Naples by Gallivant

The scents and memories I brought from Naples cannot be more different from Naples by Gallivant, created by Luca Maffei.

On both of my visits to Naples, I was a tourist having merely enough time to grasp the meaning of the sentence attributed to Goethe: “To see Naples and die …“.
Blinded by fascinating history, and colourful and expressive local mentality, I thought I was touched by the soul of the city, but Naples by Gallivant made me rethink my experiences.

Naples Luca Maffei and Nick Stewart, the brand owner, created is everything but what I remember:

This is Naples without noisy and dirty port, Naples without mindblowing traffic, without a middle finger and “Va fan culo!” coming out from a window of an old Fiat because you actually stopped at a red light.

No beggers hoarding the tourists while they gaze around, stunned by omnipresent history, no aggressive street-market merchants chasing you just because you gave their goods one glimpse too many, no small groups of grannies, older than the town itself, chit-chatting in a shadow after the Sunday Mass, as if the world will never change.

Naples by Gallivant is everything but dense and loud: it works as nature and history of the place, but without the noise and fuss the people create.

It works as a piously smoky panorama, overlayed with yellow, brown, blue and grey:
Salty air, a few rays of sunshine earlier in the morning, or in the evening, when the sea rests. The saltiness of the damp wooden pier, and the mineral scent coming from old and dry shingles, mixing with light incense in some small coastal church, after even ever-present grannies went away.

Naples presented by Gallivant is not the place you’d travel to see it and die amazed, overwhelmed and excited, knowing Naples is impossible to forget.
This is an olfactive imprint of a place where you travel to just be, or to stay in deep serenity, overwhelmed and humbled by moments when gazing to a blue and grey horizon blurs the line between nature and piety.