Vespa Tunes XIV: Che Calore, Pino Daniele, 1977
The summer I turned sixteen my family and I took an overnight car ferry to Northern Spain. Once there we roughly followed the route of the pilgrims’ Camino to Santiago di Compostela, but as godless folk we did so in our aged Ford Sierra estate. We stayed in the excellent state-run Paradores hotels which offered welcome cool, crisp shade at the end of long, hot days. We also discovered that Spaniards (wisely) eat very late as the evening cools, so we did too, and that cars made in Dagenham in the eighties didn’t have air conditioning, even when they had a Spanish name.
At some point on our trip we stopped in a village in the middle of a baking day, perhaps to look at the map (a map! the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there). With few frames of reference for such heat-soaked torpor—in my memory saturated with the colours of an over-exposed photograph—at the time it reminded me of the movie Bagdad Café, which is set in the Mojave. A far cry from Clerkenwell, it was deserted save for a couple of wild dogs and an old lady in black who just said Que calor! Que calor! as we passed. Que calor indeed.
Our final arrival point was Santiago itself where, even as an often tiresome eye-rolling teenager, I still recall my delight in our hotel. The Hostal de los Reyes Católicos was founded by Ferdinand and Isabella for weary pilgrims who must have imagined themselves in paradise. I certainly thought so: cool, calm, verdant cloisters; tinkling fountains; a gauzy curtain billowing gently in the breeze as I lay on the bed and, treat of treats, drank an ice-cold mini-bar Coca Cola from a glass bottle glistening with condensation.
When the Hostal was inaugurated by los Reyes Católicos in 1499, almost exactly five hundred years before I enjoyed my Coke there, across the Mediterranean Ferdinand’s first cousin once removed, Frederick, sat on the throne of Naples. The Spanish influence in Naples is omnipresent—zucchine a scapece; playing cards; summer dinner reservations at 11pm cause no consternation—not to mention a panoply of dialectal vocabulary.
That lexical cross-pollination finds no better musical expression than in the songs of Pino Daniele, a singer-songwriter born in the port area of the city whose eclectic inspirations—pop and rock; jazz and tarantella; blues and rumba—are married to lyrics in uncompromising Neapolitan. Napule è, from his first album Terra Mia is an impassioned ode to the city, with all of its glories and all of its difficulties, long established as an unofficial Neapolitan anthem.
During this sweltering summer it is however another song from Terra Mia which springs to mind. As the jaunty rhythm of Che Calore drifts from the radios of coffee bars onto enervated, over-saturated streets, I am reminded of the old lady in a village somewhere in Northern Spain in 1993, of the delight of an ice-cold Coke, and of the cloisters of Ferdinand and Isabella.
Che calore, che calore, comme coce 'o sole
S'è miso justo 'ncapa e nun ce fa' fatica'
Che calore, che calore, sto tutto surato
È meglio ca levàmmo mano nun ce stà niente 'a fa'
What heat, what heat, how the sun burns
Its got the idea in its head to not let us work
What heat, what heat, I’m drenched with sweat
We might as well give up, there’s nothing to be done
I mo' moro
Cu 'stu calore nun me fido chiù
Stongo una zuppa 'e surore
E si m'arraggio nun fatico chiù
I’m going to die
I can’t stand this heat any more
I’m soaked in sweat
And if I get angry I’ll not work any more
"Che calore, che calore", dice 'a chiattona
Saglienne 'e grare nun ce 'a fa
"Che calore, che calore", dice 'o guaglione
Si se scassano 'e tazze l'aggio 'a pava'
“What heat, what heat”, says the fat woman
Climbing the stairs she can’t manage
“What heat, what heat”, says the boy at the coffee bar
If the cups get broken I’ll have to pay for them
I mo' moro
Cu 'stu calore nun me fido chiù
Stongo una zuppa 'e surore
E si m'arraggio nun fatico chiù
I’m going to die
I can’t stand this heat any more
I’m soaked in sweat
And if I get angry I’ll not work any more
I mo' moro
Cu 'stu calore nun me fido chiù
Stongo una zuppa 'e surore
E si m'arraggio nun fatico chiù
I’m going to die
I can’t stand this heat any more
I’m soaked in sweat
And if I get angry I’ll not work any more
Loved this -your writing, photos, and the song. Certainly brings back the memory of the wonderful paradores - and ‘Que Calor! I think, though, we travelled the Camino in the ancient brown Ford Cortina estate, the Sierra being its more sprightly successor. And, as you comment, all done with paper maps. Which is why I remember doing most of the driving, being an unreliable navigator.X
Omg Agnes, Bagdad Cafe! We loved that movie (and Säggabrecht) , so much that once on a trip we even found the the town of Rosenheim!
As usual, you have described in word pictures, the stultifying heat and torpor so graphically, as did your Vespa song, which transported us back to our recent two weeks in Naples!