CHIEFLY ABOUT CHURCHES
WITH SOME SAINTS, BUT MORE SINNERS
He who will see the churches of Naples must rise betimes, since
ancient custom closes them, for unknown reasons, from eleven o'clock
till four. Some say the poor man will get nothing for his pains. But
this is not so. It is indeed impossible that sacred buildings in a
city so old and famous as Naples should be devoid of interest. Here,
as elsewhere, they reflect the strong emotions of the citizens, their
sorrows and their aspirations; and though it is true that many a once
noble building has been daubed over with unmeaning ornament so freely
that one has trouble in discovering the pure taste with which the
builders wrought it, yet there is not a church in Naples which does
not set vibrating some chord either of beauty or poignant association.
No man can know the city or its people if he neglect the churches.
Past and present jostle each other perpetually there, and the effigies
of kings look down with fine grave eyes on the filthy peasant women
lifting up their children to kiss the feet of the dead Christ.
I have paused in the Strada Quercia opposite the Gesu Nuovo, once, as
I have said before, the palace of the San Severini, Princes of
Salerno. It was on that fine doorway that the Prince affixed the
inscription "An old sparrow does not enter into the cage," as he stood
beneath his ancestral gateway listening for the mule team with its
jingling bells which gave him his chance of life and safety. Perhaps
he waited under this old archway till he saw the beasts with
high-piled burdens coming up this way from the Mercato, and slipped in
silently among the swarthy knaves who led them, and so forth from the
city and away to France, where he hatched a scheme of vengeance which
destroyed the King, his enemy. The tinkling of those mule-bells as
they went up this narrow street in the night fell on no ears that
heeded them, yet in truth and earnest they were ringing the dirge of
the House of Aragon.
The interior of the Gesu is among those which arouse the citizens of
Naples to enthusiasm. It is not without grandeur, but over-decorated,
and on my mind it leaves but little sense of pleasure.
But from this archway where I stand I can see a church far older and
more interesting, one indeed which yields in fame to none in Naples.
It is Santa Chiara, whose dignified facade rears itself with twin
towers in the cool shadow of the courtyard, a name famous not only in
the ecclesiastical history of Naples, but in the legal also, having
given its title to a great body of state councillors which once met
here. It was the royal chapel of King Robert the Wise, third among the
monarchs of his house, and the only prosperous one out of the whole
number, though even he was pursued by sorrows, and by remorse too,
unless the constant suspicions of the centuries have erred.
For the tale goes that Robert knew better than any other the cause of
that sudden illness which carried off his elder brother, Charles
Martel, King of Hungary, when, towards the close of their father's
life, he came to Naples to arrange for the succession. Stories of
mediaeval poisonings are to be received with caution. No man who
glances round Naples to-day, swept and garnished as it has been by
advancing science, will find it hard to understand how swiftly disease
may--nay, must have struck in those crowded dirty streets six
centuries ago. Yet Robert was believed to have seized the throne by
fratricide. This Church of Santa Chiara was his atonement for the
crime, and by its high altar he sleeps for ever, robed as a monk and
throned as a king, beneath a monument of rare beauty, on which
Petrarch wrote the jingling epitaph, "Cernite Robertum, regem virtute
refertum."
"Chock full of virtue." Such was Petrarch's judgment on King Robert
dead, and doubtless he believed it, for the King's Court was splendid,
poets and scholars were held in honour, and Florentines especially.
Innocent or guilty, Robert ruled with a magnificence which makes his
reign the one bright spot in the troubled history of the Anjou
sovereigns; and posterity, which has little good to say of any of
them, remembers gratefully that he procured the laurel crown for
Petrarch, and gave his protection to that rake Boccaccio.
Let us go in and see his church. It is rectangular, and has no aisles,
while a long range of chapels upon either hand recall irresistibly the
quirk recorded of King Robert's son, when his father, proud of the
progress which the church was making, brought him in to admire its
fair proportions. The graceless lad gazed round, and it struck him
that the chapels were not unlike so many mangers. So when the King
pressed him for his opinion he remarked airily that the church
reminded him of a stable, whereupon the King said angrily, "God
grant, my son, that you be not the first to eat in those stalls!"
It was a prophetic speech, and one which must have returned many times
on the King's memory, for the historian Giannone assures us that the
first train of royal mourners who entered the new church were
following the coffin of this very lad, King Robert's firstborn, and
the hope of the realm.
The chief artist selected to adorn Santa Chiara with frescoes was no
other than the great Florentine, Giotto. Petrarch, Boccaccio, Giotto!
How the best brains of Tuscany flocked to Naples in those days! The
explanation of it was, apart from the natural attractions of a
splendid Court, that when Charles of Anjou defeated and slew Manfred,
he cast down by that act, and ruined throughout Italy, the party of
Ghibellines, the Emperor's men, of whom Manfred, son of a great
emperor, was naturally head. The Guelfs, the Pope's men, returned to
Florence, whence they had been banished, and straightway the closest
ties sprang up between the city on the Arno and the city of the Siren,
so close that the money-bags of Florence saved Charles from ruin at
least once.
So Tuscan poets and artists making the weary ten days' journey were
assured that on the shores of the blue gulf they would find
compatriots. Giotto came most gladly, and in the chapels of Santa
Chiara he painted many scenes of Bible story, all of which were daubed
over with whitewash by order of a Spanish officer a century and a half
ago. He complained that they made the church dark. There is indeed one
fresco left in the old refectory, now a shop. But Crowe and
Cavalcaselle do not accept it as the work of the same hand.
So here, in the large, cool church, Giotto painted for many a day,
alternating his labours perhaps with visits to Castel dell'Uovo, where
he painted the chapel, now a smoky, useful kitchen! King Robert loved
the man, so shrewd and cogent was his talk, and often came to chat
with him in one place or the other. "If I were you, Giotto, I should
stop painting now it is so hot," observed the King. "So should I, if I
were you," returned the artist dryly. And one day, wishing perhaps to
warn Robert by how frail a tenure he held his throne, he painted an
ass stooping under one pack saddle and looking greedily towards
another lying at his feet. Both saddles were adorned with crowns, and
the explanation was that the ass typified the Neapolitans, who thought
any other saddle better than the one they bore.
The most beautiful works of art in Santa Chiara, if not indeed in the
whole city, are the eleven small reliefs which run as a frieze along
the organ gallery. The scenes are from the life of St. Katherine,
martyr as well as saint. Dignified and tender, wrought with the rarest
delicacy, yet inspired with astonishing vigour, the graceful figures
are in white relief upon a ground of black. Very memorable and lovely
they appear, rebuking the corrupt taste which has begotten so much
base ornament in Naples.
Next to this frieze the interest of Santa Chiara lies in its
monuments, for in this Royal Chapel of Anjou many children of that
house were buried. The King himself assumed the frock of a Franciscan
monk before his death, craving for a peace which he did not find upon
his throne, and lies recumbent therefore, attired humbly in his habit,
while on a higher story of the monument he sits enthroned in all his
earthly splendour, gazing down upon his church with those keen
features which were characteristic of his house, the thin hooked
nose, not unlike a vulture's beak, so strangely like that which one
sees on the coins of his grandfather, murderer of Conradin. Uneasy
were the lives of all the monarchs of that house; their throne was set
in blood, and in blood it was perpetually slipping.
I left Santa Chiara by the northern door, which opens on a handsome
double staircase descending to the courtyard. In this wide space there
is fine shadow, and, by contrast with the noisy street outside, the
square is almost silent--a wondrous thing in Naples! Across the court,
beside the archway by which I entered, rises the noble campanile, once
planned on Gothic lines, but interrupted by the death of King Robert,
and finished two centuries and a half later by an architect who
transformed it into the classic style. There are mean houses all
around, occupied by people who care not one jot for King Robert or his
lost design.
Down the incline of the courtyard, where Boccaccio may well have
whispered guilty secrets to his Anjou princess, there loafs a hawker
with his donkey, his head thrown back, his brown hat tilted
picturesquely, bawling with iron throat the praises of his leeks and
cabbages, while the donkey creeps on cautiously over the broken
stones. In the Neapolitan speech he is the "padulano"--the man who
comes from the swamp, by which is meant the low plain of the Sebeto,
that muddy river which the railway to Castellammare crosses on the
outskirts of the city. On this marshy ground grow quantities of early
vegetables, and these it is which the padulano goes vaunting in his
brazen voice. He needs his strength of lung, for see! on the highest
story a woman has heard his bawling and comes out upon her balcony. At
that height they do not bargain in words, but in signs, the universal
language of the people. A few rapid passes of the hands and the
business is done. The woman lets down a basket by a rope; a few soldi
are jingling in the bottom; the basket goes up packed with green
stuff, and the padulano loafs on beside his patient donkey.
It is in these crowded quarters of the ancient city, these streets
through which the noisy, swarthy, dirty people were seething just as
they are now when Pompeii was a peopled town and the hawkers went up
and down the streets of Herculaneum,--it is here that one can grasp
most easily those peculiarities which fence off life in southern Italy
from that of other regions in the peninsula. Here is neither the
dignity of Rome nor the gracious charm of Tuscany, but another world,
a life more hot and passionate, more noisy and more sensuous, a
character strangely blended out of the blood of many nations--Greek,
Saracen, Norman, Spaniard--each of which contributed some burning drop
to the quick glow of the Campanian nature, making it both fierce and
languid, keen and subtle beyond measure when its interests are
engaged, capable of labour, but not loving it, easily depressed, and
when thwarted turning swiftly to the thought of blood. Here is
difficult material for the statesman. Never yet, in all its
vicissitudes of government, have these volcanic, elemental passions
been concentrated on any one great object. In the War of Independence
Milan had its "Cinque Giorni"; Venice, led by Manin, struck a glorious
blow at the oppressor; but Naples effected nothing till Garibaldi came
with armies from without.
How the street swarms with curious figures! I stand aside in the
opening of a side lane, and there goes past me a man carrying in one
hand a pail of steaming water, while on his other arm he has a flat
basket, containing the sliced feelers of an octopus, and a tray of
rusks. At the low price of a soldo you may choose your own portion of
the hideous dainty, warm it in the water and devour it on the spot.
Close upon his heels, bawling out his contribution to the deafening
noises of the streets, comes the "pizzajuolo," purveyor of a dainty
which for centuries has been unknown elsewhere. "Pizza" may be seen in
every street in Naples. It is a kind of biscuit, crisp and flavoured
with cheese, recognisable at a glance by the little fish, like
whitebait, which are embedded in its brown surface, dusted over with
green chopped herbs. I cannot recommend the dainty from personal
knowledge, but Neapolitan tradition is strongly in its favour.
The pizzajuolo goes off chanting down a sideway, and I, moving on a
little, still away from the Toledo and towards the older quarter of
the town, find that the street has widened out into a small square,
the Largo San Domenico, on the left of which stands the famous Church
of San Domenico Maggiore, second in beauty to none in Naples, and
perhaps less spoilt than many others by the hand of the restorer. The
bronze statue of the saint stands on a pillar in the square, looking
down on the palaces which were once the homes of Neapolitan nobles,
dwelling gladly in this centre point of the great city. Neither
cavaliers nor ladies live here now. The world of trade and civic
institutions has slipped into their abandoned palaces, and enjoys the
spacious rooms and frescoed ceilings which were designed for the
splendour of great entertainments.
On the southern side of the Largo, sloping towards the sea, runs the
Via Mezzocannone, which, if antiquaries are to be believed, was the
ditch skirting the city wall upon the western side in Greco-Roman
days. It is a lane worth following, though narrow and somewhat fetid,
for by it one may reach not only a certain very ancient fountain, the
Fontana Mezzocannone, which is of itself worth seeing, but also the
Church of San Giovanni Pappacoda, and by careful search may even find
the bas-relief of Niccolo Pesce, of whom I spoke at length in a former
chapter. But my course is eastwards. I turn up the steps, and enter
the Church of San Domenico Maggiore by a door admitting to its
southern transept.
The cool and silent chapel into which one steps is the most ancient
part of the church, massive and severe. The first glance reveals that
the building must have been in a high degree esteemed a place of
sepulture. The tombs are very numerous, and names of mark in the
history of Naples appear on every side. Through the vaulted doorway
leading to the main body of the church there stream long rolling
melodies, the crash of a fine organ played triumphantly, and the grand
music of a pure tenor voice, ringing high among the arches. The church
is full of kneeling figures, among which others stroll about with
little care for their devotions; while children, infinitely dirty,
waddle up and down untended, as if the show were for their amusement
only.
The chanting ceases, and the priests in their gorgeous vestments
stream down the altar steps towards the sacristy. I have come at an
unlucky moment! The sacristy at least will be closed till the priests
have done unrobing! But no! The hawk-eyed sacristan has marked down
the stranger, and hurries up obsequious and eager to detain me. I
cannot think of leaving without seeing the most interesting sight in
Naples--the coffins? "Si, sicuro! The very sarcophagi of all the
princes of the House of Aragon." "But they are in the sacristy," I
object, "and that is full of priests unrobing!" "Oh, you English, you
odd people," hints the sacristan, with a shrug. "What does that
matter?" If he does not care, why should I? And in another moment we
are in the sacristy.
Clearly the sacristan knew his ground, and has committed no breach of
manners; for among the crowd of ecclesiastics, young and old, which
fills the long panelled chamber, some jovial, some ascetic, many
chatting pleasantly, others resting on long seats, not one betrays the
least surprise at the intrusion of a tourist bent on sightseeing. High
dignitaries, arrayed like Solomon in his glory, make way courteously
as the sacristan draws me forward, and standing in the centre of the
vast apartment points out that the panelling ceases at half the height
of the walls, leaving a kind of shelf, on which lie, shrouded in red
velvet, to the number of five-and-forty, the coffins of the family of
Aragon, and the chief adherents of their house.
Here, taking what rest remorse allows him, is that Ferdinand who
trapped the barons in Castel Nuovo. His son Alfonso, who shared in
that and other infamies, is not here. He lies in Sicily, whither he
fled at the bidding of the furies who pursued him. But close by is his
son, the young King Ferdinand, whose chance of redeeming the fame of
his house was lost by death. And here is that luckless Isabella,
Duchess of Milan and of Bari, whose husband, Duke Giovanni Galeazzo
Sforza, was robbed of throne and life by his uncle Ludovic the Moor,
the man who, more than any other, was accountable for all the woes and
slavery of Italy. What bitter tragedies were closed when the scarlet
palls were flung over those old coffins! Here, too, is the dust of
the base scoundrel Pescara, archetype of treachery for all ages, at
least of public treachery. In private life his heart may have been
true enough, else how could his wife Vittoria Colonna have loved and
mourned him as she did? It is no new sight to see a woman lay great
love at the feet of a man who, on one view, is quite unworthy of it.
Her knowledge is the wider, and the account as she cast it may be the
truer. Why need we be puzzled that we cannot make our balance agree
with hers? How is it possible that we should?
On leaving San Domenico Maggiore, my desire is to pass into the Strada
Tribunali, the largest and most important of the three streets which
still cleave the city as they did in ancient days. The cross ways
turning up by San Domenico are devious and narrow, evil alleys
darkened sometimes by the high dead wall of a church or convent, at
others bristling with life, from the foul "bassi," the cellars which
are the despair of Neapolitan reformers, where ragged women crouch
over a chafing-dish of bronze, their only fire, and all the refuse is
flung out in the gutter, up to the high garrets where the week's wash
is hung out on a pole to dry. Not the freshest wind which blows across
the sea from Ischia can bring sweetness to these alleys, or expel the
wandering fever which on small inducement blazes to an epidemic and
slays ruthlessly. There were high hopes of Naples when the
"risanamento" was begun, that great scheme of clearance which was to
let in fresh air and sunshine among the rookeries. But already the new
tenements begin to be as crowded and as filthy as the old ones, and
the better era is soiled at its very outset. One cannot make a people
clean against its will. And then the sunshine! Week after week it is a
curse in Naples. The old narrow streets made shadow, the new wide
ones do not. Who knows whether the city will escape more lightly when
the next epidemic comes? God grant it may! For the days of cholera in
1884 were more awful than one cares to think about.
Among these devious lanes lies the Chapel of San Severo, a shrine
which everyone should visit, but one concerning which I have nothing
to say that is not set forth in the guide-books. Had it been the
Church of San Severo and San Sosio indeed, I could have told a grisly
tale of poisonings; but that lies far down towards the harbour and we
shall not pass it. At length I emerge in the narrow Street of
Tribunals, and turning eastwards behold it running straight and
crowded further than the eye will reach, a wilderness of bustling
figures, a maze of balconies and garrets, bright shops high piled with
fruit and vegetables, and butchers' stalls dressed with green boughs
to keep off the flies. At a corner stands the booth of a lemonade
seller, one of the most picturesque of all street merchants in this
busy city. His golden fruit is heaped up underneath a canopy which
shades it from the sun. Brown water-jars are reared among the fruit
and a jet of water sparkling up sheds a cool dewy spray over oranges
and lemons, dripping off their dark green leaves like dew. Many a
passer-by stops to look at the pretty sight, and the vendor's tongue
is never still, "A quatto, a cinque, a sei a sordo, 'e purtualle 'e
Palermo." In another month or two his stall will be far gayer, for the
figs and melons will come in, and the "mellonaro" will pass the day in
shouting "Castiellamare! che maraviglia! so' di Castiellamare! mellune
verace! cu' 'no sordo vevo e me lavo 'a faccia!" With a water-melon
one may drink and wash one's face at once! Who has not seen the street
urchins gnawing at a slice of crimson melon, while the water streams
out from among the black seeds, and does in truth make streaks of
cleanliness at least upon their faces; for not the widest mouth can
catch all the dripping juice.
In this ancient street one is at the heart of Naples. This strong
pulse of life, this eager, abounding vitality has throbbed along this
thoroughfare for more ages than one can count; and the sight on which
we look to-day, the seething crowd, the straight house-fronts, the
long street dropping to the east, is different in no essential from
that which has been seen by every ruler of the city--Spaniard,
Angevin, or Norman, yes, even by Greek and Roman governors--from days
when the fires of Vesuvius were a forgotten terror, and the streets of
Pompeii surged with just such another crowd as this. It is here, in
this most ancient Strada Tribunali, that the traveller should pause
before he visits the old buried cities. Here and here only will he
learn to comprehend how they were peopled; and only when he carries
with him in the eyes of memory the aspect of the cellars and the
shops, the crowded side streets and the pandemonium of noise, will he
succeed in discovering at Pompeii more than a heap of ruins, out of
which the interest dies quickly because his imagination has not gained
materials out of which to reconstruct the living city.
Neapolis, the old Greek city, was similar to Pompeii both in size and
construction. Its situation, too, was not dissimilar. It stood near
the sea, yet did not touch it, having a clear space of open ground
between its strand and walls, perhaps because the sea was an open
gateway into every town which stood upon it, though the nature of the
ground partly dictated the arrangement. There is no building, even in
the Strada Tribunali, which was standing when Pompeii was a city. The
oldest left is near the point at which we entered the street--to be
exact, it is at the angle of the Strada Tribunali and the Vico di
Francesco del Giudice--a tall brick campanile of graceful outline
which, in the confusion of the narrow street, one might most easily
pass unobserved. That is the only portion still remaining of the
church built by Bishop Pomponio, between the years 514 and 532; and
not only is it almost, if not quite the most ancient building now
extant in Naples, but it was the first of Neapolitan churches known to
have been dedicated to the Virgin, and it is thus especially sacred in
the eyes of the citizens.
Going eastwards still along this most interesting street I come ere
long to a great church upon my right where I must pause, for there are
associated with it closely the memories both of Petrarch and
Boccaccio. Now of these two men I confess to a strong preference for
the rake. He was a sinner, and a great one. But for that matter he was
a penitent in the end, and had he not found grace, it is for no man to
scorn him. Iniquitous though they be, I prefer the record of his warm
human passions to the dry spirituality of Petrarch; and to me one tale
out of the _Decameron_, with its high beat of joyous and exultant
life, is worth all the sonnets in which the poet of Avignon bewailed
the fact that the moon would not come down out of heaven.
No one who has turned over the works of Boccaccio is unacquainted with
the name of Fiammetta. She was of course not least among the seven
ladies of noble birth who met in the Church of Santa Maria Novella in
Florence on that Tuesday morning when the tales of the _Decameron_
begin. She, too, it was whose amorous musings Boccaccio published in a
book which bore her name. In fact her warm-blooded personality
pervades the writings of her lover; and it was in this Church of San
Lorenzo that he saw her first, as he tells us himself in the
_Filocopo_. The passage is well known to be autobiographical, though
occurring in a tale of pure, or rather impure imagination.
"I found myself," he says, "in a fine church of Naples, named after
him who endured to be offered as a sacrifice upon the gridiron. And in
it there was a singing compact of sweetest melody. I was listening to
the Holy Mass celebrated by a priest, successor to him who first girt
himself humbly with the cord, exalting poverty and adopting it. Now
while I stood there, the fourth hour of the day, according to my
reckoning, having already passed down the Eastern sky, there appeared
to my eyes the wondrous beauty of a young woman, come hither to hear
what I too heard attentively. I had no sooner seen her than my heart
began to throb so strongly that I felt it in my slightest pulses; and
not knowing why, nor yet perceiving what had happened, I began to say,
'Oime, what is this?'... But at length, being unable to sate myself
with gazing, I said, 'Oh, Love, most noble lord, whose strength not
even the gods were able to resist, I thank thee for setting happiness
before my eyes!'... I had no sooner said these words than the flashing
eyes of the lovely lady fixed themselves on mine with a piercing
light."
There was sin in that look, though not perhaps by the standard of
those days. It was an Anjou princess who won immortality in the Church
of San Lorenzo on that Holy Thursday when she was dreaming of nothing
but a lover--perhaps not even of so much as that. She was the Princess
Maria, natural daughter of King Robert the Wise, he whose tomb we saw
in the Church of Santa Chiara. She had a husband; but no one asks or
remembers his name. It is with Boccaccio that her memory is linked for
evermore. She was certainly of rare beauty. Her lover, than whom no
man ever wrote more delicately, tries to fix it for all time. "Hair so
blonde that the world holds nothing like it shadows a white forehead
of noble width, beneath which are the curves of two black and most
slender eyebrows ... and under these two wandering and roguish eyes
... cheeks of no other colour than milk." Item two lips, indifferent
red! Why, what a shiver it gives one to realise that not Boccaccio
himself can convey to us any real picture of his love! Even the magic
of his style, informed by all the passion of his burning heart, can
give us nothing better than a catalogue of charms such as any village
lover of to-day might write! The dead are dead; and no wizard can set
them before us as they lived.
Yet granting that, it is still the spirits of these lovers which haunt
the Church of San Lorenzo, filling the large old temple with a throb
of human passion to this hour. I saunter round endeavouring to fix my
mind on the details of the architecture, which are worth more notice
than they commonly receive from all save students. But it is useless.
Every time I raise my eyes I seem to see the subtle radiance of
sympathy flash across the church from the eyes of the princess,
stirring strange, uneasy feelings, born of young hot blood, and the
sensuous essence of the chanting heard in the restless days of spring.
The architecture may wait the coming of some cooler head. I stroll out
into the courtyard, full of memories of kings and poets and of Anjou
Courts, when the world was splendid, and life was full of colour, and
the city not more unhappy than it is to-day.
Among the letters of Petrarch is one written from the monastery
attached to this church. The poet lodged there during a visit to
Naples in 1342, after the death of King Robert, and gives a vivid
description of a great hurricane which struck the city on the 25th of
November in that year.
The storm had been predicted by a preacher, whose denunciation struck
such terror into the Neapolitans, easily stirred to religious
apprehensions, that ere dark a troop of women stripped half naked and
clasping their children to their breasts were rushing through the
streets from church to church, flinging themselves prostrate before
the altars, bathing the sacred images with tears, and crying aloud to
the Saviour to have mercy on mankind.
The panic spread from house to house. The city was alive with fear.
Petrarch, not untroubled by the general consternation, went early to
his chamber, and remained at his window till near midnight watching
the moon sail down a ragged angry sky until her light was blotted out
by the hills, and all the dome of heaven lay black.
"I was just falling asleep," he says, "when I was rudely awakened by
the horrible noise made by the windows of my room. The very wall
rocked to its foundation under the buffet of the gust. My lamp, which
burns all night, went out; in place of sleep the fear of death came
into the chamber. Every soul in the monastery rose, and those who
found each other in the turmoil of the night, exhorted one another to
meet death bravely.
"The monks who had been astir thus early for chanting Matins,
terrified by the trembling of the earth, came to my room brandishing
crosses and relics of the saints. At their head strode a prior named
David, a saint indeed, and the sight of them gave us a little
courage. We all descended to the church, which we found full of
people, and there passed the rest of the night, expecting every moment
that the city would be swallowed up, as foretold by the preacher.
"It would be impossible to depict the horror of that night in which
all the elements seemed to be unchained. Nothing can describe the
appalling crash of the storm wind, rain and thunder in one moment, the
roar of the furious sea, the swaying of the ground, the shrieks of the
people, who thought death here at every instant. Never was night so
long. As soon as day came near the altars were made ready, and the
priests attired themselves for Mass. At last the morning came. The
upper part of the town had grown more calm, but from the seafront came
frightful shrieks. Our fear turned into boldness, and we mounted on
horseback, curious to see what was going on.
"Gods! What a scene! Ships had been wrecked in the harbour, and the
shore was strewn with still breathing bodies, horribly mangled by
being dashed against the rocks--the sea had burst the bounds which God
set for it--all the lower town was under water. It was impossible to
enter the streets without risk of drowning. Around us we found more
than a thousand Neapolitan gentlemen who had come to assist, as it
were at the obsequies of their country. 'If I die,' I said to myself,
'I shall die in good company.'"
If we may trust the story told by Wading, a great historical authority
upon the deeds of the Franciscan Order, to which the monks of San
Lorenzo belonged, this same prior David, whose aspect Petrarch found
so comforting, was the instrument of a notable miracle on this
occasion, having kept the impious sea out of at least some part of
the city by boldly thrusting the relics of the saints in its track.
Petrarch does not mention this, and indeed if Prior David could do so
much he is to blame for not having done more, since he might as easily
have prevented all the damage done while he was chanting in his
church.
As for Petrarch, the storm impressed him so deeply that he told
Cardinal Colonna he had resolved never to go afloat again, even at the
Pope's bidding. "I will leave the air to birds, and the sea to
fishes," he observed very sagely; "I know that learned men say there
is no more danger on sea than on land, but I prefer to render up my
life where I received it. That is a good saying of the ancient writer,
'He who suffers shipwreck a second time has no right to blame
Neptune.'"
Are we not growing a little tired of churches? There are so many in
this city, and in the next chapter I shall have to dwell long upon the
Carmine, or rather on its manifold associations. Well, no great harm
will be done if we pass by a good many of these temples; but one must
not be left unmentioned, namely the cathedral, which we have almost
reached. A few yards from San Lorenzo, the Strada del Duomo cuts
across the old Decumanus Major at right angles, and if we descend it a
little way towards the sea we have before us the fine front of the
cathedral.
It will be expected of me here that in lieu of copying from Gsell-Fels
all the interesting facts about the date of the building, describing
the ancient fane of Santa Restituta which has already witnessed
fourteen centuries, or detailing the arrangement of the chapels where
so much of the noblest ever born in Naples lies mouldering into
dust,--it is expected of me, I suppose, that I shall repeat once more
the oft-told tale of the liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro,
that miracle and portent which brings luck to the city if it happens
speedily, and is a presage of woe when it is delayed. We have heard
the story all our lives. But no book on Naples is complete without it,
and I will therefore take the description by Fucini, which has at any
rate the advantage of being little known in England, to which I may
add that it is the work of one who might very truly say what he did
not know of Naples, at least in his own day, was not knowledge.
"In the church," says Fucini, "the crowd was dense. Around the altar
crowded pilgrims, male and female, shouting, laughing, weeping,
chewing prayers and oranges.... In the midst of deep silence begins
the moving function. The officiating priest holding up to the people
the vase, not unlike a carriage lamp, inspects it carefully, and
beginning to twirl it in his hands, cries out with a stentorian voice,
'It is hard, the blood is hard!' At that fatal announcement the people
break out into cries most pitiful. The pilgrims weep, some even are
like to faint. The saint is slow. The miracle delays, the cries and
tears redouble. A group of peasant women who stand near me pour out
these prayers, 'Faccela, faccela, la grazia, San Gennarino mio bello!'
And if the priest still shook his head they broke out again, 'It is
hard! O, quanto ci mette stamattina, San Gennarino mio benedetto. Ah
faccela, faccela, questa divina grazia, faccela, faccela, San
Gennarino bello, bello, bello!'
"The pilgrims went on chanting, the people crowded round the chapel.
In the nave a powerful preacher was relating the life and glories of
the saint. The noise of voices rose or fell as the priest signified
that the commencement of the miracle was still far off, or gave hopes
of its speedy consummation.
"At last, when the suspense had lasted nine-and-twenty minutes, we saw
the priests and those spectators who were nearest to them fix their
eyes more intently on the vase, with beckonings and signs, as if to
say, 'Perhaps--a minute more--I almost think--who knows?' Then
followed a moment of great anxiety, a short interval of silence,
broken only by sobs and stifled sighs. The emotion spread, tearful
faces and trembling hands undulated in a kneeling crowd. Then suddenly
all arms were flung in air, all hands were clapped, the priest waved a
white veil joyfully, and like the outbursts of a hurricane the organs
pealed out in crashing harmonies, the bells clanged and clamoured
through the air, and the high roof of the cathedral rang with the
triumph of the voices of the vast crowd chanting the Ambrosian hymn."
If the Duomo had no other interest, the emotion of this oft-repeated
scene would create a fascination to which everyone must yield. But it
teems with interest. It abounds in relics out of every age of Naples.
I cannot convey its charm to any other man. For me the church is full
of presences and shadows of the past, kings and cardinals, noble
gentlemen and lovely ladies, hopes and aspirations, and feverish
ambitions mouldering together beneath marble cenotaphs and stately
wealth of gilding and of fresco. I stand before the monument of
Innocent the Fourth, he who had no other word than "adder" to bestow
on the great emperor whom he opposed and crushed; and straightway all
the tragedy of that terrific strife absorbs my memory, and I am
devoured by pity for the fair land of Italy which became the
battlefield of two such powers, and which by the victory of the
Church and the ruin of the Empire lost a family of rulers more apt for
the creation of her happiness than any which has governed the
Peninsula from the destruction of the Goths until our own day. To one
who looks back across the years, desiring more the welfare of this
queen among the lands than the triumph of any principle, it seems a
base deed that was wrought by this fine-featured old man, lying here
so peacefully in the contemplation of the centuries, his judges. One
wonders if he ever saw as we do the rare and precious value of the
thing he was destroying, whether the true nobility of Frederick, his
culture, his wide humanity, his strong firm government were really
worse than nothing in the judgment of the active brain which throbbed
beneath that placid brow. The ruin of the Empire, the concentration of
all power in the papacy, the expulsion of the Emperor and all his
brood from Italy, it was nothing less than this that Innocent
contrived. Not the great Hildebrand himself, whose tomb we shall visit
at Salerno, did more service to the Church. The pity is that one
should find it so hard to see how that service helped mankind, to whom
no consequences seem to have come that were not dire and woeful. But
whether good or evil, it was great. There was nothing paltry about
Innocent. He was not of double heart. He found a great thing to do,
and did it with all his might. In this world of futilities that is
much, and very much, perhaps all that can be asked of man with his dim
vision. The consequences must be left unto the care of those who see
them.