“In 2014 I took a journey to Italy with my daughter Aza. After a while in Capri, we ended our travels in Naples in order that we may learn Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels in their entirety there. It was July, extremely popular, and we had been greeted by the scent of the ocean, the previous stone combined with the salt and the brine and the smells of cooking. It was marvelous. This was our time collectively to speak about the whole lot that was taking place in our lives and in the books (which evoke layers and layers of Neapolitan life): our feelings and what we had been feeling with every web page. Soon after, Aza would have her first child, and we knew we might by no means go on one other journey of this type. Our resort [the Royal Continental Hotel Naples] was partly designed by the modernist architect Gio Ponti—together with the materials, the beds, the sinks, and the loopy rooftop pool. We learn, principally in our room, like panting puppies in entrance of the faltering air-con unit. When we weren’t studying, we had been strolling to get misplaced. We’d flip down some tiny avenue and it could open straight into a particular person’s kitchen. There’d be folks sitting exterior smoking, having desultory conversations, enjoying video games. Vespas buzzing by. We additionally hung out at Castel dell-Ovo, throughout from our resort. Close by, there have been docks with fishing boats, and we watched the haul come in, maybe with the anchovies that ended up in puttanesca sauce. We ate a lot of puttanesca sauce. One day we visited the National Archaeological Museum of Naples to have a look at the artifacts from Pompeii. Seeing these objects was so fascinating as a result of you already know what occurred to the individuals who owned them, the despair and the way they died, and who they died with. One of my favourite issues we noticed was a easy cast-bronze skillet—virtually precisely just like the one I had at residence. To consider somebody in an historical Pompeii villa utilizing my skillet was such a unusual piece of connection. I keep in mind a little mosaic, a charming girl considering what to put in writing subsequent. That second, and people novels, have left a sure vibration in thoughts. We had been like spirits floating by means of what Naples was, and nonetheless is, actually like.”
Louise Erdrich is the creator of Python’s Kiss: Stories, a assortment of brief fiction that shall be printed March 24. She can be the proprietor of Birchbark Books, a bookstore in Minneapolis. This article appeared in the April 2026 difficulty of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the journal here.