toward regions of rarest beauty—Amalfi, Majori, Cetara, Salerno.
In our happy thoughts the smooth, white Corniche road lies like a
delicate thread along the green mountain-sides,—those Mountains of the
Blest, whose rounded brows home the nightingale, whose shoulders are
terraces of fruits of the tropics and whose storied feet rest eternally
on white beaches that glisten in the blue waters of a matchless bay.
A memory this, compounded of pebbly, curving shores sweeping around
soft, distant headlands; lustrous groves of pomegranates and oranges;
picturesque fishing hamlets of little stone houses nestled away in
deep, shady inlets; the patter and shuffle of barefooted women trotting
steadily through the dust under great hampers of lemons; sunburned
workmen singing homeward through the dusk; the shouts and laughter
of bare-headed fishermen drawing their red-bottomed boats up on the
shore; and the low, contented singing of your Neapolitan coachman
who, as twilight falls, looks long and dreamily out to sea and no
longer cracks his whip over the weary little Barbary ponies that are
drawing you up the dusty heights toward the cool rose-pergola of the
Cappuccini. Visitors, reluctantly departing, will never forget this
land “where summer sings and never dies,” and must ever after feel with
Longfellow:—
“Sweet the memory is to me
Of a land beyond the sea,
Where the waves and mountains meet,
Where, amid her mulberry-trees,
Sits Amalfi in the heat,
Bathing ever her white feet
In the tideless summer seas.”
We distinguish Torre Annunciata, abreast of our speeding boat, by
the evil redolence of its swarming fish markets and the boisterous
shouting of its many children at _mora_; and, in striking contrast, one
thinks of grim Pompeii, farther inland,—“la città morta,”—hushed and
prostrate in moonlit desolation. At the neighboring Torre del Greco we
can fancy the coral fishers, who may not yet have left for the season’s
diving off Sicily, to be smoking black cheroots along the wharves and
planning lively times when they market their coral and Barbary ponies
in November. Certainly there is little to suggest the peace that
Shelley found here. Few shores are more dramatic than those of this
Vesuvian Campagna Felice. Resina hangs gloomily over the entrance to
the entombed Herculaneum, and Portici lights up but half-heartedly,
abashed that all her royal Bourbon palaces should now be housing only
schoolboys. About both villages and for miles inland any one may see
the wrath of Vesuvius in dismal evidence in twisted lava rock of
weird and sinister shapes. But there is a fullness of life on these
shores to-night, increasing as our boat advances; individual houses
multiply into villages, and villages overlap into a solid mass that
is Naples’s East End. We pick our way among the clustering boats, and
around long piers with little lighthouses at their ends, and presently
Luigi abandons his cheroot, stands up by the mast and shouts shrill and
mysterious hails, and shortly up we come to our landing at a flight of
dripping stone steps at the tatterdemalion Villa del Popolo, sea-gate
to the noisiest, dirtiest, most crowded (and so most characteristic)
section of all Naples. A passing of silver from me, from Luigi a
twisted smile and a regretful “buon riposo,”—the last, I fear, that I
shall ever hear from him,—and I take leave of my amiable companion for
the sputtering lights and exciting diversions of the swarming Carmine
Gate and Mercato. From the tide-washed Castello dell’ Ovo to the prison
heights of Sant’ Elmo and the charming cloisters of San Martino, and
from the huts of the Mergellina fishermen to far beyond where I am
standing on the eastern front of the city, all Naples is sparkling with
lights and humming with an intense and multi-phased tumult.
Lucifer falling from Paradise must have experienced some such
contrast as those who exchange the serene evening beauty of the Bay
of Naples for the odors, uproar, and confusion of the Mercato. But
does not the saying run, “See Naples and die”? And to miss visiting so
characteristic a district by night is almost to fail to see “Naples”
at all; though it may, perhaps, appear at first glance to assure the
“and die.” The quay of Santa Lucia is the only other section that even
attempts to rival this in preserving unimpaired the “best” traditions
of Neapolitan uproar and picturesque squalor. And it must be remembered
that one’s interest in this city is like that felt for a pretty,
bright, and amiable child who is, at the same time, a very ragged
and dirty one. Life, as it is found in the Mercato, is exuberance
_in extenso_; the most complete conception possible of a “much ado
about nothing.” It is an irrelevant tumult in which matter-of-fact
inconsequences are expressed with an incredibly disproportionate use
of shoulders, fingers, and lungs. An inquiry as to the time of day
is attended with a violence of gesticulation adequate to convey the
emotions of Othello slaying Desdemona; an observation on the weather
involves a pounding of the table and a wild flourish of arms like the
expiring agony of an octopus. Even work itself seems half play in its
accompaniment of romantic posturing, eloquent and profuse gestures, and
continual over-bubbling of merriment, quarrels, and song. All this is
of the very essence of the Mercato—hopelessly tattered and unkempt,
artlessly unconscious of its picturesque rags, and altogether so
frankly frowzy and disheveled as to become, upon the whole, positively
charming. No one equals the Neapolitan in expressing the full force of
the Scotch proverb, “Little gear the less care.”
In appearance the Mercato is a rabbit-warren of tortuous chasms lined
with dowdy structures in every advanced stage of decrepitude. Even its
lumbering churches of Spanish baroque rather add to than detract from
this effect. No money is squandered on upkeep. The cost of initial
construction is here like an author’s definitive edition,—final.
Little, cramped balconies, innocent of paint, blink under the
flapping of reed-made shades, shop signs are illegible from dirt and
discoloration, and the weathered house-fronts shed scales of plaster
as snakes do skins. The very skies are overcast with clouds of other
people’s laundry. Dead walls flame with lurid theatre posters, unless
warned off by the “post-no-bills” sign—the familiar “è vietata l’
affissione.” Cheap theatres are completely covered with life-size
paintings illustrating scenes from the play for the week. Lottery signs
abound. Certain window placards, by their very insistence, eventually
become familiar and homelike; as, for instance, the “first floor to
let,” the omnipresent “si loca, appartamento grande, 1^o primo,” for
which one comes in time to look as for a face from home. Religion
contributes a garish and tawdry decorative feature in the little gaudy
shrines on street corners and house-fronts, where, in a sort of shadow
box covered with glass, candles sputter before painted saints. The
government monopolies, salt and tobacco, the Siamese Twins of Italy,
are inseparable with their ever-lasting “Sale e Tabacchi” signs and
dwell together everywhere on a common and friendly footing, like the
owls, snakes, and prairie dogs in Kansas.
Curiosity fairly plunges a man into so promising a field, and Adventure
stalks at his elbow. He finds the narrow, squalid streets brimming
with a restless, noisy, nervous swarm. Picturesque qualities are
brought out in the play of feeble street lamps and the dejected,
half-hearted lights of dingy, cavernous shops and eating-places. A
_comme il faut_ costume for men appears to be limited to trousers
and shirt, with the latter worn open to the belt. The women affect
toilettes of a general dirty disarray which their laudable interest
in the life around frequently leads them absent-mindedly to arrange
in the quasi-retirement of the doorways, the front sill itself being
reserved for the popular diversion of combing the hair of their spawn
of half-naked children. To traverse an alley and avoid stepping on some
rollicking youngster _in puris naturalibus_ is vigorous exercise of
the value of a calisthenic drill. Still, it is possible to escape the
babies, but scarcely the fakirs and beggars. The fakir has odds and
ends of everything to sell and teases for patronage for love of all
the saints; one even awaits the Oriental announcement, “In the name of
the Prophet, figs!” The beggars, of course, are worse; crawling across
your path and dragging themselves after you to display their physical
damages, often self-inflicted, in quest of a _soldo_ of sympathy.
Express compassion in other than monetary terms and you get it back
instanter, along with a dazing assortment of vitriolic maledictions. As
the visitor’s patience gives way under the strain, it presently becomes
a very pretty question as to whose language is the most horrific, his
own or the beggar’s.
Women dodge through the streets carrying great bundles on their
heads, and pause from time to time for friendly greetings with frowzy
acquaintances tilting out of the upper windows where the laundry
hangs. It is from these mysterious upper windows that the housewife
in the morning lowers a pail and a bit of money wrapped in a piece of
newspaper, and bargains with the leather-lunged _padulano_ when he
comes loafing along beside his panniered donkey, crying his wares in
that “carrying voice” we all admire in our opera singers. Those are
the hours of trying domestic exaction, when the woman who does not
care for water in the milk watches the production of the raw material
with the cow standing at the doorway, or from the frolicsome goat
that nimbly ascends every flight of stairs to the very portal of the
combined kitchen and sleeping-room. But just now neighbors are shouting
conversations in those same upper windows, or calling down to the women
and girls who go shuffling along on the lava pavement below in wooden
sabots that look like bath-slippers—if, indeed, one has imagination
enough to think of bath-slippers in this vicinity.
Restless activity prevails. The most unnatural things are the statues,
chiefly because they do not move. One catches glimpses of them now
and then in the niches of the motley-marbled churches,—churches of
memories grave and gay, of Boccaccio’s first glimpse of Fiammetta, or
the slaying of the young fisherman-tribune, Masaniello, whom Salvator
Rosa delighted to paint. There is buying and selling, eating and
drinking. There are fruit stands and lemonade stalls and macaroni
stores and dejected little shops with festoons of vegetables pendent
from the smoky ceilings over whose home-painted counters weary women
await custom with babies in their arms. A brisk demand prevails for the
famous cheese-flavored biscuit called “pizza,” set with little powdered
fish, and those who desire can have a slice of devilfish-tentacle
for a _soldo_, which the purchaser dips in the kettle of hot water
and devours on the spot. Should this latter fare disagree with any
one, there will be access on the morrow to the miracle-working “La
Bruna”—the picture of the Virgin in the church of St. Mary of the
Carmine—which every child in Naples knows was painted by St. Luke;
and if that should fail, there is still the liquefying blood of St.
Januarius in the inner shrine of the cathedral.
Happily, the senses are more than four; and when seeing, smelling,
tasting, and feeling fail from over-exertion in the Mercato, still
hearing remains, so that one may study the Sicilian-like prattle of the
Neapolitan in all its ramifications from a whisper to a shriek. The
character of the man is expressed along with it; and thus one observes
that while a Piedmontese may be steady and industrious, a Venetian
gossipy and artistic, a Tuscan reserved and frugal, and a Roman proud
and lordly, the Neapolitan is merry, loquacious, generous, quarrelsome,
superstitious, and, too frequently, vicious. Thus the Mafia flourishes
with him, and the Camorra, an unbegrudged possession, is wholly his
own. His _vendetta_ may, perhaps, be mildly defended on the ground that
it is, at least, only a personal affair, and certainly less foolish
and reprehensible than the perennial jealousy of an entire people, as,
for example, the ancient feud between Florence and Siena, where an
inherited antagonism is still devoutly cherished and the old battle of
Montaperti refought with fury every morning. The Neapolitan had rather
spend that time on the lottery, dream his lucky numbers, look them up
in his dream-book, and go to the Saturday afternoon drawings with a
fresh and stimulating interest in life.
It is a nice question whether the Mercato loves singing best, or
eating—when it can get it. At night one inclines to the latter view.
There is a prodigious hubbub around all the open-air cooking-stoves and
in every smoky _trattoria_ and family eating-place. One would scarcely
hazard an opinion as to the number of bowls of macaroni, quantities
of _polenta_, and whole nations of snails and frogs that are being
devoured between appreciative gestures and puffs of cigarettes, and
washed down unctiously with _minestra_ soup and watery wines. But as
all these good people have probably breakfasted solely on dry bread and
black coffee, no one would think of begrudging them the delight they
are taking in dining so gayly and at so modest an outlay. If stricter
economy becomes necessary later, they will patronize the charity
“kitchens,” where soup, vegetables, meat, and wine are supplied at
cost, or perhaps some friend will give them a voucher and they will be
able to get it all for nothing.
So far as economy is concerned, they know all there is to be learned
on the subject. Several families of them will live in a single room;
and when that room is the damp, foul cellar they call _fondaco_, it
is something one does not care to think of a second time. When they
indulge in street-car riding they never neglect to take the middle
seats, because they are the cheapest. They know all about the market
for restaurant scraps and cigar stumps, where quotations are governed
by length.
Their extraordinary generosity to one another in times of distress is
almost proverbial. Misery both fascinates and touches them, perhaps
because it is never very far from their own doors. One morning I
shouldered my way into the middle of a strangely silent crowd and found
there a weeping crockery vender whose entire stock in trade had been
demolished by some mishap. It meant his temporary ruin, as could be
seen from the faces of the painfully silent and sympathetic audience.
The peddler seemed utterly stunned by his misfortune and lay on the
ground with his face in his arms. How touching it was to see the little
cup that some one had significantly set beside him, and to know that
every copper-piece that fell into it came from Poverty’s Very Self,
and bore the message, “It’s hard, poor fellow; we know how hard; but
here’s a little something—try again.”
But, as Thomas Hardy’s peasants say, it is time to go “home-along.”
Emerging from the noisy congestion of the Mercato the quiet and cool
of the water front is rather more than refreshing. The shipping
along the Strada Nuova stands out stately and picturesque, silvered
toward the moon and black in the dense shadows. Harbor lights sparkle
brightly under the solemn eye of the _molo_ lighthouse. The military
pier points a long, black finger warningly toward Vesuvius. Along the
Strada del Piliero one has pleasant choice of viewing on the left the
animated steamer piers and the secure anchorage where the great ships
for Marseilles and the Orient tug mildly at their hawsers, or seeing
on the right the ceaseless activity of swarming little streets, some
glowing in arbors of colored lights in celebration of a neighborhood
_festa_ and others observing a milder form of the same noisy programme
we have just forsaken. On the broad Piazza del Municipio the massive
and heavy-towered Castello Nuovo rears a sombre and storied front; and
farther along we pass the vast gray bulk of the famous Teatro San Carlo
and the lofty crossed-arcade of the Galleria Umberto I, and skirting
the corner of the Royal Palace enter the broad and brilliant Piazza del
Publiscito.
Contrasts again! What a different crowd from that of the poor Mercato.
Here is a groomed and well-conducted multitude that has come out
to enjoy its coffee and cigarettes as it listens to the band in the
pavilion on the western side or the open-air melodrama in that on the
east. And what a change in surroundings! Palaces and splendid churches
and public buildings, now. Solemn effigies of departed kings stare
stonily down from niches in the moonlit façades. A fringe of dark-eyed
boys lounges in indolent content around the coping of a fountain.
Hundreds of chairs and tables throng the open space, and we gladly rest
on one of them and experiment with Nocera and lemon juice, preparatory
to a good-night stroll up the Toledo. Enthusiasm prevails here, too.
Familiar melodies from the old operas are welcomed with storms of
applause and shouts of “Bravo” or “Bis”; whereupon the conductor bows
profound gratification and selects the music for the next number with a
face glowing with pride. Politeness abounds. The air is gracious with
“grazie,” and like expressions of courtesy. Ask a light for your cigar,
and the Neapolitan raises his hat and thanks you, supplies the match,
raises his hat and thanks you again, though all the while he has been
doing the service. Indeed, he seems capable of expressing more civility
by a touch of the hat than we can by completely doffing ours. One looks
about and concludes that the women are not particularly pretty and that
good dressing is a lost art with them. The men, as a rule, impress one
more favorably; though they are perversely inclined to spoil their good
looks by waxing their mustaches to a needle-point and trimming their
long beards square, like bas-reliefs of Assyrian kings.
It is nearly nine o’clock. I settle for my drink, leave the usual
centesimi with the bowing waiter, and plunge into the Broadway of
Naples, the renowned Toledo. Its map-name is Via Roma, but the “Toledo”
it has been for ages and as such it will remain to many Neapolitans
to the end of time. It is a busy and peculiar street. Rows of raised
awnings in two long, converging lines dress the feet of tall, dark
buildings that are studded with shallow iron balconies filled with
pots of flowers. It is comparatively narrow and with sadly straitened
sidewalks, but no street in Naples is so long or so continually used;
if it is followed, through all its changes of names, it will carry one
past the Museo and away up to the very doors of the summer palace at
Capodimonte, running due north all the way. Shops of all descriptions
line it, and it is thronged to the overflow of the sidewalks and the
hysterical abuse of distracted cabmen in the middle of the street. One
thinks of Paris when he sees the newspaper kiosks and the many bright
little stands decked out with fruit and gay trifles. The shops satisfy
any taste and any purse, for it is the common gathering-ground of
Naples.
It is vastly diverting to step aside and take note of the varieties
of people that troop along this brilliant highway. One sees jaunty
naval cadets from Leghorn; street dandies in white duck and tilted
Panamas; delivery boys in long blue blouses; tattered and bare-headed
bootblacks, with sleeves rolled up in business fashion; _artisti_ in
greasy coats; minor government officials in spectacles and rusty black,
trying to be rakish on four hundred dollars a year; sub-lieutenants,
with their month’s thirty dollars in hand, off to lose it at cards
at some _circolo_; swarthy _contadini_, the farmer “Rubes” of Italy,
having disposed of their poultry and their wives’ straw plaiting, are
here “doing the town”; groups of impoverished laborers from near-by
estates, lamenting with despairing gestures the impending failure of
the olive crop and charging it to ghosts and the evil eye; venders of
coral and tortoise shell; resplendent Carabinieri in pairs, fanning
themselves with their picturesque chapeaux; thrifty policemen pursuing
street peddlers, with an eye to a per centum of the fines; heroic
school-ma’ams, trying to forget that their miserable one hundred and
fifty dollars per annum is not likely to save them from such distress
as De Amicis tells of in his impressive “Romanzo d’ un Mestro”; that
odd military _rara avis_, the Bersagliero, pruning his glossy feathers
and looking quite equal to a trot to Posilipo and back; rioting
students, still unreconciled to having been “ploughed” at the recent
examinations, or having failed of the coveted _laurea_ degree when,
frock-coated and nervous, they discussed their theses unsuccessfully
before the jury of examiners; the pompous syndic of some commune;
priests in black cassocks and fuzzy, broad-brimmed hats; some prefect
returning from a many-coursed dinner, intent upon political _coups_
when the Government’s candidates come up for election; and, most
dejected and dangerous of all, the unemployed men of education, the
_spostati_, who will hunt government jobs while there is any hope and
then turn Socialists in Lombardy or Camorristi in Naples.
All along the way the soda fountains are sputtering and the “American
Bars” bustling. Bookstores fascinate here, as everywhere, and shining
leather volumes cry out for attention in the names of D’Annunzio, De
Amicis, Verga, and Fogazzaro. “Il Trionfo della Morta” lifts its slimy
head on every counter, side by side with the breezy Neapolitan stories
of Signora Serao. I always look curiously, but so far unsuccessfully,
to find a single bookstore window that does not contain that national
family table ornament, the “I Promessi Sposi” of Manzoni—the man for
whom Verdi composed the immortal Requiem Mass.
The Toledo tide runs northward for twenty blocks or so from where we
entered it, swings around the marble statue of Dante in the poet’s
piazza, and sets south again. At nine o’clock it begins to diverge
into the Strada di Chiaja, where there is music and promenading until
midnight.
Detecting this hint of the hour, I hail a venerable, loose-jointed cab
and bargain to be taken to my great, sepulchral, marble-floored room on
the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele. Now, cabs are cheap in Naples—after you
have paid a penalty of extortion for the first few days’ experience;
the real expense concerns the tailor as much as the cabman, in wear
and tear to clothing, trying to keep on the seat as you bounce along
over these volcanic-block pavements. This evening the cabman starts the
usual trouble by demanding threefold the legal fare, and as we work it
down to the tariff rate he insults me pleasantly and volubly, and I
try to do as well by him. At length we arrive at a quasi-satisfactory
basis; he shrugs contemptuous acceptance of my terms and I relax to the
point of conceding that his ponies are only a little worse-groomed than
the average and have, as far as I can see, all the mountainous brass
fixtures prescribed by custom, along with the coral horn that will save
me from the evil eye. So in I clamber. There is an infantry volley of
whip-cracking and a burst of wild invective at the obstructing crowd
and my head snaps back with sufficient force to keep me quiet to the
journey’s end.
On the pleasant little balcony of my room I dare not linger long
to-night. Well I know the busy programme of the departure on the
morrow. There will be a hurried stop for one last hasty look into the
Museo, with my luggage on the waiting cab outside; then, at my urgent
“Fa presto,” some reckless Jehu will rattle me over the stones to the
station; I will go down into my pocket again, in the old familiar way,
for seventy centesimi and an additional _pourboire_ to the cabby; and
twenty more for the spry old porter who will shoulder my grips into
the smoker; and the conductor will blow a horn, and the station bell
will ring, and the engineer will blow a whistle,—in their rare Italian
manner,—and the wheels will begin to squeak and groan, and I shall be
off for Rome.
And that is why a cigar lacks its usual solace on my balcony to-night;
the last I am to smoke in Good Night to this fascinating city. The
subdued hum of cheery, happy revelry, mingled with music and song,
drifts up from the bright squares and animated streets. The minutes
multiply as I dwell over the varying phases of old Vesuvius, or gaze
long and lingeringly over the star-lit Bay and all the romantic
playground of these grown-up children. One cannot bring himself to
say a definite farewell to this beautiful Region of Revisitors. With
a yearning hope of returning some other day, he moderates it to a
heartfelt Good Night and a tentative “till we meet again”:—
“A rivederci, Napoli! Benedicite e buon riposo!”
[Illustration]
HEIDELBERG
9 P.M. TO 10 P.M.
There stands an ancient castle
On yonder mountain height,
Where, fenced with door and portal,
Once tarried steed and knight.