Sawt Falasteen - From flags to tattoos, Naples turns blue as title fever grows

In anticipation of the club's first Italian football league title for three decades, the city is celebrating and decorating its streets with blue -- Napoli's colour.

Blue banners and flags stream from balconies and street corners and Napoli scarves and jerseys fill shop windows in this boisterous southern Italian city.

Even the bread has turned blue.

"I live for Napoli. It's my passion. So I had the idea of creating a special loaf in honour of Napoli... for my fan customers," baker Antonio Coppola told AFP.

Within the labyrinth of alleys that characterise this teeming metropolis, Coppola has started baking bright blue loaves decorated with an "N" whenever the team has a match.

Naples has always lived and breathed football but the prospect of Napoli winning their third Scudetto -- and the first since Diego Maradona led the team in 1990 -- has brought the passion to new heights.

A picture of Maradona as a saint looks down on Salvatore Russo's tattoo parlour as he works on a Scudetto-themed design on a customer's arm.

He has seen an uptick in people requesting Napoli tattoos as the competition reaches its final weeks, for which he has come up with a new design.

"I decided to put aside my superstition and tattoo the third Scudetto," Russo said, showing off his forearm bearing an image with the dates of Napoli's titles -- including 2023 -- hovering over its crest.

"The players will sew it on their jerseys, but I sewed it on my skin."

The artist, born just steps away from the huge Maradona mural at the heart of Naples' Spanish quarter, has already tattooed about 30 people with the design.

The most recent was Antonio Cardone, owner of a nearby curtain shop.

"We've almost won it," he told AFP. He is so confident that he is already thinking about a fourth title.

"I hope it comes soon because I'm already 56!" he joked, gritting his teeth as Salvatore's needle pierced the skin on his arm.

- Maradona and San Gennaro -

In Naples, long plagued by poverty, unemployment and organised crime, the passion for football transcends generations and social classes.

One well-dressed Neapolitan talking to AFP in the street earlier this week said he was a lawyer who had just left a court hearing.

But Eugenio Salzano did not hesitate to whip off his shirt to show off his left upper arm, adorned with a Napoli tattoo and one depicting the blood of St Gennaro, the city's patron saint.

"For me it is a dream come true," said Salzano, a Napoli season ticket holder, of the team's anticipated victory which he plans to celebrate on the street with the rest of the city.

"Celebrating in Naples is crazy for sure. I can't describe it in words because you have to live it," he said.

"So the day it happens, you'll realise what it's like to party in Naples."

Such is the delirium that some are even talking about Vesuvius, the volcano whose majestic silhouette dominates the Bay of Naples, getting in on the act.

"If it erupts, we hope it will spit out tri-colour lava" in the colours of the Italian flag, laughed Salzano.

There had been hopes that Napoli could also win the Champions League until a loss to northern rivals AC Milan on Tuesday put an end to that dream.

However, taxi driver Giuseppe de Bernardo was unfazed.

"We're 22 points ahead of Milan in the league. That's what counts. That's what shows we're the strongest," he said.

S.Abdullah--SF-PST