I Took the Ferrari to Work Today. When I first saw one of these things (photo) coming down the tracks about three years ago, I thought they were filming another Star Trek movie.

Fixed rail urban transport systems in Naples have usually been on the order of Toonerville Trolleys of the kind that unwashed urchins—the scugnizzi—hang on to the back of for free rides. The longest such rail line in Naples used to be the number 1 line that ran from Bagnoli in and through the city all the way to the east end of town at Poggioreale. Thirty years ago a ticket still cost a paltry 50 lire (ten cents). Then, they tore up the tracks for most of that stretch in order to widen roads for car traffic. The number 1 now runs between Piazza Vittoria in the west (adjacent to the Villa Comunale) and Poggioreale in the east, still a good chunk of Naples. The ticket costs 1 euro.

Anyway, when it passed me for the first time, I was afraid to get on and contented myself with reading the painted autograph on the side: "Pininfarina." This is in reference to Battista Farina (1893-1966), founder of the famous chassis design company that has turned out a number of snazzy versions of Maserati and Ferrari. The company still bears the name and has gone into designing classy street cars. This new model is called the Sirio and is built by Ansaldo Breda, the largest Italian manufacturer of light-rail transport systems, with various models now lightly prowling urban rails all over Europe from Oslo to Ankara and, indeed, in the United States in Los Angeles, Boston, and Atlanta. This model, the Sirio, is an articulated train with driver compartments at both ends. In the interior, single rows of seats are aligned on each side, facing the center; thus, you can make easy eye contact with the person across the way or with the navel of the person standing in the aisle. The two motors run on asynchronous triphase alternating current fed by insulated gate bipolar transistor inverters and choppers. This makes me wary of spider-manning myself to the back for a free ride. Of, course, there is no back, anyway.

Turtle Point. The gentle giant of the deep pictured (below) is the Loggerhead Sea Turtle (Caretta caretta). (I'm no Charles Darwin, but I think that means "turtle-turtle" in Latinized French.) The creature is common to many of our planet's seas. While not exactly on the endangered species list, they would surely be on the battered species list, if there were such. Most of their problems have little to do with whatever naturally ails turtles; the creatures are simply victims of civilization. They wind up with cracked body shells from collisons with boats; they injure their flippers trying to struggle loose from fishing nets, or, in the worst cases, the flippers can be sliced off by the props of passing motor boats; they get fishing hooks embedded in their flesh or even swallow them; or they can simply be poisoned by pollution and, as a result, be blind or have lost their delicate sense of direction.

For many years in Naples, the Anton Dohrn Aquarium in the Villa Comunale did valuable veterinary work in taking in these wounded creatures from local waters. That work has now been expanded greatly by a new facility—a "Turtle Point"—on the premises of the old Italsider steel mill in Bagnoli, an area that is little by little making its way back from long decades of urban blight. The new facility is on 600 square meters and houses 23 tanks dedicated solely to caring for these creatures, rehabilitating them and returning them to the sea. Examplars of Caretta caretta arrive from all over the Mediterranean at what is now one of the largest such rescue facilities in Europe. In 2005, the center took in about 90 sea turtles and managed to return half of them to the wild. The others did not survive. The freed turtles are outfitted with temporary tracking devices so marine biologists can follow them. There are now plans to expand the center with a larger, adjacent facility.