Lo Sciopero, or How the Italians Helped Me Survive a Taxi Strike

Italians are famously strike-prone. Shipping items are delayed? Port workers strike. Baggage doesn’t appear at the airport? Baggage handlers strike. Metro only comes twice an hour? Transit strike. Disgusting old mattress left on the street not collected? Okay, that could also be because someone keeps parking on top of it and every time the garbage collectors come around they can’t move it because of the car. Anyway, strikes are nothing new for Italians, who are mostly resigned to them, and sometimes strikes are even advertised in advance, depending on the scale of the issue being protested and how many services will be shut down.

The first time I experienced a strike it was a little baby strike. An amuse-bouche of a strike, if you will. Just a teeny-tiny itty-bitty temporary closure of the funicolare system for four hours midday. Frustrating, as I had walked about 25 minutes in the sun to the station only to find the gates shut, but the metro was running and so were the cabs, so I gave thanks that at least something was working and I wouldn’t have to walk home. The thing about Naples is that the map is a lie, because a REAL map of Naples would be topographical so that you could know in advance if you need to climb 1,000 steps straight up in the air to reach your destination. Vomero, our neighborhood, is at the top of the hill, which on a hot day seems to extend endlessly into the sky as you huff and puff your way up, assisted periodically by a helpful sea breeze that mainly carries the scent of errant dog doo. The funicolare system is vital because its three lines take you down (and then back up) from Vomero to key central stops in other neighborhoods. So no funicolare meant taking the metro, which was fine but not ideal because it takes longer, and maybe it will show up immediately or maybe you’ll have to wait 20 minutes. Additionally, for COVID reasons, the windows are kept open (which I’m not complaining about), but this means that there is nothing to dampen the sound of the train screeching along the tracks. Think Phoebe Buffay “singing” along to Ross’s bagpipes trapped in a bag with a furious cat, and you’ll have about 10% of the volume level of the Naples metro. Anyway. The funicolare closure was an irritation but not too terribly inconvenient. The second time I encountered a strike, however, it was not remotely amusing, but I did survive it thanks to some helpful anonymous Italians.

We had planned to fly to Prague for Thanksgiving. The Naples airport is right next to the naval base where J works. When we went to Dublin earlier in November, we packed our suitcases the night before, and I came with J on his drive to work so that we could leave the car at the base and walk to the airport for our flight. Extremely convenient, but it was a long day on the base, and for the trip to Prague I hadn’t gotten my act together in time to pack the night before and go with J to the base in the morning. Instead I planned that on the day of our flight I would pack, put the apartment in order, and take a cab to the airport from the stand located across the street from our apartment.

I left our apartment with a few hours before our flight to find that there were no cabs at all at the nearby taxi stand. Odd, as there were usually one or two available, but maybe they were all out driving? No matter, there’s another cab stand at the larger piazza about 15 minutes away, so I just had to drag my suitcase uphill and I’d find a cab. There was, however, a very long backup of cars trying to access the Vomero entry to the tangenziale (the ring road around Naples that leads to the city center, the airport, and points south), all leaning on their horns, which made me anxious for what the traffic probably looked like on the tangenziale, aka very bad, which didn’t bode well for the trip to the airport.

At the piazza I knew I really had a problem. There was not a single cab at the taxi stand where you can usually find 10-12 cars waiting. Every space was empty, and looking around, I realized that the normally ubiquitous white cabs were missing from the road. Oh no.

A bus driver was parked near the taxi stand, and I knocked on the door to ask him for help. “Where are the cabs?” I blurted out in Italian, trying not to cry. He replied something I couldn’t understand. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I said, and now I really was crying. The bus driver eyed me nervously and flagged down a passerby, explaining in rapid Italian. I caught “inglese” and “taxi” and “la ragazza,” and waited anxiously for the second man to explain. “C’e uno sciopero,” he said.

There’s a taxi strike.

No cabs.

Now what?

After a moment of speechless panic I remembered that there was still the option of the Alibus, the public bus that goes from the center of Naples to the airport. I knew I had to get to Piazza Garibaldi to catch the Alibus but what was the best way to get to Garibaldi? The metro took almost a half hour, and what if I had to wait 20 minutes for it to arrive? And it looked like the traffic on the tangenziale was terrible, so what if the Alibus was horribly delayed and I missed the flight? I called J to let him know and assured him that I would figure it out. Panicked, I rotated on the spot like a demented shwarma as though this would make a cab materialize, blibbering “Alibus, Garibaldi, Alibus, Garibaldi, metro?” over and over when suddenly the second man pointed over my shoulder. “Quell’autobus va a Garibaldi!” he said. “Vai, vai, vai!”

I vai’d, running across several lanes of traffic to catch the 130 to Garibaldi, skidding onto the bus just before the doors closed. I called J to let him know I was on the bus and not to worry, but I only had 11% battery so I would put my phone on airplane mode. The bus turned right, and traffic kept going at a steady pace as we drove toward the Arenella neighborhood. Wowie! We were really moving! Alas, five minutes later the bus came to a total standstill — we had arrived at one of the roads that feeds into the Arenella entry onto the tangenziale.

This was a hellscape: The bus was on a two-way road (Via Giacinto Gigante), traveling rightward on the map toward the intersection pictured below in the red circle. At the traffic light, two other streets converge on Via Giacinto Gigante. Each is a one-way street going TOWARD Via Giacinto Gigante, creating a gigante mess.

The seventh circle of hell is found at this intersection.

There is a traffic light, but it might as well be broken, since the drivers turning from the one-way roads onto Via Giacinto Gigante (which, again, is a two-way road with one lane of traffic going in each direction) lunge across traffic just before the light changes and block the box, because this is Naples, where it’s much better to have TOTAL ANARCHY with EVERYONE GOING AT THE SAME TIME! The bus inched forward. Actually that’s an exaggeration. Every two minutes we moved forward another millimeter.

By this point the despair had truly settled in and I was crying silently but copiously into my mask. Why had I been so stupid and taken a bus? At least the metro isn’t subject to traffic. Oh lord, now I was in for it. This bus was going to take an hour to get to Garibaldi, and I was going to miss the flight. My phone was almost dead and I was trapped on a bus with no way to charge it. I had no tissues. And — oh god, was the bus driver going to take the tangenziale to the city center? What about all the congestion earlier I saw leading onto the tangenziale? DOOOOOOOM!

None of the other passengers seemed fazed except for one old guy who periodically looked out the window, sighed loudly, and muttered to himself. Across from him was an older woman who said something to me in Napoletano that sounded like “do you want to sit down?”

“No, va bene, tutto bene,” I snuffled, touched that she had noticed my distress. Then inspiration struck me and I turned to her to ask what route the driver was taking. Maybe if he was going to use the surface roads, it wouldn’t take so long! I suddenly realized I could not remember the Italian word for take, and I didn’t dare turn my phone service back on to consult Google Translate in case the battery died, leaving me with no way to contact J. What I WANTED to say in Italian was “does this bus take the tangenziale?” but instead what I said was “does this bus go to the tangenziale?,” implication being, “does this bus terminate at the tangenziale?” Everyone looked confused and there were several murmurs of “Garibaldi, Garibaldi.” We repeated this Abbott and Costello routine a few times.

“Yes,” I said in Italian, getting more desperate, “but does the bus go to the tangenziale and then Garibaldi?”

Her eyes lit up. “Si! Tangenziale, then Garibaldi!”

While this exchange was occurring the bus had crept down the road and closer to the intersection. Maybe if he gets stuck in traffic on the tangenziale he’ll let me off and then I can call J to come pick me up from the side of the road! I thought wildly. Just then the bus reached the intersection and turned left to take the highway, and by some miracle — and I truly do not know how this was possible — the traffic evaporated and the bus zoomed down the street to the tangenziale, which was completely clear of traffic.

At this point I had stopped crying and the older woman reassured me that the bus was close to Garibaldi once the driver exited the tangenziale for the city center. “Grazie, grazie mille,” I beamed through my mask. A few minutes later, the bus terminated at Piazza Garibaldi with plenty of time for me to catch the Alibus to the airport. I felt like crying all over again, this time with relief and gratitude for the kindness of the strangers who helped me survive lo sciopero.