Where the road to Herculaneum leaves the bay and its seafaring life,
it enters, between the walls of lofty, fly-blown houses, a world of
maccaroni haunted by foul odors, beggars, poultry, and insects. There
were few people to be seen on the street, but through the open doors
of the lofty fly-blown houses we saw floury legions at work making
maccaroni; grinding maccaroni, rolling it, cutting it, hanging it
in mighty skeins to dry, and gathering it when dried, and putting it
away. By the frequency of the wine-shops we judged that the legions
were a thirsty host, and by the number of the barber-surgeons' shops,
that they were a plethoric and too full-blooded host. The latter shops
were in the proportion of one to five of the former; and the artist
who had painted their signs had indulged his fancy in wild excesses of
phlebotomy. We had found that, as we came south from Venice, science
grew more and more sanguinary in Italy, and more and more disposed to
let blood. At Ferrara, even, the propensity began to be manifest on
the barbers' signs, which displayed the device of an arm lanced at
the elbow, and jetting the blood by a neatly described curve into a
tumbler. Further south the same arm was seen to bleed at the wrist
also; and at Naples an exhaustive treatment of the subject appeared,
the favorite study of the artist being to represent a nude figure
reclining in a genteel attitude on a bank of pleasant greensward, and
bleeding from the elbows, wrists, hands, ankles, and feet.