“In 2014 I took a trip to Italy with my daughter Aza. After some time in Capri, we ended our travels in Naples so that we could read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels in their entirety there. It was July, very hot, and we were greeted by the scent of the sea, the old stone mixed with the salt and the brine and the smells of cooking. It was marvelous. This was our time together to talk about everything that was happening in our lives and in the books (which evoke layers and layers of Neapolitan life): our emotions and what we were feeling with each page. Soon after, Aza would have her first baby, and we knew we would never go on another trip of this sort. Our hotel [the Royal Continental Hotel Naples] was partly designed by the modernist architect Gio Ponti—including the fabrics, the beds, the sinks, and the crazy rooftop pool. We read, mostly in our room, like panting puppies in front of the faltering air conditioning unit. When we weren’t reading, we were walking to get lost. We’d turn down some tiny street and it would open straight into a person’s kitchen. There’d be people sitting outside smoking, having desultory conversations, playing games. Vespas buzzing by. We also spent time at Castel dell-Ovo, across from our hotel. Close by, there were docks with fishing boats, and we watched the haul come in, perhaps 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 look at the artifacts from Pompeii. Seeing those objects was so fascinating because you know what happened to the people who owned them, the despair and how they died, and who they died with. One of my favorite things we saw was a simple cast-bronze skillet—almost exactly like the one I had at home. To think of someone in an ancient Pompeii villa using my skillet was such a strange piece of connection. I remember a little mosaic, a charming woman thinking what to write next. That moment, and those novels, have left a certain vibration in mind. We had been like spirits floating through what Naples was, and still is, really like.”
Louise Erdrich is the author of Python’s Kiss: Stories, a collection of short fiction that will be published March 24. She is also the owner of Birchbark Books, a bookstore in Minneapolis. This article appeared in the April 2026 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
