan leaders Sunday night were 50-something Italian mamas and teenage girls, police said.<BR><BR>"Obviously things are changing even in these feuds," the Corriere della Sera newspaper wrote Monday.<BR><BR>The protagonists in Sunday's bloodbath were the wives and granddaughters of Camorra gangster families, the Mafia organization that operates in and around the southern Italian city of Naples.<BR><BR>One car full of Cava family women and another car with Camorra boss Salvatore Graziano, his granddaughters and their mother showered each other with bullets in the prolonged shootout in Lauro, a town east of Naples. Two middle-aged mothers and a 16-year-old girl were killed.<BR><BR>"Yesterday's incident shows that not only bosses and their 'soldiers' have the duty to eliminate members of rival families; now the women, the bosses' wives and even the daughters participate," Corriere wrote.<BR><BR>Mafia women, especially in Sicily's "Cosa Nostra," are traditionally not allowed to get mixed up in men's business. Instead, the black-skirted women shuttle between the kitchen and the church, selflessly grieving for their fallen loved ones.<BR><BR>But in Naples, the battle of the sexes has taken on new meaning with the "madrina," or godmother, muscling in on territory of the traditional godfather.<BR><BR>One woman even allegedly ran one of Naples' most powerful criminal families while her brother was in prison.<BR><BR><BR><BR><BR>
