As Ida Susser writes in reference to Belmonte's Broken Fountain, "good ethnographies have long lives." This classic of urban anthropology, one of the most acclaimed ethnographies of recent years, offers vivid, literary descriptions of Fontana del Re, an impoverished Neapolitan neighborhood. Belmonte documents the struggles of Neapolitans surrounded by crumbling buildings and economic insecurity. He details family dynamics as well as the working of Naples's informal economy, the day-to-day struggle for economic subsistence, and the intermittent begging and thieving of the young. Taking...