the vast palaces now heaps of brick and shattered marble! What
glare of fires, and roar of popular tumult, and wail of pestilence
and famine, have come sweeping over the wild plain where nothing is
now heard but the wind, and where the solitary lizards gambol
unmolested in the sun!
The train of wine-carts going into Rome, each driven by a shaggy
peasant reclining beneath a little gipsy-fashioned canopy of sheepskin,
is ended now, and we go toiling up into a higher country
where there are trees. The next day brings us on the Pontine
Marshes, wearily flat and lonesome, and overgrown with brushwood,
and swamped with water, but with a fine road made across them,
shaded by a long, long avenue. Here and there, we pass a solitary
guard-house; here and there a hovel, deserted, and walled up. Some
herdsmen loiter on the banks of the stream beside the road, and
sometimes a flat-bottomed boat, towed by a man, comes rippling idly
along it. A horseman passes occasionally, carrying a long gun
cross-wise on the saddle before him, and attended by fierce dogs;
but there is nothing else astir save the wind and the shadows,
until we come in sight of Terracina.
How blue and bright the sea, rolling below the windows of the inn
so famous in robber stories! How picturesque the great crags and
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points of rock overhanging to-morrow's narrow road, where galleyslaves
are working in the quarries above, and the sentinels who
guard them lounge on the sea-shore! All night there is the murmur
of the sea beneath the stars; and, in the morning, just at
daybreak, the prospect suddenly becoming expanded, as if by a
miracle, reveals - in the far distance, across the sea there! -
Naples with its islands, and Vesuvius spouting fire! Within a
quarter of an hour, the whole is gone as if it were a vision in the
clouds, and there is nothing but the sea and sky.
The Neapolitan frontier crossed, after two hours' travelling; and
the hungriest of soldiers and custom-house officers with difficulty
appeased; we enter, by a gateless portal, into the first Neapolitan
town - Fondi. Take note of Fondi, in the name of all that is
wretched and beggarly.
A filthy channel of mud and refuse meanders down the centre of the
miserable streets, fed by obscene rivulets that trickle from the
abject houses. There is not a door, a window, or a shutter; not a
roof, a wall, a post, or a pillar, in all Fondi, but is decayed,
and crazy, and rotting away. The wretched history of the town,
with all its sieges and pillages by Barbarossa and the rest, might
have been acted last year. How the gaunt dogs that sneak about the
miserable streets, come to be alive, and undevoured by the people,
is one of the enigmas of the world.
A hollow-cheeked and scowling people they are! All beggars; but
that's nothing. Look at them as they gather round. Some, are too
indolent to come down-stairs, or are too wisely mistrustful of the
stairs, perhaps, to venture: so stretch out their lean hands from
upper windows, and howl; others, come flocking about us, fighting
and jostling one another, and demanding, incessantly, charity for
the love of God, charity for the love of the Blessed Virgin,
charity for the love of all the Saints. A group of miserable
children, almost naked, screaming forth the same petition, discover
that they can see themselves reflected in the varnish of the
carriage, and begin to dance and make grimaces, that they may have
the pleasure of seeing their antics repeated in this mirror. A
crippled idiot, in the act of striking one of them who drowns his
clamorous demand for charity, observes his angry counterpart in the
panel, stops short, and thrusting out his tongue, begins to wag his
head and chatter. The shrill cry raised at this, awakens half-adozen
wild creatures wrapped in frowsy brown cloaks, who are lying
on the church-steps with pots and pans for sale. These, scrambling
up, approach, and beg defiantly. 'I am hungry. Give me something.
Listen to me, Signor. I am hungry!' Then, a ghastly old woman,
stretching out one hand, and scratching herself all the way with
the other, and screaming, long before she can be heard, 'Charity,
charity! I'll go and pray for you directly, beautiful lady, if
you'll give me charity!' Lastly, the members of a brotherhood for
burying the dead: hideously masked, and attired in shabby black
robes, white at the skirts, with the splashes of many muddy
winters: escorted by a dirty priest, and a congenial cross-bearer:
come hurrying past. Surrounded by this motley concourse, we move
out of Fondi: bad bright eyes glaring at us, out of the darkness
of every crazy tenement, like glistening fragments of its filth and
putrefaction.
A noble mountain-pass, with the ruins of a fort on a strong
eminence, traditionally called the Fort of Fra Diavolo; the old
town of Itri, like a device in pastry, built up, almost
perpendicularly, on a hill, and approached by long steep flights of
steps; beautiful Mola di Gaeta, whose wines, like those of Albano,
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have degenerated since the days of Horace, or his taste for wine
was bad: which is not likely of one who enjoyed it so much, and
extolled it so well; another night upon the road at St. Agatha; a
rest next day at Capua, which is picturesque, but hardly so
seductive to a traveller now, as the soldiers of Praetorian Rome
were wont to find the ancient city of that name; a flat road among
vines festooned and looped from tree to tree; and Mount Vesuvius
close at hand at last! - its cone and summit whitened with snow;
and its smoke hanging over it, in the heavy atmosphere of the day,
like a dense cloud. So we go, rattling down hill, into Naples.
A funeral is coming up the street, towards us. The body, on an
open bier, borne on a kind of palanquin, covered with a gay cloth
of crimson and gold. The mourners, in white gowns and masks. If
there be death abroad, life is well represented too, for all Naples
would seem to be out of doors, and tearing to and fro in carriages.
Some of these, the common Vetturino vehicles, are drawn by three
horses abreast, decked with smart trappings and great abundance of
brazen ornament, and always going very fast. Not that their loads
are light; for the smallest of them has at least six people inside,
four in front, four or five more hanging on behind, and two or
three more, in a net or bag below the axle-tree, where they lie
half-suffocated with mud and dust. Exhibitors of Punch, buffo
singers with guitars, reciters of poetry, reciters of stories, a
row of cheap exhibitions with clowns and showmen, drums, and
trumpets, painted cloths representing the wonders within, and
admiring crowds assembled without, assist the whirl and bustle.
Ragged lazzaroni lie asleep in doorways, archways, an
d kennels; the
gentry, gaily dressed, are dashing up and down in carriages on the
Chiaji, or walking in the Public Gardens; and quiet letter-writers,
perched behind their little desks and inkstands under the Portico
of the Great Theatre of San Carlo, in the public street, are
waiting for clients.
Here is a galley-slave in chains, who wants a letter written to a
friend. He approaches a clerkly-looking man, sitting under the
corner arch, and makes his bargain. He has obtained permission of
the sentinel who guards him: who stands near, leaning against the
wall and cracking nuts. The galley-slave dictates in the ear of
the letter-writer, what he desires to say; and as he can't read
writing, looks intently in his face, to read there whether he sets
down faithfully what he is told. After a time, the galley-slave
becomes discursive - incoherent. The secretary pauses and rubs his
chin. The galley-slave is voluble and energetic. The secretary,
at length, catches the idea, and with the air of a man who knows
how to word it, sets it down; stopping, now and then, to glance
back at his text admiringly. The galley-slave is silent. The
soldier stoically cracks his nuts. Is there anything more to say?
inquires the letter-writer. No more. Then listen, friend of mine.
He reads it through. The galley-slave is quite enchanted. It is
folded, and addressed, and given to him, and he pays the fee. The
secretary falls back indolently in his chair, and takes a book.
The galley-slave gathers up an empty sack. The sentinel throws
away a handful of nut-shells, shoulders his musket, and away they
go together.
Why do the beggars rap their chins constantly, with their right
hands, when you look at them? Everything is done in pantomime in
Naples, and that is the conventional sign for hunger. A man who is
quarrelling with another, yonder, lays the palm of his right hand
on the back of his left, and shakes the two thumbs - expressive of
a donkey's ears - whereat his adversary is goaded to desperation.
Two people bargaining for fish, the buyer empties an imaginary
waistcoat pocket when he is told the price, and walks away without
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a word: having thoroughly conveyed to the seller that he considers
it too dear. Two people in carriages, meeting, one touches his
lips, twice or thrice, holding up the five fingers of his right
hand, and gives a horizontal cut in the air with the palm. The
other nods briskly, and goes his way. He has been invited to a
friendly dinner at half-past five o'clock, and will certainly come.
All over Italy, a peculiar shake of the right hand from the wrist,
with the forefinger stretched out, expresses a negative - the only
negative beggars will ever understand. But, in Naples, those five
fingers are a copious language.
All this, and every other kind of out-door life and stir, and
macaroni-eating at sunset, and flower-selling all day long, and
begging and stealing everywhere and at all hours, you see upon the
bright sea-shore, where the waves of the bay sparkle merrily. But,
lovers and hunters of the picturesque, let us not keep too
studiously out of view the miserable depravity, degradation, and
wretchedness, with which this gay Neapolitan life is inseparably
associated! It is not well to find Saint Giles's so repulsive, and
the Porta Capuana so attractive. A pair of naked legs and a ragged
red scarf, do not make ALL the difference between what is
interesting and what is coarse and odious? Painting and poetising
for ever, if you will, the beauties of this most beautiful and
lovely spot of earth, let us, as our duty, try to associate a new
picturesque with some faint recognition of man's destiny and
capabilities; more hopeful, I believe, among the ice and snow of
the North Pole, than in the sun and bloom of Naples.
Capri - once made odious by the deified beast Tiberius - Ischia,
Procida, and the thousand distant beauties of the Bay, lie in the
blue sea yonder, changing in the mist and sunshine twenty times aday:
now close at hand, now far off, now unseen. The fairest
country in the world, is spread about us. Whether we turn towards
the Miseno shore of the splendid watery amphitheatre, and go by the
Grotto of Posilipo to the Grotto del Cane and away to Baiae: or
take the other way, towards Vesuvius and Sorrento, it is one
succession of delights. In the last-named direction, where, over
doors and archways, there are countless little images of San
Gennaro, with his Canute's hand stretched out, to check the fury of
the Burning Mountain, we are carried pleasantly, by a railroad on
the beautiful Sea Beach, past the town of Torre del Greco, built
upon the ashes of the former town destroyed by an eruption of
Vesuvius, within a hundred years; and past the flat-roofed houses,
granaries, and macaroni manufactories; to Castel-a-Mare, with its
ruined castle, now inhabited by fishermen, standing in the sea upon
a heap of rocks. Here, the railroad terminates; but, hence we may
ride on, by an unbroken succession of enchanting bays, and
beautiful scenery, sloping from the highest summit of Saint Angelo,
the highest neighbouring mountain, down to the water's edge - among
vineyards, olive-trees, gardens of oranges and lemons, orchards,
heaped-up rocks, green gorges in the hills - and by the bases of
snow-covered heights, and through small towns with handsome, darkhaired
women at the doors - and pass delicious summer villas - to
Sorrento, where the Poet Tasso drew his inspiration from the beauty
surrounding him. Returning, we may climb the heights above Castela-
Mare, and looking down among the boughs and leaves, see the crisp
water glistening in the sun; and clusters of white houses in
distant Naples, dwindling, in the great extent of prospect, down to
dice. The coming back to the city, by the beach again, at sunset:
with the glowing sea on one side, and the darkening mountain, with
its smoke and flame, upon the other: is a sublime conclusion to
the glory of the day.
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That church by the Porta Capuana - near the old fisher-market in
the dirtiest quarter of dirty Naples, where the revolt of
Masaniello began - is memorable for having been the scene of one of
his earliest proclamations to the people, and is particularly
remarkable for nothing else, unless it be its waxen and bejewelled
Saint in a glass case, with two odd hands; or the enormous number
of beggars who are constantly rapping their chins there, like a
battery of castanets. The cathedral with the beautiful door, and
the columns of African and Egyptian granite that once ornamented
the temple of Apollo, contains the famous sacred blood of San
Gennaro or Januarius: which is preserved in two phials in a silver
tabernacle, and miraculously liquefies three times a-year, to the
great admiration of the people. At the same moment, the stone
&nb
sp; (distant some miles) where the Saint suffered martyrdom, becomes
faintly red. It is said that the officiating priests turn faintly
red also, sometimes, when these miracles occur.
The old, old men who live in hovels at the entrance of these
ancient catacombs, and who, in their age and infirmity, seem
waiting here, to be buried themselves, are members of a curious
body, called the Royal Hospital, who are the official attendants at
funerals. Two of these old spectres totter away, with lighted
tapers, to show the caverns of death - as unconcerned as if they
were immortal. They were used as burying-places for three hundred
years; and, in one part, is a large pit full of skulls and bones,
said to be the sad remains of a great mortality occasioned by a
plague. In the rest there is nothing but dust. They consist,
chiefly, of great wide corridors and labyrinths, hewn out of the
rock. At the end of some of these long passages, are unexpected
glimpses of the daylight, shining down from above. It looks as
ghastly and as strange; among the torches, and the dust, and the
dark vaults: as if it, too, were dead and buried.
The present burial-place lies out yonder, on a hill between the
city and Vesuvius. The old Campo Santo with its three hundred and
sixty-five pits, is only used for those who die in hospitals, and
prisons, and are unclaimed by their friends. The graceful new
cemetery, at no great distance from it, though yet unfinished, has
already many graves among its shrubs and flowers, and airy
colonnades. It might be reasonably objected elsewhere, that some
of the tombs are meretricious and too fanciful; but the general
brightness seems to justify it here; and Mount Vesuvius, separated
from them by a lovely slope of ground, exalts and saddens the
scene.
If it be solemn to behold from this new City of the Dead, with its
dark smoke hanging in the clear sky, how much more awful and
impressive is it, viewed from the ghostly ruins of Herculaneum and
Pompeii!
Stand at the bottom of the great market-place of Pompeii, and look
up the silent streets, through the ruined temples of Jupiter and
Isis, over the broken houses with their inmost sanctuaries open to
the day, away to Mount Vesuvius, bright and snowy in the peaceful
distance; and lose all count of time, and heed of other things, in