His talents in full flower and basking in public admiration, gonzo journalist and inveterate anti-establishment troublemaker Barrett Brown is jailed in his native Texas on various federal felony charges.
It is 2013 and Brown’s adventures have included helping Anonymous hacktivists publicly expose private U.S. intelligence contractors engaged in deep-state power abuses at a time of rising concerns over Big Brother surveillance.
Brown has done this in swashbuckling style – often in a drug-altered state, chatting with executives whose hacked emails have been dumped online while on opiate maintenance medication. Brown was in withdrawal from antidepressants and opioids, he would later testify, when he threatened an FBI agent in a video posted to YouTube.
“I wanted to become famous for overthrowing things,” Brown writes in his much-awaited memoir, “My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous.”
Mainstream press coverage at the time of Brown’s prosecution was uneven and sometimes just plain inaccurate. Beyond seeking to set the record straight, the book snapshots a pivotal moment in online activism, and pulls no punches.
Although not a hacker, Brown was a well-known actor/provocateur in the rise of hacktivism, a powerful skein of political activism pioneered by the likes of WikiLeaks that tapped the internet to expose wrongdoing and spur change. That includes supporting Tunisia’s 2011 popular uprising.
Those shenanigans preceded Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations of wholesale unauthorized National Security Agency surveillance of the U.S. public, which would erase doubts about their righteousness.
Brown is a showman, a gifted writer in the tradition of William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. He also has a knack for self-sabotage and has struggled with heroin addiction and depression. He is currently in Britain engaged in a legal struggle for political asylum.
ARLINGTON, Virginia (AP) — Long before generative AI’s boom, a Silicon Valley firm contracted to collect and analyze non-classified data on illicit Chinese fentanyl trafficking made a compelling case for its embrace by U.S. intelligence agencies.
The operation’s results far exceeded human-only analysis, finding twice as many companies and 400% more people engaged in illegal or suspicious commerce in the deadly opioid.
Excited U.S. intelligence officials touted the results publicly — the AI made connections based mostly on internet and dark-web data — and shared them with Beijing authorities, urging a crackdown.
One important aspect of the 2019 operation, called Sable Spear, that has not previously been reported: The firm used generative AI to provide U.S. agencies — three years ahead of the release of OpenAI’s groundbreaking ChatGPT product — with evidence summaries for potential criminal cases, saving countless work hours.
“You wouldn’t be able to do that without artificial intelligence,” said Brian Drake, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s then-director of AI and the project coordinator.
The contractor, Rhombus Power, would later use generative AI to predict Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine with 80% certainty four months in advance, for a different U.S. government client. Rhombus says it also alerts government customers, who it declines to name, to imminent North Korean missile launches and Chinese space operations.
U.S. intelligence agencies are scrambling to embrace the AI revolution, believing they’ll otherwise be smothered by exponential data growth as sensor-generated surveillance tech further blankets the planet.
But officials are acutely aware that the tech is young and brittle, and that generative AI — prediction models trained on vast datasets to generate on-demand text, images, video and human-like conversation — is anything but tailor-made for a dangerous trade steeped in deception.
LIMA, Peru (AP) — At age 75, one of Latin America’s most storied journalists had been looking forward to weaving into books the fragmented threads of more than four decades of investigative reporting that exposed high-level abuse of power in Peru and abroad.
In an illustrious career, Gustavo Gorriti has endured death threats from drug traffickers, survived Peru’s harrowing Shining Path insurgency and a kidnapping by silencer-toting military intelligence agents during a 1992 presidential power grab.
Then an aggressive lymphatic cancer struck, wasting the former five-time national judo champion’s robust physique. Diagnosed in August, Gorriti was in the final drips of two months of chemotherapy in December when a different kind of body blow landed.
A smear campaign — amplified by complicit, cowed or indifferent broadcast and print media — portrayed the self-styled “intelligence agent for the people” as Public Enemy No. 1, a ruthless, egotistical victimizer of innocents.
Gorriti is clear on who is behind it: A cabal of “kleptocrats” in Peru’s political and business elites who are in prosecutorial peril due in large part to his crowning gumshoe achievements. Their aim: “to liquidate all gains in the war on corruption.”
With his hair gone from the chemo, his trademark white beard down to “like three hairs,” Gorriti said he “looked like a pathetic Fu Manchu.” He was so debilitated “I only wanted to sleep,” he said in an interview on the terrace of his Lima apartment.
But indignation stirred the pugilistic reporter to action, marshaling his team at IDL-Reporteros, an online news site, to mount a vigorous, detailed defense.
“You don’t get to choose when you go to war,” he said.
Then it got worse. By March 27, Gorriti was facing a criminal investigation in a bizarrely framed bribery case, accused of “favoring” two anti-corruption prosecutors with publicity.
“Of course it’s not true,” one of the prosecutors cited, José Domingo Pérez, told The Associated Press. “This is a blatant attempt to muzzle one of Latin America’s best investigative reporters, the outlet that he has founded, and, by extension, any journalist who would dare to speak truth to power in Latin America,” The Washington-based National Press Club said in a statement co-signed by seven press and human rights groups.
As their rivalry intensifies, U.S. and Chinese military planners are gearing up for a new kind of warfare in which squadrons of air and sea drones equipped with artificial intelligence work together like a swarm of bees to overwhelm an enemy.
The world’s only AI superpowers are engaged in an arms race for swarming drones that is reminiscent of the Cold War, except drone technology will be far more difficult to contain than nuclear weapons. Because software drives the drones’ swarming abilities, it could be relatively easy and cheap for smaller powers and rogue actors alike to acquire their own fleets of killer robots.
The unchecked spread of swarm technology “could lead to more instability and conflict around the world,” said Margarita Konaev, an analyst with Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
As the undisputed leaders in the field, Washington and Beijing are best equipped to set an example by putting limits on military uses of drone swarms. But their intense competition, China’s military aggression in the South China Sea and persistent tensions over Taiwan make the prospect of cooperation look dim.
Chinese police are investigating an unauthorized and highly unusual online dump of documents from a private security contractor linked to the nation’s top policing agency and other parts of its government — a trove that catalogs apparent hacking activity and tools to spy on both Chinese and foreigners.
Among the apparent targets of tools provided by the impacted company, I-Soon: ethnicities and dissidents in parts of China that have seen significant anti-government protests, such as Hong Kong or the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang in China’s far west.
The dump of scores of documents late last week and subsequent investigation were confirmed by two employees of I-Soon, known as Anxun in Mandarin, which has ties to the powerful Ministry of Public Security. The dump, which analysts consider highly significant even if it does not reveal any especially novel or potent tools, includes hundreds of pages of contracts, marketing presentations, product manuals, and client and employee lists.
They reveal, in detail, methods used by Chinese authorities used to surveil dissidents overseas, hack other nations and promote pro-Beijing narratives on social media.
The documents show apparent I-Soon hacking of networks across Central and Southeast Asia, as well as Hong Kong and the self-ruled island of Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its territory.
“I believed, honestly, that these were the most important documents in internet history,” Joan Donovan said in an interview. “Our role as academics is not to play favorites. It’s not to do P.R. It’s to tell the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us. And unfortunately, I lost my job for it.”
By FRANK BAJAK
Dec. 4, 2023
A prominent disinformation scholar who left Harvard University in August has accused the school of muzzling her speech and stifling — then dismantling — her research team as it launched a deep dive in late 2021 into a trove of Facebook files she considers the most important documents in internet history.
The actions impacting Joan Donovan’s work coincided with a $500 million donation to Harvard by a foundation run by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. In a whistleblower disclosure made public Monday, Donovan seeks investigations into “inappropriate influence” from Harvard’s general counsel, the Massachusetts attorney general’s office and the U.S. Department of Education.
The CEO of Whisteblower Aid, a legal nonprofit supporting Donovan, called the alleged behavior by Harvard’s Kennedy School and its dean a “shocking betrayal” of academic integrity at the elite school.
“Whether Harvard acted at the company’s direction or took the initiative on their own to protect (Facebook’s) interests, the outcome is the same: corporate interests are undermining research and academic freedom to the detriment of the public,” CEO Libby Liu said in a press statement.
BOSTON (AP) — White House officials concerned by AI chatbots’ potential for societal harm and the Silicon Valley powerhouses rushing them to market are heavily invested in a three-day competition ending Sunday at the DefCon hacker convention in Las Vegas.
Current AI models are simply too unwieldy, brittle and malleable, academic and corporate research shows. Security was an afterthought in their training as data scientists amassed breathtakingly complex collections of images and text. They are prone to racial and cultural biases, and easily manipulated.
BY FRANK BAJAK, HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH AND LARRY FENN
July 5, 2023
The confidential documents stolen from schools and dumped online by ransomware gangs are raw, intimate and graphic. They describe student sexual assaults, psychiatric hospitalizations, abusive parents, truancy — even suicide attempts.
“Please do something,” begged a student in one leaked file, recalling the trauma of continually bumping into an ex-abuser at a school in Minneapolis. Other victims talked about wetting the bed or crying themselves to sleep.
Complete sexual assault case folios containing these details were among more than 300,000 files dumped online in March after the 36,000-student Minneapolis Public Schools refused to pay a $1 million ransom. Other exposed data included medical records, discrimination complaints, Social Security numbers and contact information of district employees.
Rich in digitized data, the nation’s schools are prime targets for far-flung criminal hackers, who are assiduously locating and scooping up sensitive files that not long ago were committed to paper in locked cabinets. “In this case, everybody has a key,” said cybersecurity expert Ian Coldwater, whose son attends a Minneapolis high school.
BOSTON (AP) — In early June, sporadic but serious service disruptions plagued Microsoft’s flagship office suite — including the Outlook email and OneDrive file-sharing apps — and cloud computing platform. A shadowy hacktivist group claimed responsibility, saying it flooded the sites with junk traffic in distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Initially reticent to name the cause, Microsoft has now disclosed that DDoS attacks by the murky upstart were indeed to blame.
But the software giant has offered few details — and did not immediately comment on how many customers were affected and whether the impact was global. A spokeswoman confirmed that the group that calls itself Anonymous Sudan was behind the attacks. It claimed responsibility on its Telegram social media channel at the time. Some security researchers believe the group to be Russian.
Microsoft’s explanation in a blog post Friday evening followed a request by The Associated Press two days earlier. Slim on details, the post said the attacks “temporarily impacted availability” of some services. It said the attackers were focused on “disruption and publicity” and likely used rented cloud infrastructure and virtual private networks to bombard Microsoft servers from so-called botnets of zombie computers around the globe.
BOSTON (AP) — Ukrainians reacted Thursday with puzzlement and some ire to comments by a top Starlink official that their country has “weaponized” the satellite internet service, which has been pivotal to their national survival.
President Gwynne Shotwell of SpaceX, which runs Starlink, was also reported to have said at the same venue Wednesday that the Elon Musk-controlled company has taken unspecified action to prevent Ukraine’s military from using Starlink technology against Russian invaders.
The network of low-orbiting satellites has been crucial to Ukraine’s use of battlefield drones — a central fixture of the year-old war — and the country’s defenders have no viable alternative. The satellite links help Ukrainian fighters locate the enemy and target long-range artillery strikes.
Onstage at a conference in Washington, D.C., Shotwell said: “We were really pleased to be able to provide Ukraine connectivity and help them in their fight for freedom. It was never intended to be weaponized. However, Ukrainians have leveraged it in ways that were unintentional and not part of any agreement.”
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Drone advances in Ukraine have accelerated a long-anticipated technology trend that could soon bring the world’s first fully autonomous fighting robots to the battlefield, inaugurating a new age of warfare.
The longer the war lasts, the more likely it becomes that drones will be used to identify, select and attack targets without help from humans, according to military analysts, combatants and artificial intelligence researchers.
That would mark a revolution in military technology as profound as the introduction of the machine gun. Ukraine already has semi-autonomous attack drones and counter-drone weapons endowed with AI. Russia also claims to possess AI weaponry, though the claims are unproven. But there are no confirmed instances of a nation putting into combat robots that have killed entirely on their own.
Experts say it may be only a matter of time before either Russia or Ukraine, or both, deploy them.
“Tracers In The Dark” by Andy Greenberg (Doubleday)
The year was 2011. Cryptocurrency was a little-understood novelty, and Sen. Chuck Schumer called a news conference to vent outrage over a one-stop online shop for illegal drugs whose technology made sellers “virtually untraceable.”
The New York lawmaker’s description of Silk Road helped seed a persisting myth that technology reporter Andy Greenberg exhaustively dispels in “Tracers in the Dark,” that transactions of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can’t be tracked.
Greenberg sketches the evolution of a wholly new discipline in the surprisingly lively real-life police procedural, following law officers and programmers who invent and deploy cryptocurrency-tracking tools to catch a new breed of criminal. They take down Silk Road and other “dark web” markets and merchants, finger crypto money launderers and snare the sysadmin and users of Welcome to Video, a major South-Korea-based distributor of child sexual abuse material.
Best of the action are two takedown dramas. A young Quebecois behind the AlphaBay dark web market, Alexandre Cazes, lives large in Thailand, rocketing around in a Lamborghini, running up $12,000 restaurant bills and boasting of adulterous sexploits online. The other takedown is of a DEA agent and a Secret Service agent who illegally enriched themselves off Silk Road while investigating it – each wholly on their own.
Elon Musk’s managerial bomb-throwing at Twitter has so thinned the ranks of software engineers who keep the world’s de-facto public square up and running that industry insiders and programmers who were fired or resigned this week agree: Twitter may soon fray so badly it could actually crash.
Musk ended a very public argument with nearly two dozen coders over his retooling of the microblogging platform earlier this week by ordering them fired. Hundreds of engineers and other workers then quit after he demanded they pledge to “extremely hardcore” work by Thursday evening or resign with severance pay.
The newest departures mean the platform is losing workers just at it gears up for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, which opens Sunday. It’s one of Twitter’s busiest events, when tweet surges heavily stress its systems.
“It does look like he’s going to blow up Twitter,” said Robert Graham, a veteran cybersecurity entrepreneur. “I can’t see how the lights won’t go out at any moment” — although many recently departed Twitter employees predicted a more gradual demise.
Three engineers who left this week described for The Associated Press why they expect considerable unpleasantness for Twitter’s more than 230 million users now that well over two-thirds of Twitter’s pre-Musk core services engineers are apparently gone. While they don’t anticipate near-term collapse, Twitter could get very rough at the edges — especially if Musk makes major changes without much off-platform testing.
The bulletproof vehicles that Colombia’s government assigns to hundreds of high-risk individuals are supposed to make them safer. But when an investigative reporter discovered they all had GPS trackers, she only felt more vulnerable — and outraged.
No one had informed Claudia Julieta Duque — or apparently any of the 3,700-plus journalists, rights activists and labor and indigenous leaders who use the vehicles — that the devices were keeping constant tabs on their whereabouts. In Duque’s case, it happened as often as every 30 seconds. The system could also remotely cut off the SUV’s engine.
“It’s something super invasive,” said Duque, who has been a persistent target of rogue security agents. “And the state doesn’t seem to care.”
The government agency responsible has said the trackers were installed to help prevent theft, to track the bodyguards who often drive the vehicles and to help respond to dangerous situations.
For a decade, Colombia had been installing trackers in the armored vehicles of at-risk individuals as well as VIPs, including presidents, government ministers and senators. The agency’s director made that disclosure after Duque learned last year through a public records request that the system was recording her SUV’s location an average of five times an hour.
The director dismissed privacy concerns and called the practice “fundamental” to guaranteeing security.
Considering the tracker a danger to her and her sources, Duque pressed for details on its exact features. But the National Protection Unit, known as UNP in Spanish, offered little. She then demanded the agency remove the device. It refused. So in February, Duque returned the vehicle, left the country and filed a legal challenge.
Now back in Bogotá, she is hoping for satisfaction when Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first leftist president, takes office Aug. 7.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Drone camera footage defines much of the public’s view of the war in Ukraine: grenades quietly dropped on unwitting soldiers, eerie flights over silent, bombed-out cities, armor and outposts exploding in fireballs.
Never in the history of warfare have drones been used as intensively as in Ukraine, where they often play an outsized role in who lives and dies. Russians and Ukrainians alike depend heavily on unmanned aerial vehicles to pinpoint enemy positions and guide their hellish artillery strikes.
But after months of fighting, the drone fleets of both sides are depleted, and they are racing to build or buy the kind of jamming-resistant, advanced drones that could offer a decisive edge.
The urgency was reflected by the White House’s disclosure Monday that it has information that Iran will be rushing “up to several hundred” unmanned aerial vehicles to Moscow’s aid. Iranian-supplied drones have effectively penetrated U.S.-supplied Saudi and Emirati air-defense systems in the Middle East.
“The Russian drone force may still be capable, but exhausted. And Russians are looking to capitalize on a proven Iranian track record,” said Samuel Bendett, an analyst at the CNA military think tank.
Meanwhile, Ukraine wants the means “to strike at Russian command and control facilities at a significant distance,” Bendett said.
The demand for off-the-shelf consumer models remains intense in Ukraine, as do efforts to modify amateur drones to make them more resistant to jamming. Both sides are crowdfunding to replace battlefield losses.
“The number we need is immense,” a senior Ukrainian official, Yuri Shchygol, told reporters Wednesday, detailing the first results of a new fundraising campaign called “Army of Drones.” He said Ukraine is initially seeking to purchase 200 NATO-grade military drones but requires 10 times more.
Outgunned Ukrainian fighters complain that they simply don’t have the military-grade drones needed to defeat Russian jamming and radio-controlled hijacking. The civilian models most Ukrainians rely on are detected and defeated with relative ease. And it’s not uncommon for Russian artillery to rain down on their operators within minutes of a drone being detected.
Compared with the war’s early months, Bendett now sees less evidence of Russian drones getting shot down. “The Ukrainians are on the ropes,” he said.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — On Ukraine’s battlefields, the simple act of powering up a cellphone can beckon a rain of deathly skyfall. Artillery radar and remote controls for unmanned aerial vehicles may also invite fiery shrapnel showers.
This is electronic warfare, a critical but largely invisible aspect of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Military commanders largely shun discussing it, fearing they’ll jeopardize operations by revealing secrets.
Electronic warfare technology targets communications, navigation and guidance systems to locate, blind and deceive the enemy and direct lethal blows. It is used against artillery, fighter jets, cruise missiles, drones and more. Militaries also use it to protect their forces.
It’s an area where Russia was thought to have a clear advantage going into the war. Yet, for reasons not entirely clear, its much-touted electronic warfare prowess was barely seen in the war’s early stages in the chaotic failure to seize the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv.
It has become far more of a factor in fierce fighting in eastern Ukraine, where shorter, easier-to-defend supply lines let Russia move electronic warfare gear closer to the battlefield.
“They are jamming everything their systems can reach,” said an official of Aerorozvidka, a reconnaissance team of Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicle tinkerers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of safety concerns. “We can’t say they dominate, but they hinder us greatly.”
A Ukrainian intelligence official called the Russian threat “pretty severe” when it comes to disrupting reconnaissance efforts and commanders’ communications with troops. Russian jamming of GPS receivers on drones that Ukraine uses to locate the enemy and direct artillery fire is particularly intense “on the line of contact,” he said.
BOSTON (AP) — President Joe Biden couldn’t have been more blunt about the risks of cyberattacks spinning out of control. “If we end up in a war, a real shooting war with a major power, it’s going to be as a consequence of a cyber breach of great consequence,” he told his intelligence brain trust in July.
Now tensions are soaring over Ukraine with Western officials warning about the danger of Russia launching damaging cyberattacks against Ukraine’s NATO allies. While no one is suggesting that could lead to a full-blown war between nuclear-armed rivals, the risk of escalation is serious.
The danger is in the uncertainty about what crosses a digital red line. Cyberattacks, including those that cripple critical infrastructure with ransomware, have been on the rise for years and often go unpunished. It’s unclear how grave a malicious cyber operation by a state actor would have to be to cross the threshold to an act of war.
“The rules are fuzzy,” said Max Smeets, director of the European Cyber Conflict Research Initiative. “It’s not clear what is allowed, what isn’t allowed.”
Polish Senator Krzysztof Brejza on the night of parliamentary elections on Oct. 13, 2019 (AP Photo)
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Polish Sen. Krzysztof Brejza’s mobile phone was hacked with sophisticated spyware nearly three dozen times in 2019 when he was running the opposition’s campaign against the right-wing populist government in parliamentary elections, an internet watchdog found.
Text messages stolen from Brejza’s phone — then doctored in a smear campaign — were aired by state-controlled TV in the heat of that race, which the ruling party narrowly won. With the hacking revelation, Brejza now questions whether the election was fair.
It’s the third finding by the University of Toronto’s nonprofit Citizen Lab that a Polish opposition figure was hacked with Pegasus spyware from the Israeli hacking tools firm NSO Group. Brejza’s phone was digitally broken in to 33 times from April 26, 2019, to Oct. 23, 2019, said Citizen Lab researchers, who have been tracking government abuses of NSO malware for years.
The other two hacks were identified earlier this week after a joint Citizen Lab-Associated Press investigation. All three victims blame Poland’s government, which has refused to confirm or deny whether it ordered the hacks or is a client of NSO Group. State security services spokesman Stanislaw Zaryn insisted Thursday that the government does not wiretap illegally and obtains court orders in “justified cases.” He said any suggestions the Polish government surveils for political ends were false.
KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) — Outsiders have long profited from Africa’s riches of gold, diamonds, and even people. Digital resources have proven no different.
Millions of internet addresses assigned to Africa have been waylaid, some fraudulently, including through insider machinations linked to a former top employee of the nonprofit that assigns the continent’s addresses. Instead of serving Africa’s internet development, many have benefited spammers and scammers, while others satiate Chinese appetites for pornography and gambling.
New leadership at the nonprofit, AFRINIC, is working to reclaim the lost addresses. But a legal challenge by a deep-pocketed Chinese businessman is threatening the body’s very existence.
The businessman is Lu Heng, a Hong Kong-based arbitrage specialist. Under contested circumstances, he obtained 6.2 million African addresses from 2013 to 2016. That’s about 5% of the continent’s total — more than Kenya has.
AFRINIC made no claim of graft when it revoked Lu’s addresses, now worth about $150 million, saying his company was not adequately serving Africa’s interests. Lu fought back. His lawyers in late July persuaded a judge in Mauritius, where AFRICNIC is based, to freeze its bank accounts. His company also filed a $80 million defamation claim against AFRINIC and its new CEO.
It’s a shock to the global networking community, which has long considered the internet as technological scaffolding for advancing society. Some worry it could undermine the entire numerical address system that makes the internet work.
BOSTON (AP) — A very strange thing happened on the internet the day President Joe Biden was sworn in. A shadowy company residing at a shared workspace above a Florida bank announced to the world’s computer networks that it was now managing a colossal, previously idle chunk of the internet owned by the U.S. Department of Defense.
That real estate has since more than quadrupled to 175 million addresses — about 1/25th the size of the current internet.
”It is massive. That is the biggest thing in the history of the internet,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, a network operating company. It’s also more than twice the size of the internet space actually used by the Pentagon.
After weeks of wonder by the networking community, the Pentagon has now provided a very terse explanation for what it’s doing. But it has not answered many basic questions, beginning with why it chose to entrust management of the address space to a company that seems not to have existed until September.
The oldest settled terrain in Serbia’s capital, the Belgrade Fortress, overlooks the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers from atop a 125-meter ridge. Indeed, the city is named for it (“grad” is old Slav for fortified settlement, “beo” means white). The fortifications have endured many breaches.
They’ve been variously overrun and toppled by Goths, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Romans, Byzantines, Turks, Habsburg Austrians and Nazis. More recently, NATO warplanes struck greater Belgrade — not for conquest but punishment.
We visited on a walking tour on a hot, late September day following five days in Bosnia. In Belgrade for less than 72 hours, we would forgo the on-site military museum renowned for its collection of killing machines, ancient to modern.
Belgrade Fortess from Zemun heights, past Great War island.
The omissions and distortions of our tour guide came as little surprise. He is a pleasant-enough fellow in a country Freedom House judges only partly free. Serbia is run by a pro-Kremlin populist swimming in cut-rate Russian oil and fortified by virulent nationalists. Independent journalism is under siege. Violence-prone figures menace on state media. The population is heavily armed. Corruption is serious.
I kept mostly quiet during the group tour but felt compelled to interject when our guide failed to mention the central fact in explaining why Serbia’s bid for EU membership is not going well. It’s not mostly a question of economic readiness, as he implied. It’s more about Serbia’s refusal to let go ethnic Albanian-dominated Kosovo.
President Aleksandar Vucić refuses to recognize an independent Kosovo, where more than 10,000 people were killed and 1 million forced from their homes in a 1998-99 conflict initiated by militant separatists. He and his supporters consider Kosovo a Serb province, and it’s still a powder keg. The U.S. bombing forced then-President Slobodan Milosević to withdraw. Americans are not popular. In a February opinion survey by the International Republican Institute, just 22% of Serbs had a favorable opinion of the United States compared to 88% for Russia.
A St. Regis Hotel (by Marriott) just opened in this Belgrade waterfront towerA short distance from Belgrade waterfront
We felt no hostility. People were friendly and accommodating, our guide included. Oddly, it was a young Londoner in our group who confronted me, suggesting the U.S. role in the 1996 Dayton Peace Accords that ended the Bosnia war was inappropriate meddling. I’m often critical of U.S. foreign policy but consider Dayton admirable. Was it right for the U.S. and its NATO allies (including Britain) to bomb Serbia for 78 days?, the Londoner might have asked. I cringed at some of the targets hit, such as the Chinese Embassy.
For nearly five centuries until the late 1800s, lands inhabited by Serbs were dominated by Ottoman Turks, who were mostly interested in trade but could be nasty overlords. The Turks built dozens of mosques in Belgrade, including inside Kalamegdan (as the citadel was known). Uprisings by Serbs, mostly farmers, gained with the years.
Our guide showed us Belgrade’s lone remaining mosque but did not mention that a major mosque was torn down in 1878 where the Parliament building now stands. Nor did he mention that the small Muslim minority has been agitating for a new mosque. Authorities tore down a makeshift one in 2017. (It lacked a permit).
At the “House of Flowers”
To Serb nationalists, religion is inextricable from ethnic identity. They resent as traitors fellow Slavs who converted to Islam under Turkish rule. That bigotry undergirds their ethnic cleansing during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia. Epic poems that inspired the bloodletting celebrate leaving no “Turk” alive, no “Turkish” home standing. Serb insurgents who seized Ottoman-run Belgrade in 1806 slit the throats not just of Turkish men but women and children.
“Ideas of national liberation became inextricably intertwined with the act of killing your neighbor,” journalist Tim Judah wrote in a 1997 book. Atrocities were terror tools for both sides. The occupying Turks — to enforce control — would lop off the heads of rebellious Serbs and display them on stakes. Some rebels were even impaled alive.
Our walking tour guide spared us the gore. But we did stop at a small sidewalk statue commemorating the Serb boy slain in 1862 by Turkish soldiers in a quarrel. The city was then in an awkward dual governance and Serb police intervened. There was a riot, then a Turk artillery bombardment from the citadel that killed dozens. The Ottomans were in decline, and France, England, Russia and Austria decided on a solution: Serbia would become an independent country. The Turks left five years later.
Princip statue dedicated. On a square where he and fellow young nationalists would gather. Photo by BETA.
Unfortunately for the Serbs, self-rule would be short-lived. The Austro-Hungarians took over and built some impressive public works. But Serb nationalists chafed and one, Gavrilo Princip, shot dead Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. On the killing’s 101th anniversary Serb leaders unveiled a Princip statue in central Belgrade. To them, he was a freedom fighter. To others, he was a terrorist. That the killing set off World War I was secondary. The Bosnian Serbs who donated the statue had a year earlier unveiled a similar work in their self-styled East Sarajevo republic.
Political assassination also stains the present. In 2003, a sniper’s bullet killed Serbia’s first democratically elected prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, just outside his downtown office. More than a dozen ultra-nationalists and criminals were convicted and sentenced. The gangster/politician nexus dogs today’s Serbia. Fear engenders self-censorship. Free speech is on shaky ground.
Zoran Djinjić. Slain in 2003 by an unholy alliance of gangsters and security men.
One 2023 death threat reported by Human Rights Watch singled out a journalist at the independent news site KRIK who had reported on a dramatic drop in the cost of a contract killing.
Corruption and negligence wreak rot. The opposition blame it for the deaths of 15 people in the late October entrance collapse at the renovated rail station of Novi Sad on the Budapest-Belgrade line. The international rail artery is being upgraded with 85% Chinese financing. We’d need to fly to Budapest as a result.
Radio-television building damaged in 1999 NATO bombing.
Not on view when we visited Belgrade was the U.S. stealth fighter the Serbs shot down during the conflict. It’s at the aviation museum (at Belgrade’s airport), which was closed.
We didn’t have great luck with museums. We tried the Tesla museum (Where we were told to wait for an hour in line outdoors under a punishing sun to buy tickets for a guided tour — the only way to see it). Oh well.
Fidel Castro lays a wreath at Tito’s mausoleum
The House of Flowers, where the late Marshal Josip Brod Tito’s mausoleum houses a compact museum, was a better choice. It is abutted by an annex devoted to re-evaluating the “disputed history” of Yugoslavia. Tito kept it together by suppressing ethnic resentments, spurning the Soviets and insisting on non-alignment.
Vucić cares little for that legacy. Indeed, the “Blue Train” used by Tito to crisscross the continent has been slowly retired. Visitors until recently could gush over its walnut, mahogany and cherry Art Deco interior. The cult of personality around Tito is all but gone. For a decade after his 1980 death sirens sounded every May 4 at 3:05 p.m., anniversary of his fatal cardiac arrest, and people observed a minute of silence.
The National Museum is worth a visit to peer into the Serbian soul. Uroš Predić’s masterworks especially. I also learned that the largest number of Serb saints come from the Nemanjić royal family (1166-1371). The Turks famously burned the body of one, St. Sava, in 1595 upon hauling it to Belgrade from a monastery (there’s a painting).
“An Orphan at his Mother’s Grave” 1888 Uroš Predić
We walked along the Danube across from Great War Island – floating restaurants line the bank — to Zemun. It had a bustling Saturday market and fish joints. On a hill with a view of Belgrade is a 19th-century Orthodox church, the Hariševa Chapel, dedicated to the “military saint” Demetrius (Move over, Mother Teresa). It was locked, unfortunately. The interior art by Pavlé Simić is apparently spectacular.
On our Uber ride back from Zemun we got a better look at the crumbling Hotel Jugoslavia. The city’s classiest hotel in its heyday, visitors included Queen Elizabeth and U.S presidents Nixon and Carter. It was partly damaged in the NATO bombing, never fully repaired. As AP’s Dušan Stojanovic reported after our visit, the hotel is set to be demolished and replaced with a pair of high rises to include a luxury hotel and apartments.
Hotel Jugoslavia
The notion of more skyscrapers, extending a high-rise building boom, is widely bemoaned. Who can afford such living? Russian oligarchs? The city’s Sava River waterfront is mockingly deemed Belgrade’s Dubai. Locals also grumble that the central rail station was moved far from the city center to accommodate the facelift.
Visually, Belgrade is quite handsome if the waterfront is overlooked. In 1876, a reporter for the Illustrated London News described its architecture as “equal portions Cairo and Paris.” Much of the city center was destroyed in 1941 when Germany bombed Belgrade into submission. Three years later, the Allies also bombed, in support of Tito’s advancing communist partisans.
Once again, most of the victims were civilians.
Suggested reading:
“My Parents: An Introduction” by Aleksandar Hemon. The Bosnian-American writer was born in Sarajevo to a Bosnian Serb mother and a father of Ukranian descent. He fled in 1995. Hemon is best known for his 2008 novel “The Lazarus Project.” This book is an affectionate, clear-eyed nonfiction portrait of parents and family life in Tito’s Yugoslavia before it all came crashing down. The uprooted parents relocate to Canada. Hemon celebrates the community, including his dad’s choral group, that nourishes them.
“The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia” by Tim Judah. A 1997 book by a journalist who lived in Belgrade during the breakup of Yugoslavia. It brims with historical context. A quote Judah cites from the British historian Edward Crankshaw reflects the book’s thrust: “Centuries of existence under oppression may bring out the best in a people, but it may also magnify the worst.”
The thematic and chronological heart of a six-week journey we began in Istanbul in early September was Bosnia-Herzegovina. The visit was long overdue. In the 1990s, I was an AP correspondent based in Berlin and opted not to physically cover the holocaust perpetrated on Bosnia’s ethnic Muslims. We had three young children.
Former Yugoslavia is a historic battleground of Turks and Serbs further complicated by Austro-Hungarian meddling. And Bosnia’s recuperation is only partial. The political morass that preceded the three-decade-old siege of Sarajevo still festers.
We would approach by land from the West.
Our gateway was Trieste. It’s part of Italy now but in many ways is more Austrian and Slovene (read: clean and orderly). Trieste was imperial Vienna’s main port, a 19th-century shipbuilding and naval redoubt and cosmopolitan magnet for dockworkers and traders from all over. It became an Allied protectorate after Tito’s partisans expelled the Nazis in a vengeful spectacle with slain accused collaborators dumped by the hundreds into nearby limestone crevices.
James Joyce in Trieste
We only stayed half a day. Travel writer Jan Morris’ elegiac last book, “Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere,” argues convincingly for a longer sojourn including a visit to Miramare Castle, built by the ill-fated Austrian royal who would be crowned Emperor Maximilian I in Mexico only to be executed by the locals in 1867. Trieste is not what you’d call a party city. It shuts down at 11 p.m. — save a few Turkish groceries and a döner kebab joint near the rail station (We arrived rather late from Rome).
Next up was Ljubljana, even more Habsburg in orderliness and architectural grace. It bustled with tourists who typically pair a visit with excursions to Slovenia’s fetching alpine destinations (Spandex-clad cyclists boarded our inbound train lathered from exertion).
Ljubljana, Slovenia
The Slovene capital’s auto-free (mostly) center is a big draw. Our B&B was on the Ljubljanica river near the Dragon Bridge. As a chatty waiter at a riverside café remarked upon learning we’d be in town less than 48 hours, “It only really takes one day to see Ljubljana.”
The six-hour 1995 BBC documentary “The Death of Yugoslavia” was a touchstone for us. Oft cited by historians, it is a remarkable act of journalism and makes it quite clear who ignited and prolonged the ethnically targeted violence. Slovenia figures in Act I. Its break with Belgrade was swift and nearly bloodless (about 66 dead); Its borders contained the smallest ethnic Serb population of any Yugoslav republic.
A pride of Ljubljana is the architect Jože Plečnik. A student of the Viennese modernist Otto Wagner, he would also renovate Prague’s Castle between the wars. Plečnik’s imprint is everywhere in the compact city. So are living vestiges of socialist Yugoslavia. Some good ones: Free education and health care.
We had wished to travel to Sarajevo by rail but were stymied by the political stalemate that has hexed Bosnia since the 1996 Dayton Peace Accords ended the war with no victors.
Getting to Zagreb by train was easy. But on to Sarajevo, forget it. Direct rail connections linking Bosnia’s capital with those of Croatia and Serbia don’t exist. It’s an 8 1/2-hour bus trip from Zagreb to Sarajevo, about the same from Sarajevo to Belgrade. Border crossings can be a hassle, and many of the buses lack toilets. We opted to fly.
Sarajevo
In Sarajevo, my colleague Aida Cerkez graciously showed us around. A brave and resourceful wonder woman who ran the AP office during the war, Aida drove us through the hills overlooking the city so we could see it from the perspective of the Serb gunners who rained shells on civilians. Then she took us to what’s left of the 850-meter tunnel the besieged Bosniaks dug under the U.N.-held international airport. It was a lifeline she traversed more than 50 times — the foot traffic ran in one direction at a time, it was so narrow — hunched over as she humped in supplies including vital satellite comms equipment. Journalists working in Sarajevo (including the AP crew) were careful not to disclose the tunnel’s existence. Then John Burns wrote it up in The New York Times.
Our wonderful hostess at the Halvat House B&B in Sarajevo had at the time relied on the tunnel for supplies to feed the foreign journalists she and her husband lodged at the time.
In 1992, AP’s John Daniszewski wrote about Cerkez as a young mother preparing a “survival backpack” for her son, Igor, in case she were killed but he survived. She would later dispatch him and her mom to Germany. The AP hired her, first as a fixer then as a reporter. Two years later, Cerkez was named Sarajevo bureau chief.
Bistrik potok street, Sarajevo
She was sure she would be killed and recalled the times she’d hunch down at the wheel of the AP’s Land Cruiser, yell “Geronimo” and floor it through Sniper Alley – where Serbs in high rises had a clear shot at the avenue that linked the airport with downtown. She’d hum Elvis Presley’s “Peace in the Valley” to calm her nerves.
“I was so sure that I was going to die that I flew to Frankfurt ,” she recalled, where she told AP’s regional director, Steve Miller, it would be the last time he’d see her. She started crying. “I’m not sorry for myself. But for my son.” Steve came through. The AP arranged a life insurance policy for her. It ate up a big chunk of her paycheck. But it gave her piece of mind.
Aida is now news editor at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and co-wrote a short film, underwritten by the Rockefeller Foundation, based on a relationship she developed researching the 80th anniversary of the 1914 assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife.
Mokra Gora, Serbia
The Sarajevo magnicide would spark World War I. Aida found a man who witnessed it. He’d lived in the same home all his life — but in five different countries — and it wasn’t clear to him who was decimating his city in 1994 and why. Aida had to explain.
“What is This Country Called Now?” is about what Aida learned from the nonagenarian: That her work was vital even if she felt demoralized, ineffectual, ready to leave. Chronicles of murders and disappearances during WWII were woefully incomplete, the man told Aida. Too few journalists were around. Aida was inspired to carry on.
Igor’s father is a Serb, Aida a Muslim. Their union, which ended years ago, exemplifies the ethnic tolerance of Sarajevo — it had former Yugoslavia’s highest rate of mixed marriages. Aida considers herself a Yugoslav and objects to Bosnia’s political shackles. It has three presidents: an ethnic Croat, Serb and Bosniak (Muslim). Igor (surname Spaic) is journalist. But if he were to aspire to the presidency he’d be shut out. The constitution created under the Dayton Accords bars people like him who are a mix.
“We still don’t know how this is going to end — one country or three. We the anti-fascists are keeping it together,” Aida said.
Mostar
The political stalemate hamstrings Bosnia. There is much dysfunction. Take the railways. We tried to buy a one-way return from Mostar at Sarajevo’s station the morning we traveled there (by bus). But such tickets can only be had in Mostar — and nobody is limiting sales, we learned. We had to elbow our way onto the train at Mostar. Passengers outnumbered seats. Less than two weeks later the road to Mostar was washed out by a torrent of rain. More than a dozen people died in the flooding. They apparently had no warning.
In Mostar, more than a few gutted hulks of buildings harken the war. Not so in Sarajevo, where nearly 10,000 civilians died, including almost 1,500 kids. Graveyards abound and shell- and bullet-pocked buildings bear witness. New construction diminishes them. So, too, with Sarajevo roses — shell-impact craters later filled with red resin to serve as memorials. I shuddered seeing one in the center of the Markale market. A pair of Serb mortar attacks killed dozens there, finally persuading NATO to begin bombing the besiegers.
Sarajevo rose
We took the aerial tram to the abandoned, graffiti-strewn bobsled run overlooking Sarajevo where Serb gunners positioned artillery and, on a day trip, saw “The Bridge on The Drina” in Višegrad, a 16th-century marvel built under Ottoman rule and enshrined in prose by the 1961 Nobel literature prize-winner Ivo Andrić. The stone bridge’s strength and constancy work as counterpoint to the violence and intolerance that play out the bridge.
The ethnic hatred driving Serb nationalists traces to their defeat by the Turks at Kosovo Polje in 1389, while Croat nationalism surged over Serb attempts at hegemony in the wake of WWI. Croat collaboration with Nazi occupiers (the Ustasha regime) exacerbated matters. An Ustasha government was installed in wartime Sarajevo, rendering it a scorpion’s nest of lethal intrigue.
After visiting enough Sarajevo museums we had serious atrocity fatigue. No less because Palestinian children were at that moment being slaughtered by Israel with scant international opprobrium. The parallel with the Serb siege of Sarajevo was obvious.
On our last day in Sarajevo we visited its rebuilt city hall, which in addition to housing the local government is part museum, part national library. Serb separatists gutted it with shelling in the early days of the siege, incinerating almost two million books and drizzling black ash about the city’s Turkish quarter. One exhibit catalogues the Serb war crimes punished by the International Criminal Court. There were 90 convictions in all, including of separatist leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic for genocide and crimes against humanity. They are serving life sentences.
After all the immersion into what hateful Serb separatists had done to Sarajevo, my wife in particular had some trepidation about to our next stop: Belgrade.
Sarajevo city hallIzetbegovic museum
Suggested reading:
“The Bridge on the Drina” and “Bosnian Chronicle” by Ivo Andrić. The author won the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature and was a Yugoslav diplomat. Both were written during World War II. The first is a historical novel that uses the bridge built by the Ottoman Turks in the 16th century — heavily reliant on the labor of local Serbs — to tell story of the fateful and ultimately unhappy, often violent clash of civilizations, of racial disharmony, economic envy, human foibles. Over five centuries many of the region’s Serbs resist Islam while others serve it and assimilate. Christian-Muslim relations sweeten and sour, often depending on outside pressure. Ottoman gives way to Austro-Hungarian rule. “Bosnian Chronicle” takes place in Napoleonic times in Travnik, then the Bosnian capital. It is more about the inner workings of power and diplomatic intrigue.
“The Fracture Zone:” by Simon Winchester. I’m a big Winchester fan, particularly “The Professor and the Madman” and was not disappointed by this 1999 book. It narrates a trip he takes from Vienna to Istanbul as a correspondent for The Guardian during the Serb-Kosovo war — the opposite direction we took on our six-week trip. His job: Try to understand what precipitated the recent bloodletting. One dramatis persona in Winchester’s history-laden travelogue is long dead, the severed head of the grand vizier of the Ottoman sultan who tried to overrun Vienna in 1683. Vienna’s city museum has Kara Mustafa’s separated noggin, but won’t display it. The torso’s in Anatolia.
“Balkan Ghosts” by Robert D. Kaplan. I read this book when it first published in 1993 so I can’t assess the updated edition. Credit Kaplan with raising the alarm with his reporting that Yugoslavia would self-immolate. Kaplan took a lot of heat from scholars for arguing that the peoples of the Balkans had some wort of an innate predisposition for violence, for often accepting “fancy for fact” and a rather simplistic premise that the 21st century would boil down to a battle between (Turkic) Islam and Christianity. Were the Ottoman Turks and Austro-Hungarians brutal overlords in their occupations of these lands? Not always. Did they persecute based on religion? Not necessarily. Better to read Ivo Andrić for the nuance.
I have not read Rebecca West’s 1943 classic “The Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.” It’s long and, many say, overly tendentious.
Films:
“No Man’s Land” directed by Danis Tanović. Won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2002. A biting, darkly humorous morality play on the front lines of the Bosnia war near Tuzla. The cast of characters includes U.N. blue helmets, journalists and, of course, the men doomed to fight and die. Priceless: when the two protagonists – a Serb and a Bosniak soldier – argue about who started the war while hunkering together under Serb bombardment.
“Quo Vadis, Aida?” directed by Jasmina Žbanić. This 2020 feature follows a U.N. translator’s anguished attempt to save the males in her family from being hauled away to slaughter with Srebrenica’s other men in 1995. The massacre of more than 8,000 men and boys — who Dutch peacekeepers failed to protect — was the most egregious single act of ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Bosnian Serbs (these under Ratko Mladić’s command). The movie is beautifully acted and emotionally draining.
Most tourists likely don’t read Roberto Saviano’s 2006 “Gomorrah” ahead of a trip to Naples. Elena Ferrante’s “Neapolitan Quartet” is understandably more popular. But I’m an odd one, fixated on organized crime’s poisonous grip on any region. Saviano is a master reporter, and among his findings was that indiscriminate toxic waste disposal by the local Camorra gangsters had driven up cancer rates. We’d be drinking bottled water.
My pickpocket paranoia eased considerably after we checked into our B&B. Like most major cities, Naples does have high-crime districts worth avoiding, such as Scampia. But the metro felt non-threatening and tourist areas are always pretty safe; a trio of soldiers and their armored vehicle were routinely on sentry a block from our hotel on Via Toledo. There are hurly-burly rough edges to this metropolis as organized crime’s weighty imprint does translate — at minimum — into inefficiencies in public services. It begins with the trash collection.
None of which precluded our wonderful stay in what was an obligatory stop on the Grand Tour for Europe’s 18th and 19th-century aristocrats. The Naples we saw is in splendorous decay, the locals exuberantly living “alla Grande.” It’s noisy, indulgent, charming. I chuckled constantly at all the zippy scooter-riding on narrow cobbled streets, particularly the kid with the maniacal grin impertinently honking a path through startled pedestrians.
Neapolitan food is inimitable. And not just the pizza. The rich loam of Mt. Vesuvius’ flanks yields splendid tomatoes. The locals are chatty. The archaeology and history intoxicate: The Greco-Roman fundament, the rotating Spanish, French and Germanic royal occupiers, the looted artistic treasures.
Naples has always lived on the edge of disaster, straddling two active volcanoes. Vesuvius, ravager of Pompeii, menaces to the south. To the immediate west is Campi Flegrei (Fields of Fire), a supercaldera with even greater explosive potential that’s been rumbling lately. Its last previous eruption, in 1538, was but sputter in geologic time.
Our guide for Pompeii asked that we arrive before the 9 a.m. opening to beat the crowds. He was not pleased to learn we were coming via not-always-punctual regional rail. Oh, and the transit/tourist pass we bought (Campania ArteCard) turned out not to cover the “express” train that was to get us to the ruins with time to spare. It didn’t, and cost us 15 euros each. In poor repair, it groaned on the tracks, a horse cart against the national TrenItalia rail’s high-speed service, which we’d ridden from Rome to Naples and later on to Salerno for a day-trip by ferry to the Amalfi Coast.
Our B&B’s location on Via Toledo bordering the Spanish Quarter was ideal for our four-day visit, just half the time in Naples proper. Local guide Emanuele (found on GuruWalks.com) drove a few tourists away on Day One with his colorful, enthralling recounting of the underdog city’s madcap history. He segued into why the late Diego Armando Maradona is so beloved. Emanuele is a booster of sustainable tourism, Our walking tour featured instruction in traditional Neapolitan coffee-making and a visit to an octogenarian tailor.
In 1787, forty years after Pompeii was rediscovered, Goethe visited and recorded: “There have been many disasters in this world, but few have given so much delight to later generations.” I’d have to agree. Our private Pompeii tour guide, Vincenzo, is an archaeologist involved in recent digs (hired through VesuviusvsPompeii). We got a great feel for the 79 AD disaster — minus the speculative embellishments for which so many tour guides are renowned (See the historian of ancient Rome, Mary Beard). We could have done without the crowds, and Italian authorities have just acknowledged that they are getting out of hand. They are restricting visitors to 20,000 a day beginning Nov. 15, 2024.
Vincenzo complained about something else: Italian museum authorities don’t leave enough of the treasures they uncover on site, preferring to put them on display at the Archaeology Museum in Naples. DO NOT miss that museum for the best of Pompeii and Herculaneum relics (especially the mosiacs) and the eye-popping Farnese Bull, the largest single sculpture recovered from antiquity.
We also saw the Museo di Capodimonte (the ground floor sculpture collection was closed — they were installing air conditioning — but painting and decorative arts were open) after a great lunch at the nearby Luggetella trattoria. Capodimonte is among Italy’s largest museums (with works by Titian, Carravagio, El Greco) in a Bourbon palazzo on a hill that shoulders a splendid park.
On Naples’ bay side, take the municipal elevator up Monte Echia for a grand pre-sunset view of Vesuvius and the offshore islands, then descend to the shoreline and join the Neapolitans in their passeggiata (ritual stroll). On Echia’s slopes are the walls of Parthenope, the 8th-century B.C. Greek city that preceded by three centuries today’s city center, which is a short stroll.
One more dining tip: in Positano on the Amalfi Coast consider the climb to the unassuming, family-run Ristorante di Costantino for lunch. It’s a strenuous little hike — especially on a hot day — but the food and a view, far from the claustrophobic crowds, won’t disappoint.
Recommended reading:
“Gomorrah,” by Roberto Saviano. A Naples native and a fearless journalist, Saviano lays bare the endemic influence of the Camorra crime syndicate. After the book’s publication, Saviano required armed protection and spent time in exile.
“Naples 1944,” by Norman Lewis. Not just a great personal memoir of World War II but also a searing portrait of a city in desperate times that accentuate its denizens’ obsessions, superstitions and eccentricities. The Allies liberated the city in late 1943. Lewis’ job as an occupier was to try to pacify the place. He admits to doing a rather poor job of it. And oh, the people he meets.
“The Fires of Vesuvius,” by the classicist Mary Beard. Visitors to Pompeii and Herculaneum are easily seduced by the bacchanalian lasciviousness of the place and, indeed, our guide described Pompeii as a first-century “Città del Peccato” (Sin City). It had 24 brothels on the two-thirds of it (44 acres) so far uncovered and its lustiness is quite graphically exemplified in frescoes like the Priapus, a fertility god, depicted in phallic majesty at the House of Vettii, which officially opened last year. The Roman playground was also cultural and commercial hub. Beard is interested not just in who died here and how but what we’ve learned about how they lived. Personally, it made me appreciate modern plumbing.
