COLUMN ONE : Naples Puts On Its Best Face : Although the Italian port wallows in corruption, crime and decay, Clinton and other G-7 leaders will be offered a sanitized view of a city that is trying to clean up its act.

NAPLES, Italy —  The question being tested here under the volcano is whether, beginning with one world-important and summer-scorched weekend in July, it is possible to hew order from the chaos called Naples.

Will President Clinton, who arrives Friday, find a historic and beautiful city that is belatedly recovering its health and pride? Or will he and leaders from the six other richest nations see hastily applied makeup caking an urban corpse as the setting for their Group of Seven meeting this weekend?

Reform Naples! O sole mio. What a giggle. Easier to stay the tide.

But don’t laugh too hard. Overdue change is afoot in Italy’s messiest metropolis. Reforms are being launched, and some serious people are taking them seriously: “I have begun to stop for red lights,” said Tullio Pironti, the city’s last remaining book publisher. “I used to feel stupid if I stopped, because nobody else did.”

Whether this sudden modernization will outlast a limelit international gathering is the real question. Though the Italian government, the Secret Service and Neapolitans themselves will make sure Clinton sees no trace of it, there is an everlasting seamy side of Naples: When I exclaimed at a white-bearded body in blue jeans lying in the gutter, my cab driver scarcely braked, explaining, “No, he’s not dead, that’s Alfonso, who’s quite comfortable there. He’s a habitue. Alfonso drinks and drinks. I think he drinks to forget.”

Oblivion and disorder, thy name is Napoli.

Little moves under the broiling sun except hands jammed on horns. Motorbikes weave on sidewalks around pedestrians, pickpockets, con men, preteen apprentice hoods called scugnizzi . Vendors hawk African gewgaws, Miami Dolphin hats, smuggled cigarettes and pirated copies of X-rated movies.

Naples’ throbbing streets are home to a nasty branch of organized crime called the Camorra, and support some of Europe’s highest official unemployment and worst civic services. Naples is a noisy, noxious, insufferable and dangerous city that often seems more of the Third World than the First.

And yet . . .

Neapolitans agree that their city is ungovernable and unlivable, but 78% tell pollsters they’d never leave. Naples is a madhouse in which nothing ever works; a stress-and- Angst factory in which suicide is almost unknown.

It is a slums ‘n’ squalor, palaces ‘n’ princes southern port, with world-class architecture and museums. That kid on the corner may steal your watch while your park bench neighbor is reading Pliny the Elder in Latin. And how can anybody stay angry at a city in which one sips cappuccino while watching clouds play atop the Vesuvius volcano on the far side of a fairy-tale bay?

Naples may even seem quite magical from Bill Clinton’s sanitized view of it in the (Enrico) Caruso Suite of the Hotel Vesuvio at the heart of a newly coiffed city core, where the G-7 participants will live and meet for three days beginning Friday. Christened the “red zone” and closed to traffic, it will perhaps be the most protected place on Earth until Sunday night. Even residents on foot need a special pass to get into the area.

The security and the fresh paint are symptomatic: What a difference a year can make! Last summer, Naples touched bottom, befouled and overwhelmed by corruption and decay. Uncollected garbage festered, few traffic lights worked, potholes swallowed roads, the water was brown, the city government wasn’t paying its bills.

The crisis marked the local climax of a national scandal in which political parties, organized crime and big business were belatedly caught conspiring to get rich at public expense. Lire flowed into Naples by the billions: Special funds for a 1974 cholera epidemic, a 1980 earthquake and the 1990 World Cup came in a torrent. Many repairs and projects were started: a sports palace, schools, a new Justice Ministry building. Hardly anything was finished.

“It was like the pyramids. The question was not when a project would be finished but how long it could be kept alive to eat money,” newspaperman Vito Faenza said.

Change began Aug. 6, when Prefect Umberto Improta, the Italian government’s senior representative in Naples, dissolved the feuding, corrupt and inept city government to remedy what he deemed a lack of public order.

Improta, formerly police chief in Milan and Rome, does not take kindly to civic malfeasance. Over the past two years, he has dissolved 16 local governments in the region around Naples for having links to the Camorra and 40 others for administrative paralysis. In Naples, Improta named administrators to run the bankrupt city until elections could be held in November.

Before that, though, then-Prime Minister Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, himself an interim technocrat, amazingly asked Improta if Naples could possibly host the annual meeting of the world’s seven largest economic powers plus their newfound Russian ally.

“I said yes, if certain things were done first,” Improta, 61, said in an interview. The central and regional governments dutifully anted up about $35 million for infrastructure preparations.

When the mayoral elections came, Naples, like most other large Italian cities, turned to the left in protest against corrupt Establishment parties. Antonio Bassolino, 47, a longtime apparatchik of the former Italian Communist Party who now leads its social democratic successor, defeated right-winger Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of the former dictator.

Naples’ new mayor cut his political teeth on fierce partisan politics. But Bassolino has proved an unabashed Naples booster, reaching across party lines in search of renewal.

“I’ve been critical of him, but as mayor, Bassolino has certainly overcome his combative past. He has appointed a good team of people, and he understands that restoration cannot be done by government alone,” said Cesare De Seta, a Neapolitan author and history of architecture professor.

Together, Improta, the crusty ex-cop turned administrator, and Bassolino, the rookie reformer-mayor, are proving an effective odd couple.

They have begun stitching the southern metropolis of 1.2 million people back together: Public works contracts are now let on a fixed-price basis in a blind draw of competing companies--a revolution in the Italian context.

“Work is being finished in record time and at great savings--55% to 60% cheaper than in the past,” Bassolino said in an interview. “Everybody is interested in making the city look good. For G-7, Naples wants to prove itself to the world.”

Repaving of the main bay-side road, a civic priority for decades, is finished. The Piazza del Plebiscito and the Via San Carlo have been redone and antiqued to restore them to the way they looked in the early 19th Century, when Naples, home of a ruling Spanish king, stood with Paris and London in the front rank of European capitals.

The 17th-Century Royal Palace, where the G-7 leaders will meet in the tapestry-draped Hercules room, has had its face lifted along with a number of major thoroughfares and buildings including City Hall.

“The city is recovering. There’s a new spirit of collaboration. We must show that the government keeps its promises. To combat decay, antipathy and indifference is the best way to fight crime,” Improta said.

Cops are giving traffic tickets; trucks are towing illegally parked cars. Bassolino has reopened half a dozen parks. Improta has overseen the refurbishing of 280 schools. This month, Naples Police Chief Ciro Lomastro astonished and outraged 160 phantom city workers who collect pay for jobs they never go to--a hallowed Naples scam. He had them arrested.

Naples patriot Jean Noel Schifano, director of the French Institute that teaches French language and culture, sees marked improvement in the life of a city he loves and has written about extensively.

There is poverty aplenty, but some appearances are misleading: Swiss patients come for eye operations at one Naples clinic, Schifano says. Tens of thousands of nominally unemployed, in fact work hard in businesses and industries that do not officially exist--and therefore pay no taxes.

“Things are getting better. You can take a Sunday morning walk by the sea and smell the sea. Ten years ago, people were afraid to go out at night. Now there is night life again. We are going in the right direction. This is how Naples used to be,” Schifano said.

Wrong, says 78-year-old philosopher and social commentator Luigi Campagnone, a lifelong Naples resident: “I never go out anymore because I cannot bear to see Naples. It’s unlivable.

“People go into raptures about the music, sky, sun, sea, sand. Lies, all lies. I define Naples as a collective infection. Two weeks after G-7 it will be exactly the same mess as before,” said Campagnone over coffee at his home recently. “I was here during the Naples uprising in the war, when kids leaped bravely on German tanks and some got killed. Three days later, the Americans came, and these same kids were selling their sisters and mothers to new soldiers. It’s a stupid, diabolical city.”

In context, says Neapolitan sociologist Domenico De Masi, Naples is no stranger to big international gatherings--or the fact that little lasting good usually survives them. The Roman emperor Tiberius held ancient-world versions of G-7s on the island of Capri off the Naples coast, he says.

“Greeks, Romans, Renaissance princes, 16th- and 17th-Century kings have always met here--it’s an excuse for a party,” De Masi said.

Others are less skeptical. Surveying clean streets blessedly free of cars one morning this week, Fulvio Milone, a longtime newspaper correspondent based in Naples, says nobody expects the G-7 overhaul to be the opening salvo in a social revolution. “Rather,” he said, “it could be a trampoline toward renewal.”

Bassolino and Improta recognize that they are sailing against the wind of both history and expectation, but they are not discouraged. “We will change the cultural and civic image of the city,” Bassolino promises.

Improta, whose security forces have been nearly doubled to about 11,000 for G-7, says crime rates have fallen dramatically in the past two years, 50% in some cases.

One works project that is finished is the big, new Secondigliano prison in the northern reaches of the city. Its denizens include not only former political grandees snared by corruption investigations, but also Camorra bosses corralled by better police work and more vigorous judicial prosecution.

“We still have a long way to go, but I think we have turned the corner,” said Improta.

From their different perspectives, Bassolino and Improta both point to what appears to be a changing perception about the role of government in Naples: Some grudging respect appears to be growing among a people who have historically mocked and undermined authority.

“I think Bassolino is trying to say that Neapolitans have their dignity and can take on formal commitments,” sociologist De Masi said. “There are those magic moments in which a group of people becomes open to change. . . . Bassolino seems to offer some hope--a little brake in a fatal descent.”

Neapolitan jewels long obscured by urban blight are beginning to reassert themselves. On Sunday now, cars are banned on some seaside roads, and Neapolitans gather along them to promenade. A private volunteer group arranged to open about 200 often-closed churches, museums, monuments and archeological sites one weekend this spring. They drew nearly 1 million people.

Recently, inspecting the city’s often-shut archeological museum--one of the world’s best--Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi noted that he himself had never been there before.

Naples will never be Florence. But it will always be Naples, a vibrant and gritty port whose people long ago learned that survival, tolerance and hospitality are three of life’s great virtues.

Fingers crossed, the reforming mayor of a reawakening city quietly tells visitors that, in recent months, Italian and foreign tourists have begun to return to Naples for the first time in many years.

Times Rome Bureau researcher Janet Stobart contributed to this report.