A pair of scooters, each carrying a pair of teenage boys, swing out of the center of the street and gun gently towards us. We're three, on foot, two women and myself. We've been poking downslope under spotty lamplight, along a cobblestone byway half-strangled, here and there, by a parked car. The women have fallen a few steps behind, and it's towards them that the doubled-up boys angle their bikes. I turn, but I can't make out what's going on. Maybe a palm brushes across a breast, maybe fingers pluck at a purse-strap. Meanwhile the young male voices erupt in a jungle cacophony, and for a moment the scene appears laughable, the teens flailing and the machines wobbling and the women dumbfounded. Then however one of my friends calls out.

"Aiuto. Ai-uto, John."

I swing into my first long stride back uphill, but with that the scooters change direction too. They're roaring away, the attack's over, even as the riders pump up the volume on their Zulu cries. Not that these boys aren't, like their two victims, white and European. They're riding Italian machines with bumblebee rumps. And now as the bikes disappear, as the howls echo away, my two women friends show me a grin such as I've never seen. A grin that appears to've been pinned between their cheeks after first getting stretched and dried on a coathanger.

I look to their clothes, their purses. Everything remains in place, good luck – though little more than luck.

"You see?" shouts one woman, the Neapolitan.

This is her city. It's a summer weeknight, not much past 11, mid-2005; she's nearly been mugged on a street that must be counted an important downtown connection. Yes, Via San Sebastiano can seem like little more than an alleyway, to an American. The medieval paving and Baroque-era palazzi make it difficult to rig up adequate lighting. But San Sebastiano links two major squares in the historic center. It's supposed to be tourist-friendly and reserved for foot-traffic.

"You see what's become of this city, mo?"

Mo: the Neapolitan "now." A chesty grunt, a mouthy shrug, it's an extreme contraction of al momento, "at this moment." Mo, the locals say, as the night unwinds at the edge of a piazza you'd expect to be quiet and safe, posted for pedestrians only. And I must say it too, mo, Naples now. The ancient city, in its most recent incarnation, demands addressing.

That night on San Sebastiano, I may have helped prevent a robbery – but a few nights later that same friend, a woman with all the savvy that 40 years in Naples provides, had her bags torn from her hands. Both local and national papers ran stories concerning such "microcriminality," a poor word for it, since the smacking and groping feels definitively macro to whoever's on the receiving end. More than a few robbery victims ended up in the hospital. And yet rough stuff like that, for many Neapolitans, was but one jagged piece of an exceptionally thorny period.

Over the last couple of years the city has also endured pandemic breakdowns in garbage collection, a rise in mob activity that included stepped-up murder rates, and a piazza-crowding riot between police and locals that anticipated, by several months, the far-better publicized troubles outside Paris. And this summer Naples saw a homicide more disturbing than what happened later in France, though the trouble shared a number of the same earmarks. On the night of August 20th, a 24-year-old immigrant from Senegal was stabbed to death by a white tough about the same age. The victim's name was Diop Ibrahaim; the murderer remains unknown. Like the boys who went after my friends, the killer rode doubled-up on a bike and roared away scot-free.

In June, the Naples daily Il Mattino ran a front-page editorial declaring that the new surge in crime, coupled with a pervasive breakdown in civility, had brought the city to "the worst crisis of our time." And that crisis was forever coming up in conversation. My 80-year-old aunt had to talk about it, and so did my 12-year-old second cousin. "There used to be a certain peace," one friend told me, a no-nonsense working adult, "but no longer." Then she described the turmoil with the very words I'd heard in radio interviews with citizens of war-torn Baghdad: "The situation is terrible."

That situation has gone largely unreported in the US. To find information about Ibrahaim's murder, you need to navigate Italian websites.