The Object
There is a shop on the Riviera di Chiaia, twenty square metres of it, that opens at half past six in the morning. Not for the tourists. By seven the little counter is busy and someone has put the coffee on, because that is what you do in Naples. The address has not moved in over a century. We have stood in that doorway with the sea at our back and watched men in no hurry choose a tie the way other people choose a book.
Eugenio Marinella opened it in 1914. He had been to England, admired the narrow ties and the sober cloth, and wanted the same thing on the Neapolitan seafront. The writer Matilde Serao called what he made a small corner of England in Naples, and the phrase stuck. At first it was shirts, starched to a hard gloss, that carried the name. The tie came later, and then it would not leave.
The cloth still comes from England. The silks are printed in Macclesfield, the Cheshire mill town that has dressed the world's ties for two centuries, and they are cut and sewn by hand back in Naples. The patterns stay small and repeating, pin dots and tight geometrics, nothing that shouts across a room. The house folds each silk square seven times on itself, inward, so the tie keeps its shape without a heavy lining. It is a quiet piece of engineering you feel rather than see, in the weight of the thing and the way the knot finally sits.
A tie is a small thing. It is also the first decision a man makes before a long day, and this city has always taken its small decisions seriously.
The clients have not been small. In the 1980s President Francesco Cossiga began giving visiting heads of state a box of five Marinella ties, and the habit travelled through the chanceries of Europe. Presidents and kings have worn them since, which the family will mention and then move past, because the famous necks were never the point.
It is run now by Maurizio Marinella, the founder's grandson, who still stands near the door most mornings, and by his son Alessandro. The shop could long ago have become a label and left the seafront for Milan. It did the opposite. It kept the twenty metres and the six-thirty opening, and it still puts the coffee on. You can buy the tie in other cities now. Buy it here instead, early, before the traffic builds on the Riviera and while the espresso is still hot.
