CHAPTER I

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NAPLES

[Illustration: BAY OF NAPLES FROM THE VOMERO]

NAPLES

PAST AND PRESENT

BY

ARTHUR H. NORWAY

AUTHOR OF "HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS IN DEVON AND CORNWALL"

"PARSON PETER," ETC.

WITH TWENTY-FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR

BY MAURICE GRIEFFENHAGEN

SECOND EDITION

METHUEN & CO.

36 ESSEX STREET W.C.

LONDON

_First Published_ _May 1901_

_Second Edition_ _June 1905_

TO MY FRIENDS

BARON AND BARONESS MARIO NOLLI

OF NAPLES, AND OF ARI, IN THE ABRUZZI

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK

IN TOKEN THAT THOSE WHO ARE DIVIDED

BY BOTH SEA AND LAND

MAY YET BE UNITED IN THEIR LOVE

FOR ITALY

PREFATORY NOTE

I have designed this book not as a guide, but as supplementary to a

guide. The best of guide-books--even that of Murray or of

Gsell-Fels--leaves a whole world of thought and knowledge untouched,

being indeed of necessity so full of detail that broad, general views

can scarcely be obtained from it.

In this work detail has been sacrificed without hesitation. I have

omitted reference to a few well-known places, usually because I could

add nothing to the information given in the handbooks, but in one or

two cases because the considerations which they raised lay too far

from the thread of my discourse.

I have thrown together in the form of an appendix such hints and

suggestions as seemed likely to assist anyone who desires wider

information than I have given.

A. H. N.

EALING, 1901

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I PAGE

THE APPROACH TO NAPLES BY THE SEA 1

CHAPTER II

THE ANCIENT MARVELS OF THE PHLEGRAEAN FIELDS 21

CHAPTER III

THE BEAUTIES AND TRADITIONS OF THE POSILIPO, WITH SOME

OBSERVATIONS UPON VIRGIL, THE ENCHANTER 49

CHAPTER IV

THE RIVIERA DI CHIAIA, AND SOME STRANGE THINGS WHICH

OCCURRED THERE 68

CHAPTER V

THE ENCHANTED CASTLE OF THE EGG, AND THE SUCCESSION

OF THE KINGS WHO HELD IT 85

CHAPTER VI

THE BARBARITIES OF FERDINAND OF ARAGON, WITH CERTAIN

OTHER SUBJECTS WHICH PRESENT THEMSELVES IN STROLLING

ROUND THE CITY 101

CHAPTER VII

CHIEFLY ABOUT CHURCHES--WITH SOME SAINTS, BUT MORE

SINNERS 121

CHAPTER VIII

A GREAT CHURCH AND TWO VERY NOBLE TRAGEDIES 143

CHAPTER IX

VESUVIUS AND THE CITIES WHICH HE HAS DESTROYED--HERCULANEUM,

POMPEII, AND STABIAE 178

CHAPTER X

CASTELLAMMARE: ITS WOODS, ITS FOLKLORE, AND THE TALE OF THE

MADONNA OF POZZANO 226

CHAPTER XI

SURRIENTO GENTILE: ITS BEAUTIES AND BELIEFS 251

CHAPTER XII

CAPRI 273

CHAPTER XIII

LA RIVIERA D'AMALFI AND ITS LONG-DEAD GREATNESS 299

CHAPTER XIV

THE ABBEY OF TRINITA DELLA CAVA, SALERNO, AND THE RUINED

MAJESTY OF PAESTUM 327

APPENDIX 345

INDEX 357

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Bay of Naples from the Vomero _Frontispiece_

PAGE

Pozzuoli 24

Pozzuoli 32

Columns in the Serapeon Pozzuoli 35

Castle of Baiae 44

Fishing Stage, Santa Lucia 54

Strada di Chiaia 68

Porta Mercantile 72

Boats at the Mergellina 76

Gradoni di Chiaia 78

Naples 90

Castle of St. Elmo 97

Old Town 113

Bay of Naples from San Martino 116

The Church of the Carmine 156

In the Strada di Tribunali 168

Card-players 188

A Slum 195

In the Strada di Tribunali 209

Porta Capuana 220

Roof top, Modern Naples 259

Courtyard in the Old Town 268

Unloading Boats, Bay of Naples 284

Naples: on the modern side, looking towards Capri from the

Corso Vittorio Emmanuele 288

Gossip 334

NAPLES

PAST AND PRESENT

CHAPTER I

THE APPROACH TO NAPLES BY THE SEA

On a fine spring morning when the sun, which set last night in gold

and purple behind the jagged mountain chain of Corsica, had but just

climbed high enough to send out shafts and flashes of soft light

across the opalescent sea, I came up on the deck of the great steamer

which carried me from Genoa to watch for the first opening of the Bay

of Naples. It was so early that the decks were very quiet. There was

no sound but the perpetual soft rustle of the wave shed off from the

bow of the steamer, which slipped on silently without sense of motion.

The Ponza Islands were in sight, desolate and precipitous, showing on

their dark cliffs no house nor any sign of life, save here and there a

seabird winging its solitary way round the crags and caverns of the

coast. Far ahead, in the direction of our course, lay one or two dim,

cloudy masses, too faint and shadowy to be detached as yet from the

grey skyline which bounded the crystalline sparkles of the sea. And

so, having strained my eyes in vain effort to discover the high peak

of Ischia, I fell to wondering why any man who is at liberty to

choose his route should dream of approaching this Campanian coast

otherwise than by the sea.

For Naples is the city of the siren--"Parthenope," sacred to one of

those sea nymphs whose marvellous sweet singing floated out across the

waves and lured the ancient seamen rowing by in their strange old

galleys, shaped after a fashion now long since forgotten, and carrying

merchandise from cities which thirty centuries ago and more were

"broken by the sea in the depths of the waters" so that "all the

company in the midst of them did fail." How many generations had the

line of sailors stretched among whom Parthenope wrought havoc before

Ulysses sailed by her rock, and saw the heaps of whitening bones, and

last of all men heard the wondrous melodies which must have lured him

too, but for the tight thongs which bound him to the mast! So

Parthenope and her two sisters cast themselves into the sea and

perished, as the old prediction said they must when first a mariner

went by their rock unscathed. But her drowned body floated over the

blue sea till it reached the shore at Naples, and somewhere near the

harbour the wondering people built her a shrine which was doubtless

rarely lovely, and is mentioned by Strabo, the old Greek geographer,

as being shown still in his day, not long after the birth of Christ.

There is now but little navigation on these seas compared with the

relative importance of the shipping that came hither in old days.

Naples is in our day outstripped by Genoa, and hard run, even for the

goods of southern Italy, by Brindisi and Taranto. The trade of Rome

goes largely to Leghorn. If Ostia were ever purged of fever and

rebuilt, or if the schemes for deepening the Tiber so as to allow

large vessels to discharge at Rome were carried out, we might see the

port of Naples decline as that of Pozzuoli did for the selfsame

reason, the broad facts which govern the course of trade being the

same to-day as they were three thousand years ago. Even now it is

rather the convenience of passengers and mails than the necessities of

merchants which take the great ocean steamers into Naples. It is not

easy for men who realise these facts to remember that the waters of

the Campanian coast have more than once been ploughed by the chief

shipping of the world. Far back in the dawn of history, where nothing

certain can be distinguished of the deeds of men or nations, the

presence of traders, Phoenician and Greek, can be inferred upon

these shores. The antiquity of shipping is immense and measureless.

Year by year the spade, trenching on the sites of ancient

civilisation, drives back by centuries the date at which man's

intellect began to gather science; and no one yet can put his finger

on any point of time and say, "within this space man did not

understand the use of sail or oar." The earliest seamen of whom we

know anything at all were doubtless the successors of many a

generation like themselves. It cannot be much less than a thousand

years before Christ was born when Greek ships were crossing the sea

which washed their western coasts bound for Sicily and the Campanian

shores. Yet how many ages must have passed between the days when the

Greeks first went afloat and those in which they dared push off toward

the night side of the world, where the mariners of the dead went to

and fro upon the sea, where the expanse of ocean lay unbroken by the

shelter of any friendly island, and both winds and currents beat

against them in their course, or even by coasting up and down the

Adriatic set that dreaded sea between them and their homes! Superstition,

hand in hand with peril, barred their way, yet they broke through! But

after what centuries of fearful longing,--curiosity, and love of salt

adventure struggling in their hearts with fear of the unknown, till

courage gained the mastery and the galleys braved the surf and smoke

of the _planctae_, the rocks that struck together, "where not even do

birds pass by, no, not the timorous doves which carry ambrosia for

Zeus, but even of them the sheer rock ever steals one away, and the

father sends in another to make up the number."

Then the rowers saw the rock of Scylla and her ravening heads thrust

forth to prey on them, while beneath the fig tree on the opposite crag

Charybdis sucked down the black seawater awfully, and cast it forth

again in showers of foam and spray. These fabled dangers passed, there

remained the Island of the Sirens, which legend placed near Capri,

where Ulysses passed it when he sailed south again; and so the

wonderful tradition of the Sirens dominates the ancient traffic of

mankind upon these waters, and the harbour where the shrine of

Parthenope was reflected in the blue sea claims a lofty place in the

realms whether of imagination or of that scholarship which cares

rather for the deeds of men than for the verbal emendations of a text.

The shrine has gone. The memory remains only as a fable, whose dim

meaning rests on the vast duration of the ages through which men have

gone to and fro upon these waters. But here, still unchanged, is the

pathway to the shrine--the Tyrrhene Sea, bearing still the selfsame

aspect as in the days when the galleys of AEneas beat up the coast from

Troy, and Palinurus watched the wind rise out of the blackening west.

Since those old times the surface of the land has changed as often

almost as the summer clouds have swept across it. Volcanic outbursts

and the caprice of many masters have wrought together in destruction;

so that he who now desires to see what Virgil saw must cheat his eyes

at every moment and keep his imagination ever on the stretch. Even the

city of mediaeval days, the capital of Anjou and Aragon, is so far lost

and hidden that a man must seek diligently before he cuts the network

of old streets, unsavoury and crowded, in which he can discover the

lanes and courtyards where Boccaccio sought Fiammetta, or the walls on

which Giotto painted.

But here, upon the silent sea, at every moment fresh objects are

coming into sight which have lain unchanged under dawn and dusk in

every generation. Already the volcanic cone of Monte Epomeo towers out

of Ischia, a menace of destruction which not twenty years ago

fulfilled itself and shook the town of Casamicciola in a few seconds

into a mere rubble heap. It is a sad thing still to stroll round that

once smiling town. Ruins project on every side. The cathedral lies

shattered and untouched; there is not enough money in the island to

rebuild it. The visitors, to whom most of the old prosperity was due,

have not yet recovered from the attack of nerves brought on by the

earthquake. But there remains wonderful beauty at Casamicciola and

elsewhere on Ischia; the "Piccola Sentinella" is an excellent hotel;

some day, surely, the lost ground will be recovered, and prosperity

return.

The new town lies gleaming on the flat at the foot of the great

mountain. Far away towards my right Capri, loveliest of islands,

floats upon the sea touched with blue haze; and there, stretching

landwards, is the mountain promontory of Sorrento, Monte St. Angelo

towering over Monte Faito, and the whole mass dropping by swift, steep

slopes to the Punta di Campanella, the headland of the bell, whence in

the old days of corsairs the warning toll swung out across the sea as

often as the galleys of Dragut or of Barbarossa hove in sight, echoing

from Torre del Greco, Torre Annunziata, and many another watchtower of

that fair and wealthy coast, while the artillery of the old castle of

Ischia, answering with three shots, gave warning of the coming peril.

Even now I can see that ancient castle, standing nobly on a rock that

seems an island, though, in fact, it is united with the land by a low

causeway; and it comes into my mind how Vittoria Colonna took refuge

from her sorrows there, spending her widowhood behind the battlements

on which she had played with her husband as a child. Doubtless the two

children listened awestruck on many a day to the cannon-shots which

warned the fishers. Perhaps Vittoria may even have been pacing there

when, as Brantome writes, a party of French knights of Malta came

sailing by with much treasure on their ship, and hearing the three

shots took them arrogantly for a salute in honour of their flag, and

so, thinking of nothing but their dignity, made a courteous salute in

answer, and kept on their way. Whereupon the spider Dragut, who at

that moment was sacking Castellammare, just where the peninsula joins

the mainland, driving off as captive all those men or women who had

not fled up into the wooded hills in time, swooped out with half a

dozen galleys, and added the poor knights and their treasure to his

piles of plunder.

Many tales are told about that castle, so near and safe a refuge from

the turbulence of Naples. But already it is dropping astern, and the

lower land of Procida usurps its place, an island which in the days

of Juvenal was a byword of desolation, though populous and fertile in

our own. The widening strait of water between the low shore and the

craggy one played its part in a tale as passionate, though not so

famous, as that of Hero and Leander. For Boccaccio tells us that

Gianni di Procida, nephew and namesake of a man whose loyalty popular

tradition will extol until the end of time, loved one Restituta

Bolgaro, daughter of a gentleman of Ischia; and often when his love

for her burnt so hotly that he could not sleep, used to rise and go

down to the water, and if he found no boat would plunge into the black

sea, swim the channel, and lie beneath the walls of Restituta's house

all night, swimming back happy in the morning if he had but seen the

roof which sheltered her. But one day when Restituta was alone upon

the shore she was carried off by pirates out of Sicily, who, wondering

at her beauty, took her to Palermo and showed her to King Federigo,

who straightway loved her, and gave her rooms in his palace, and

waited till a day might come when she would love him. But Gianni armed

a ship and followed swiftly on the traces of the captors, and found at

last that Restituta was in Palermo. Then, led by love, he scaled the

palace wall by night and crossed the garden in the dark and gained the

poor girl's chamber, and might have borne her off in safety had not

the King, suspecting that all was not well, come with torches in the

darkness and discovered Gianni and cast him into prison, where he lay

till he was sentenced to be taken out and burned at the stake in the

Piazza of Palermo together with the girl who had dared to flout the

affection of a king. And burned they would have been had not the great

Admiral Ruggiero di Loria chanced to pass that way as they stood

together at the stake and known Gianni as the nephew of that great

plotter who conceived the massacre of the Sicilian Vespers, whereby

the crown of Sicily was set upon the head of Aragon. Straightway he

hastened to the King, who forthwith released Gianni and gave him

Restituta, and sent both home laden with rich gifts to Ischia, where

they lived happy for many a year, till they were overcome at last by

no worse fate than that which is reserved for all humanity whether

glad or sorry.

No man can prove this story true; but it is at least so happily

conceived as to be worth credence, like others told us by the same

immortal writer, who, though a Florentine, knew Naples well, and

doubtless wove into the _Decameron_ many an anecdote picked up in the

taverns which survives now in no other form. For there was no Brantome

to collect for us the gossip of the days when Anjou drove out

Hohenstaufen from this kingdom; and if we would know what happened on

the coast in those tragic and far-distant times we must take the tales

set down by Boccaccio for what they may be worth.

I am not sure that Gianni, the hot-passioned lad who used to swim this

strait by night, does not emerge out of the darkness of the centuries

more clearly than his greater uncle--that mighty plotter who, using

craft and guile where he had no strength, is fabled to have built up a

conspiracy and engineered a massacre which has no parallel save in the

St. Bartholomew. Yet it is not to be judged without excuse like that

foul act of cold-blooded treachery, but was in some measure an

expiation of intolerable wrongs, as may be discovered even now by

anyone who will study the plentiful traditions of that March night

when eight thousand French of every age and either sex perished in

two hours, slain at the signal of the vesper bell ringing in Palermo.

That bloodshed split the kingdom of the two Sicilies in twain. It did

more: it scored men's minds with a memory so deep that even now there

is no child in Sicily who could not tell how the massacre began. To

men then living it appeared a cataclysm so tremendous that they must

needs date time from it, as from the birth of Christ or the foundation

of the world. In documents written full four centuries later the

passage of the years is reckoned thus; and in Palermo to this day the

nuns of the Pieta sing a litany on the Monday after Easter in memory

of the souls of the French who perished on that night of woe. So

memorable was the deed ascribed by tradition to the plotter, Giovanni

di Procida, lord of that little island which is already slipping past

me out of sight.

The steamer slips on noiselessly as ever. Procida falls away into the

background, with its old brown town clinging to the seaward face of a

precipitous cliff; and I can look down the Bay of Baiae, where in old

Roman days every woman who went in a Penelope came out a Helen, and

almost catch a glance at Cumae, where Daedalus put off his weary wings

after that great flight from Crete which no man since has contrived to

imitate. There lies the Gate of Hell down which AEneas plunged in

company with the Sibyl; and round it all the land of the Phlegraean

fields, heaving and steaming with volcanic fires. There too is the

headland of Posilipo, where Virgil dwelt and where he wrought those

enchantments concerning which I shall have much to say hereafter; for

though Virgil is a poet to the world at large, he is a magician in the

memory of the Neapolitans. And who shall say their tradition is not

true?

Next, sweeping round towards my right hand in a perfect curve, comes

the shore of the Riviera di Chiaia, once a pleasant sandy beach,

broken midway by the jutting rock and island on which stood the church

and monastery of San Lionardo. It is long since church and island

disappeared, and few of those gay Neapolitans who throng the Via

Caracciolo, that fine parade which now usurps the whole seafront from

horn to horn of the bay, could even point out where it stood. In these

days the whole shore is embowered in trees and gardens skirting the

fine roadway; and there stands the wonderful aquarium, which has no

equal in the world, and where the wise will spend many afternoons and

yet leave its marvels unexhausted.

My eyes have travelled on to the other horn of this fine bay, and are

arrested by what is surely the most picturesque object in all Naples.

For at this point the spine or backbone of land which breaks the

present city into two, leaving on the right the ancient town and on

the left the modern, built along the pretty shore of which I have just

spoken,--at this point the ridge sweeps down precipitously from the

Castle of St. Elmo on the height, breaks off abruptly in the sheer

cliff of the Pizzo-Falcone, "The Falcon's Beak," and then sends

jutting out into the sea a small craggy island which bears an old

hoary castle low down by the water's edge. On this grey morning the

sea breaks heavily about the black reef on which the castle stands,

and the walls, darkened almost to the colour of the rock itself,

assume a curious aspect of vast age, such as disposes one to seek

within their girth for some at least among the secrets of old Naples.

Nor will the search be vain; for this hoary fortress is Castel

dell'Uovo, "The Castle of the Egg," so called, if we may lend an ear

to Neapolitan tradition, because Virgil the Enchanter built it on an

egg, on which it stands unto this hour, and shall stand until the egg

is broken. Others again say that the islet is egg-shaped, which it is

not, unless my eyes deceive me; and of other explanations I know none

at all, so that any man who can content himself with neither of these

may resign himself to contemplate an unsolved puzzle for as long as he

may stay in Naples.

Apart, however, from the wizard Virgil and the idle tale of the

enchanted egg, there is something so arresting in the sight of this

ancient castle thrust out into the sea that I cannot choose but see in

it the heart of the interest of Naples. It is by far the oldest castle

which Naples owns, and as its day came earliest so it passed the

first. Castel Nuovo robbed it of its consequence, both as a royal

dwelling and a place of arms; and now the noisy, feverish tide of life

that beats so restlessly from east to west through the great city

finds scarce an echo on the silent battlements of the Egg Castle,

where Norman monarchs met their barons and royal prisoners languished

in the dungeons. Inside the walls there is nothing to attract a

visitor but memories. Yet those gather thick and fast as soon as one

has crossed the drawbridge, and there is scarce one other spot in

Naples where a man who cares for the past of the old tragic city can

lose himself more easily in dreams.

But again the steamer turns her course a little, and suddenly the

Castel dell'Uovo slips out of sight, the old brown city passes across

my line of vision like a picture on the screen of a camera oscura when

the lens is moved, and I am gazing out beyond the houses across the

wide rich plain out of which the vast bulk of Vesuvius rears itself

dark and tremendous, towering near the sea. There are other mountains

far away, encircling the plain like the walls of some great

amphitheatre, but they are beyond the range of volcanic catastrophe,

and stood unmoved while the peaks of Vesuvius were piled up and blown

away into a thousand shapes, sometimes green and fertile, the haunt of

wild boars and grazing cattle, at others rent by fire and subterranean

convulsion so as to give reality to the most awful visions which the

imagination of mankind has conceived concerning the destruction which

befell the sinful cities of the plain.

The plain is the Campagna Felice, a happy country, notwithstanding the

perpetual menace of the smoking mountain, which time after time has

convulsed the fields, altered the outline of the coast, and

overwhelmed cities, villages, and churches. Throughout the last

eighteen hundred years a destruction like to that which befell the

cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii has been overtaking hamlets and

buildings of less note. The country is a palimpsest. What is now

written on its surface is not a tithe of what was once inscribed

there. In 1861 an earthquake at Torre del Greco made a fissure in the

main street. Those who dared descend it found themselves in a church,

long since buried and forgotten. So it is in every direction

throughout the Campagna Felice. The works of man are overwhelmed in

countless numbers by the ejections from Vesuvius, and the green fields

of beans and lupins which stretch so pleasantly across the wide spaces

between the Sarno and the Sebeto cover the ruins of innumerable homes.

It seems strange that a land exposed to such great and constant perils

should be densely populated. The coast is lined with towns, all

shining in the sun, and the first graceful slopes of Vesuvius itself

are studded with white buildings, planted here and there in apparent

oblivion of the floods of red-hot lava which have so often forced

their way down the inclines towards the sea. There must be many

dwellers in those towns who saw the lava break out from new vents in

1861 among the cultivated fields. Yet the fields are cultivated still,

and in time of eruption the peasants will continue working in the

vineyards within a few hundred yards of the crawling stream, knowing

well how often its progress is arrested by the cooling of the fiery

mass. There is, moreover, the power of the saints to be considered.

How often has not San Gennaro arrested the outbreaks, and brought

peace to the frightened city! On the Ponte della Maddalena he stands

unto this day, his outstretched arm, pointing to the mountain with a

gesture drawn from the mimic language of the people, bids it "Halt!"

And then the fertility of the volcanic soil! Vesuvius, if a rough

friend, is a kindly one. He may drive the people to their prayers from

time to time, which is no great harm! but, if a balance be struck, his

benefits are as many as his injuries, and the peasants, looking up, as

they hoe their fields, at the coiling wreaths of copper-coloured smoke

which issue from the cone, are content to take their chance that death

may some day meet them too in a cloud of scorching ashes as it did

those who dwelt in Pompeii so very long ago.

The great steamer is already near her moorings. The western or newer

half of Naples is hidden by the hill, and I have before my eyes only

the densely peopled ancient city, a rabbit warren of tortuous and

narrow streets, unsavoury and not too safe, yet full of interest if

not of beauty, and possessing a picturesqueness which is all their

own. One salient feature only arrests the eye wandering over this

intricate mass of balconies and house-fronts--the handsome steeple of

the Carmine, a church sorely injured and defaced, but still abounding

in romance. For there lies the boy-king Conradin, slaughtered by

Charles of Anjou in the market-place just outside; and there, too, the

fisherman Masaniello met his end, after a trick of fortune had made

him ruler of Naples for eight days. There is no church in all the city

so full of tragedies as this, which was founded by hermits fleeing

from Mount Carmel twelve hundred years ago, and which ever since has

been close to the heart of the passionate and fierce-tempered people

dwelling round its walls.

I do not doubt there was a time when travellers, arriving at Naples by

sea, found themselves greeted by persons of aspect more pleasing than

those who accost the astonished pilgrim of to-day. There was surely an

age when the lazzaroni were really picturesque, when they lay on the

warm sand in the sunshine, while the bay resounded with the chant of

fishermen, the light-hearted people beguiling their unbounded leisure

with the tuneful strains of "Drunghe, drunghete," of "Tiritomba," or

even the too familiar "Santa Lucia." It cannot be that travellers lied

when they wrote of the amazing picturesqueness of the Neapolitans,

that they painted brown purple, and put on their spectacles of rose as

they approached the land! I wish I had those spectacles; for indeed

the aspect of the quays and wharves of Naples is not attractive, while

the people who throng the boats now pushing off towards the steamer

are just such a crowd of expectant barterers as one may see wherever a

great steamer touches. In the stern of the first stands a naked boy,

brown and lithe. His accomplishment is to dive for pence, which he

does with singular dexterity, cramming all the coins as he catches

them into his mouth, which yet is not so full as to impede his

bellowing like a bull in the effort to attract more custom. Did I

complain of the lack of music? I was hasty; for there comes a second

boat, carrying two nymphs whose devotion to the art has caused them to

forget the use of water, unless it be internally. One has a hoarse

voice, the other a shrill one; and with smiles and antics they pipe

out the cheapest of modern melodies, chanting the eternal "Funicoli,

Funicola," till one wishes the writer of that most paltry song could

be keelhauled, or taught by some other process of similar asperity how

grave is the offence of him who casts one more jingle into the hoarse

throats of the street musicians of to-day. If I flee to the further

side of the steamer and stop my ears from the cacophony, my face is

tickled by the foliage of huge nosegays thrust up on the ends of poles

from a boat so low in the water that I cannot see it. The salt air

grows heavy with the scent of violets and roses. None of my senses is

at peace.

But in another hour the landing was happily accomplished. The

recollection of the mob through which one struggled to the quay, the

noise, the extortion, and the smells had faded away into the limbo of

bad dreams, and I was free to go whither I would in the small portion

of the day remaining and taste whichever sight of Naples pleased me

first. There is nothing more bewildering to a stranger than to be

turned loose in a great city with which he is imperfectly acquainted.

I looked east towards the Carmine; but the handsome campanile lay far

from the centre of the city. I gazed before me, up a long straight

street which cleft the older city with a course as straight as any bow

shot, the house fronts intricate with countless balconies and climbing

plants. It is the Strada del Duomo; but I knew it to be new through

all its lower length, and it leads into the very heart of the dense

old town, where, lost in a maze of vicoli, I could never grasp the

broad and general aspect of this metropolis of many kings.

At that moment I remembered the hill on which the Castle of St. Elmo

stood; and turning westwards along the street which borders the quays,

I came out in no great distance on the Piazza del Municipio, bordered

on the further side by the walls and towers of Castel Nuovo, that old

royal castle of Anjou and Aragon, which saw so many tragedies wrought

within its walls, and holds some still, as I shall tell in time, for

the better persuasion of any who may be disposed to set down the

accusations of history as distant and vague charges, which cannot

nowadays be brought to the test of sight. Before my eyes rises the

white priory of San Martino topping the hillside high above the town,

and it is to that point that I am hastening ere the gold light of the

afternoon fades off the bay, and the grey shades of the early dusk rob

the islands of their sunset colours. It is a long climb up to the

belvedere of the low white building. The Neapolitans believed in days

not long distant that vast caverns of almost immeasurable extent

branched out laterally from the dungeons of St. Elmo and ran down

beneath the city even to Castel Nuovo, making a secret communication

between the garrisons of the two fortresses on which the security of

Naples most depended. The story is not true. The vaults of St. Elmo do

not reach so far, and are not more extensive than the circuit of the

castle. But indeed these hillsides on which Naples lies are pierced so

frequently by caverns, so many tales are told of grottoes known and

unknown in every spine of rock, that the wildest stories of mysterious

passages have found ready credence; and there are doubtless many

children, old and young, in Naples who believe that one may walk

beneath the earth from St. Elmo to Castel Nuovo no less firmly than

they credit the existence of vast caverns filled with gold and jewels

lying underneath Castel dell'Uovo, guarded for ever from the sight of

man by the chafing of the waves.

Naples presents us with a strange blend of romance and common

sense--the modern spirit, practical and useful, setting itself with

something like the energy of the old Italian genius towards the

gigantic task of acquiring the arts of government, and turning a

people enslaved for centuries into one which can wield the hammer of

its own great destinies. "L'Italia e fatta," said Massimo d'Azeglio,

"ma chi fara ora gli Italiani?" It was the question of a patriot, and

it may be that it is not wholly answered yet. The most careless of

observers can see that some things still go wrong in Italy, that the

Italians are not yet wholly made, and it is the easiest as it is the

stupidest of tasks to demonstrate that thirty years of freedom have

not taught the youngest nation what the oldest took eight centuries to

learn. It galls me to hear the supercilious remarks dropped by

strangers coming from a country where serious difficulties of

government have not existed in the memory of man, the casual wisdom of

critics who look around too carelessly to note the energy with which

one by one the roots of evil are plucked up, and the refuse of the

long tyranny cleared away. I am not writing a political tract; but I

say once for all that the recent history of Italy can show more

triumphs than its failures; and the day will surely come when the

indomitable courage of her rulers shall purge the country of those

cankers which for centuries ate out her manhood.

"We do not serve the dead--the past is past.

God lives, and lifts his glorious mornings up

Before the eyes of men awake at last,

Who put away the meats they used to sup,

And down upon the dust of earth outcast

The dregs remaining of the ancient cup,

Then turn to wakeful prayer and worthy act."

Dear prophetess and poet, who once from Casa Guidi sang so bravely of

the future, kindling the love of Italy in many a heart where it has

since grown into a passion,--it is coming true! It may be that

fulfilment loiters, but Heaven does not disappoint mankind of hopes so

great as these. They are of the sort with which God keeps troth. The

child who went by singing "O bella liberta, o bella!" does not flute

so sweetly now he is a man, but his hands have taken hold, and his

heart is set on the greatness of his motherland.

The sun lies thick and hot in the Toledo, that long and crowded street

which is the chief thoroughfare of Naples. It is hotter still when,

having toiled as far as the museum, I turn off along the Corso

Vittorio Emmanuele, which winds along the hillside, giving at each

turn grand views across the town and harbour towards Capri shining in

the west. A little way down the Corso is a flight of steps, long,

tortuous and steep, yet forming much the pleasantest approach to the

white priory whither every visitor to Naples goes once at least

towards the hour of sunset. As one mounts, the city drops away, and

the long semicircle of hills behind it rises into sight, green rounded

hills, bearing on their summits palms which stand out sharp and dark

against the sky. With every convolution of the stairs one sees more

and more of the great plain out of which Vesuvius rises,--the Campagna

Felice, a purple flat, stretching from the base of the volcano as far

as that mountain chain which marks the limit of its power. Out of the

mountains comes a fresh cool wind, and all the city sparkles in the

sun.

So I went up among the housetops till at length I reached an open

space bounded by a rampart whence one looked down upon the town. On

the further side a gateway gave admission to a courtyard, and that

again to a corridor of the old priory, through which a guide led me

with vain pointings toward the chamber containing the "Presepe," a

vast model of the scene of the Nativity. Mary sits upon a height under

a fragment of an old Greek building; while all the valleys are filled

with the procession of the kings. Their goods are being unloaded from

the troops of asses which bore them. In the meadows sheep are grazing,

cows are being milked; and the sky is filled with choirs of angels. It

is an ingenious, theatrical toy, but not half so pretty as the sunset,

which I came to see. So, with some indignation of my guide, I pressed

on through an exquisitely cool arcaded courtyard of white marble, its

centre occupied by a garden wherein palms and roses grew almost

profuse enough to hide the ancient draw well, with its chain and

bucket lying as if they waited for some brother told off by the Prior

to draw water for the rest. In one corner of this courtyard a doorway

gives admission to the belvedere, a little chamber with two windows,

whereof one looks towards the plain behind Vesuvius, and the other

gives upon Posilipo.

As I stepped out on the belvedere the sun was dropping fast towards

Posilipo, and wide flashes of gold were spreading over all the

cup-shaped bay. Far out at sea, between the two horns of the gulf, the

dark peaks of Capri caught the light, and presently the glow blazed

more brightly in the west, and all the shores where Sorrento lies

began to quiver softly in the sunset. Vesuvius was grim and black; a

pillar of dark smoke mounted slowly from its summit, and stretched

across the paling sky like a banner floating defiantly from some tall

citadel. Deep down beneath me lay the white city, a forest of domes

and house-fronts which seemed at first impenetrable. But ere long the

royal palace detached itself from the other buildings, and I could

distinguish Castel Nuovo, with its old round towers, looking very dark

and grim, while on the left a forest of domes and spires rose out of

the densely crowded streets which have known so many masters and have

allured conquerors from lands so very far away. A faint brown haze

crept down from the hilltops, the first touch of evening chilled the

air, but the seaward sky was marvellously clear, and the wide bay

gleamed with gold and purple lights.