TO Naples last weekend for a short visit I was determined to make after re-reading Norman Lewis’ great wartime memoir, Naples ’44. The Neapolitans don’t seem to be too upset about their beloved national football team “the Azzurri” missing out on the World Cup.

One street trader, wearing a tee-shirt with ‘10’ emblazoned on it – the number now eternally associated with Diego Maradona - told me that he’d have been more upset if the World Cup had been held in “a real football country” like Spain or Argentina or France and that locating it in the Middle East rendered it “artificiale”.

He also said that any World Cup lacking the presence of Italy – four-time winners and twice runners-up – isn’t really a World Cup at all. He asks if I’m from England and I tell him, rather too hurriedly “No,” I am “Scozzese”. He looks at me pityingly and says he will pray that Scotland will qualify the next time. And then he turns to acknowledge a little street shrine to Padre Pio.

When I tell him we invented football, he re-kindles his shrivelled cigarette and there’s a smile that says “Aye right”. “Diego Maradona invented football,” he says.

PADRE PIO was a 20th century priest of the Capuchin Order (whose distinctive brown habits inspired the Italian, espresso-based steamed coffee). He is venerated as a Saint in the Catholic Church for, among other wonders, having the gift of bi-location and displaying the stigmata (the wounds of Christ) on his body.

My beloved old school football coach, Charlie Higgins had a profound devotion to Padre Pio and would often pepper his pre-match talks with stories about his life. On one occasion, I mocked the concept of bi-location (being in two places at once) by telling Mr Higgins that this was a brilliant gift and could come in handy during exams. “”McKenna, the way you played last Saturday you could have been in five places at the one time and you’d have been nowhere near the ball in any of them.”

IN Naples, you can pop down a side street when you’re out doing the shopping and walk round an original Caravaggio painting. Naples has three of Caravaggio’s works and one of them, The Seven Works of Mercy, is in a church called the Pio Monte della Misericordia, in a wee street just off one of the main thoroughfares. It’ll cost you just a fiver a pop.

Naples is one of the world’s oldest continually populated cities, stretching back two and a half thousand years. It wears its culture lightly. Many of its citizens live in and around the city centre in what immediately seem to be over-crowded neighbourhoods fitted into tight alleyways.

There are few signs of affluence here and, gloriously, none of the homogenised retail or food emporiums which have hollowed out what remains of Scotland’s urban culture. I saw only one MacDonald’s and less than a handful of takeaways providing a bastardised food purporting to be from other cultures.

Italians haven’t yet been separated from their home-produced food or clothes. There are few chains or supermarkets gnawing at their sense of themselves, marginalising their culture and destroying local trade and replacing their words and phrases with the dismal lexicon of Walmart and Costa. If their football team isn’t producing the goods their national pride can be invoked on every street corner.

SCOTLAND’S national football team has rarely produced the goods in recent decades, but it felt good last week to remind the world that modern football really did start here.

Thus, we staged some modest and circumspect events to mark the 150th anniversary of the world’s first international match which was played in Glasgow between Scotland and England at the West of Scotland cricket ground.

If the world’s first international match had been staged in Italy they would have declared a public holiday on its 150th anniversary. If he’d been alive, Caravaggio would have painted it.

TO Govan, which in its sense of community pride and in the edginess of its character, resembles Naples. I’m here to write about Sunny Govan, the outstanding community radio station which helps Govan-ites through their day. It also possesses by far the most banging and charismatic name too. In the old Glasgow, self-mocking tradition you might respond to an inquiry about your holiday destination by saying: “I’m off to the Baharras,” or “I’m off to Sunny Go-van.” It meant that you were going nowhere.

“The station’s always been called that,” says Steg G, its co-founder and director. “We asked the community what they’d like it to be called and this is what they all told us. It then got abbreviated to Sunny G because car radios have a character limitation.” The Neapolitans would have appreciated this too.