NAPLES8 P.M. TO 9 P.M.
8 P.M. TO 9 P.M.
Driftinglazily of a summer evening over the Bay of Naples in a brown old fishing felucca with a friendly ancient boatman for companion, careless of time or direction; the night winds soft; the moon clear; indolent boating-parties in joyous relaxation all about; languorous, plaintive songs of Italy near by and far away; Vesuvius glorious and mysterious in the purple offing, and the gray old city, touched with silver, beaming down from all her crescent hillsides,—here, indeed, is the stuff of which day dreams are compounded! Chimes in shadowy belfries take soft, musical notice of the hour; and my thoughts recede with those fading echoes and retrace the bright and pleasant stages that have led me this evening into an environment of such charm and romance.
Thus, then, it was. Two hours ago, as I loitered along the crowded Via Caracciolo on the Bay front and watched Neapolitan Fashion take the air, I again encountered my Old Man of the Sea at his landing-place,—swarthy, wrinkled Luigi of the hoop earrings and faded blue trousers rolled to the knees. Little was hebothering his grizzled head over the frivolity that fluttered above him; and yet it was, in fact, a charming show. Old Luigi makes a mistake, in my opinion, in ignoring the elegantpasseggiata; for afternoon promenading on the Caracciolo is something that most of Naples will do more than lift its head to see. Besides, what an attractive setting it has! The boasted park, the Villa Nazionale, arrays the western front in a pleasant old woods of broad and shady trees, along the water side of which stretches the handsome boulevard of the Caracciolo. The distinguishing mark is thus supplied to divide society between the carriage set who hector it here and along the Villa’s winding drives, and those lesser lights who venture to raise their heads secure from snubs in the promenading spaces under the trees and before the cafés and bandstand. With the latter, as the elders salute friends, renew acquaintances, and exchange civilities with jubilant exclamations, delighted shrugs, and storms of exultant gestures, the younger men, in flannel suits and foppish canes, flirt desperately by twirling their waxed little mustaches, and the snappy-eyed signorinas respond in kind by a subtle and discrete use of the fan. The contemplative promenader will stroll along the cool, statue-linedallées, issuing forth from time to time to enjoy the brisk music of the band. The hardened idler will take a mean delight in penetrating the retired and romantic retreats in the neighborhood of the Pæstum Fountain and thus arousing wholecoveys of indignant lovers who have regarded this region as peculiarly their own from time immemorial; in the event of threatened reprisals the disturber can seek sanctuary in the renowned Aquarium, just at hand, and there spend his time to better advantage in contemplating octopi and sensitive plants, and all sorts of astonishing fishes. But the real show, of course, isen voiture. With a clatter and dash along they come: Thejeunesse dorée, with straw hats cocked rakishly, shouting loudly to their horses and sawing desperately on the reins; young beauties in the latest word of milliner and modiste loll back in handsome victorias, reveling in the sensation they are creating, and with great black eyes flashing in curious contrast to the studied placidity of their quiet faces; consequential senators down from Rome; fat merchants trying to appear at ease; and all the usual remnants of the fashionable rout. On the wide sidewalks the promenaders proceed leisurely and with more good-humored democracy: prim little girls with governesses; romping schoolboys in caps of all colors; back-robed students; long-hairedartisti; and priests by the score strolling sedately and gesturing earnestly with dark, nervous hands.
To all this brave parade Luigi turns a blind eye and a deaf ear; but he always manages to see me, I have noticed. This afternoon his programme was the attractive one of a sail down to the Cape of Posilipo for a fish-dinner at a rustic littleristoranti, with the table to bespread under a chestnut-tree on a weathered stone terrace at the water’s edge where the spray from an occasional wave-top could spatter the cloth and I might fleck the ashes of my cigar straight down into the Bay. This old fellow can interest any one, I believe, when he wrinkles up into his insinuating and enthusiastic grin and plays that trump card, “And after dinner, if the signore wish, we can drift about the Bay or sail over toward Capri and Sorrento.” Naturally, this is my cue to enter. Into the boat I go; off come hat, coat, collar, and tie, and up go sleeves to the shoulder. I am allowed the tiller, and the genial old fisherman stretches at his ease beside the slanting mast and lights a long, black, quill-stemmed cheroot. Now for comfort and romance and all the delights of Buchanan Read’s inspired vision:
“I heed not ifMy rippling skiffFloat swift or slow from cliff to cliff;—With dreamful eyesMy spirit liesUnder the walls of Paradise.”
“I heed not ifMy rippling skiffFloat swift or slow from cliff to cliff;—With dreamful eyesMy spirit liesUnder the walls of Paradise.”
“I heed not ifMy rippling skiffFloat swift or slow from cliff to cliff;—With dreamful eyesMy spirit liesUnder the walls of Paradise.”
“I heed not if
My rippling skiff
Float swift or slow from cliff to cliff;—
With dreamful eyes
My spirit lies
Under the walls of Paradise.”
THE BAY OF NAPLES
THE BAY OF NAPLES
From all garish distractions our little boat bore us in rippling leisure along the picturesque Mergellina front and under the long, villa-dotted heights of the Posilipo hillside, whose shadows crept slowly out on the waters as Apollo drove his flaming chariot beyond the ridge to seek the dread Sibyl of Cumæ. Nature has always been partial to her gay, irresponsible Naples, and this afternoonshe seemed resolved to outdo herself in clothing it with charm and beauty. Under the setting sun the entire sky over Posilipo became a gorgeous riot of crimson and gold, and the opposite Vesuvian shore basked with indolent Oriental listlessness in a brilliant deluge that penetrated the deepest recesses of its vineyards and fruited terraces. Through this magic realm of richest color we floated lightly, silently responsive to the varying phases of the calm and glorious sunset hour. In deepest content
“my hand I trailWithin the shadow of the sail.”
“my hand I trailWithin the shadow of the sail.”
“my hand I trailWithin the shadow of the sail.”
“my hand I trail
Within the shadow of the sail.”
The region to which we lifted our eyes is one of veritable poet-worship. How incredible to think that on this hillside Lucullus has lived and Horace strolled and Virgil mused over his deathless verse! Look again, and under a clump of gnarled old trees one sees the latter’s venerated tomb. Over these waters came the pious Æneas with his Trojan galleys to question the Cumæan Sibyl; and since the age of fable what fleets of Carthage have passed around Cape Miseno, what barks of savage pirates, what brazen triremes of Rome, what armadas of Spain and navies of all the world! It staggers the mind to attempt to recall the scenes of war and pillage that have been enacted under the frowning brows of these storied hills during the last three thousand years.
The wonderful sail was all too brief, and almost before I was aware the goal was at hand, and I stepped ashoreat theristorantiapproved of Luigi and entered upon the promised joys. It was all as he had predicted; with possibly the exception of a few details he had discreetly neglected to warn me against. That it required four determined efforts and a threat of police to get the proper change when I came to settle the bill is really no jarring memory at all. It is the usual experience with the “forgetful” Neapolitan restaurant keeper. And what are foreigners for, anyway? And was it not worth something extra to have dined face to face with this glittering Bay, with the panorama of Naples on one hand and a sunset over Cape Miseno on the other? So with many bows and mutual civilities I parted with the zealous boniface and rejoined the waiting felucca. A light shove, and the shadows of the terrace fell behind us and we were out again on the Bay. Such are the alluring stages, among others, that may bring one eventually to an evening’s moonlight sail at Naples.
Just now the bells rang eight. Luigi grows sentimental. Again he declines my cigars, stretches at his ease and produces another quilled specimen of government monopoly such as, when at home, he lights at the end of a smouldering rope dangling in a tobacco shop of the Mercato. In the gathering gloom one sees little now of the trellised paths of Posilipo, the white marble villas with their balconies and terraces, or the brilliant clustering roses gay against the glossy green of groves of lemons and oranges. In the darkness of thefirs each cavern and grotto of this legend-haunted headland disappears and one can barely make out the wave-washed Rock of Virgil, at the farthest extremity, where, the Neapolitans will tell you, the poet was wont to practice his enchantments. The ruddy sky pales over the mouth of Avernus and the Elysian Fields, and Apollo abandons us to Diana and the broad flecking of the lights of Parthenope. We swing a wide circle in the offing. Between us and the distant rim of water-front lamps hundreds of light craft are idly floating. Romantic, pleasure-loving Naples has dined and taken to the water, to cheer its heart with laughter and song. Like glowworms the lights of the little boats lift and sway with the movement of the waves; while seaward, the drifting torches of fishermen flare in search offrutti di mare.
Like an aged beauty Naples is at her best by night, when the ravages of time are concealed. Lights glitter brightly along the shore line from Posilipo to Sorrento and all over the hillsides, and even beyond Sant’ Elmo and the low white priory of San Martino the palace-crowned heights of Capodimonte, where the paper-chases of early spring afford so much diversion to the young gallants of the court. Popular restaurants up the hillsides are marked by groups of colored lights. A thick spangle of lamps proclaims the progress of some neighborhoodfesta. The moon is full; the sky brilliant with enormous stars. In the distance the curling smokeof Vesuvius glows with a sultry red or fades fitfully into gloomy tones, as suits that imperious will which threescore of eruptions have rendered absolute. But, as all the world knows, this aged beauty of a city that “lights up” so well by night is far from “plain” by day. Then appears the charm and distinction of the original way she has of parting her hair, as it were, with the great dividing rocky ridge that runs downward from Capodimonte to Sant’ Elmo and then on to Pizzofalcone, “Rock of the Falcon.” She even secures a coquettish touch in the projecting point, like an antique necklace pendant, at the centre of her double-crescented shore, where juts a low reef and at its end rests the ancient, blackened Castello dell’Ovo,—on a magically supported egg, they say,—the accredited theatre of so many extravagant adventures. And by day she looks down in indolent content through the half-closed eyes of ten thousand windows and surveys a glorious sea of milky blue, brimming tawny curving beaches crowned with white villas in luxuriant groves and vineyards, expanding in turquoise about soft headlands and dim precipices, and bearing, on its smooth, restful bosom in the far, faint offing, magical islands of pink and pearl that seem no more than tinted clouds.
A shoal of skiffs hangs under the black hull of a belated liner, whose rails are crowded with new arrivals delighted at so picturesque and enthusiastic a reception, and whose silver falls merrily into the inverted umbrellasof the boys and girls who are singing and dancing in the little boats by the light of flaming torches. Very shortly these visitors will learn that the interest they excite in Neapolitans is to be measured very strictly in terms of ready cash. Secretly, they will be despised. There is no smile-hid rapacity comparable with that encountered here. The incoming steamer has not yet warped into her berth before the Neapolitan has begun his campaign for money. Beggars crawl out on the pier flaunting their hideous deformities and wailing forsoldi, and insulting cabmen lie in ambush at the gates. At no other port does a foreigner disembark with so much embarrassment. He goes ashore feeling like a lamb marked for the shearing, and lives to fulfill the expectation with humiliating dispatch. It has to be admitted, on the other hand, that the customs-officers occasionally catch strange flashes of transmarine interests that must puzzle them not a little. As an instance, the first person to land from the steamer I was on was a young American athlete in desperate quest of the latest daily paper, and bent, as we presumed, upon securing instant word of some matter of great and immediate importance. He succeeded; but what was our astonishment to behold him a minute later leap and shout for joy and announce to every one about him that Princeton had again won the Yale baseball series and remained the college champions!
Naples, to-night, is vibrant with song; faithful to herancient myth of the nymph Parthenope, whose sweet singing long lured men to destruction until Ulysses withstood it and the chagrined goddess cast herself into the sea and perished and her body floated to these shores. Parthenope’s children here do not destroy people by their singing now, but rather delight and revitalize them. Mandolins and guitars are throbbing softly on every hand and the old familiar songs of Naples fill the air. “Traviata,” “Trovatore,” and the “Cavalleria” reign prime favorites. To be sure, there is no escaping the linked sweetness of the wailing “Sa-an-ta-a Lu-u-ci-a,” nor that notion of perpetual and hilarious youth conveyed in the ubiquitous “Funiculì-Funiculà.” In martial staccato, as of old, Margarita, the love-lorn seamstress, is jestingly warned against Salvatore,—“Mar-ga-rì, ’e perzo a Salvatore!”—and the skittish “Frangese” recites for the millionth time the discouraging experience of the giddy young peddler who undertook to barter his “pretty pins from Paris” in exchange for kisses that would only bring “a farthing for five” in Paradise. More than one singer is deploring the heartless coquetry of “La Bella Sorrentina,” while as many more appeal amorously to the charming Maria with promises of “beds of roseleaves,”—
“Ah! Maria Marì!Quanta suonna che perdo pe te!”
“Ah! Maria Marì!Quanta suonna che perdo pe te!”
“Ah! Maria Marì!Quanta suonna che perdo pe te!”
“Ah! Maria Marì!
Quanta suonna che perdo pe te!”
We take an æsthetic interest in the Pagliaccian ravingsof Canio, and grieve for the “little frozen hands” of “La Bohème”; while, by way of contrast, all the peace and serenity of moonlight comes to us in the chaste, stately measures of the pensive “Luna Nova.” Serenades seem twice serenades when breathed in the soft, lissome dialect of Naples. There is no tiring of the impassioned refrain of “Sole Mio”:—
“Ma n’ atu soleCchiu bello, ohinè,’O sole mioSta nfronte a te!”
“Ma n’ atu soleCchiu bello, ohinè,’O sole mioSta nfronte a te!”
“Ma n’ atu soleCchiu bello, ohinè,’O sole mioSta nfronte a te!”
“Ma n’ atu sole
Cchiu bello, ohinè,
’O sole mio
Sta nfronte a te!”
And what sufficient word can be said of the lovely “A Serenata d’ ’e Rrose”? It is impossible not to rejoice with these soulful tenors in that
“The glinting moonbeams look like silver piecesFlung down among the roses by the breezes,”—
“The glinting moonbeams look like silver piecesFlung down among the roses by the breezes,”—
“The glinting moonbeams look like silver piecesFlung down among the roses by the breezes,”—
“The glinting moonbeams look like silver pieces
Flung down among the roses by the breezes,”—
or to respond to the plaintive intensity of the appealing cry:—
“Oj rrose meje! Si dorme chesta fataScetatela cu chesta serenata!”
“Oj rrose meje! Si dorme chesta fataScetatela cu chesta serenata!”
“Oj rrose meje! Si dorme chesta fataScetatela cu chesta serenata!”
“Oj rrose meje! Si dorme chesta fata
Scetatela cu chesta serenata!”
Like old Ulysses, the swift little felucca soon stops its ears to these fascinating distractions, and bears Luigi and me off into the purple darkness. The prison-capped rock of Nisida drops astern with all its august memories of Brutus and his devoted Portia, and its repugnant ones of Queen Joanna, the very bad, and King Robert, the very good. In the moonlit path the distant cliffs ofProcida, isle of romance and beauty, loom afar, but we distinguish no faintest echo of the bewilderingtarantellamusic that is danced there in its perfection. What a different spectacle its observers are enjoying from the stale perfunctory performances of the Sorrento hotels, which the tourists see at two dollars a head. For thetarantella, well done, is the intensest and most expressive of dances. All the emotions of the lover and his coquettish sweetheart are aptly portrayed—the advances, rebuffs, encouragements, slights, and final triumph. The Procida dance is a revelation when rendered out of sheer delight—con amore, as the Italians say.
An occasional faint light marks dissolute Rome’s favorite place of revelry, Baiæ the magnificent. In its heyday every house, as we read, was a palace; and it has been said that every woman who entered it a Penelope came out a Helen. Through their faded green blinds no light may be seen in the yellow stone houses of neighboring Puteoli where Paul, Timothy, and Luke took refuge in the early days of the Faith. Stolid pagan Rome had little time for them, considering that Cumæ was just around the headland, with Dædalus landing from his flight from Crete and the frantic Sibyl, at the very Jaws of Avernus, screaming her “Dies iræ! Dies illa!”
Distant Ischia appears a huge ghostly blot, mysterious and solemn. Scarce an outline can be caught of itsfabled, crag-hung castle, chambered as the very nautilus and eloquent of the unhappy Vittoria Colonna. How often has Michael Angelo climbed with sighs that old stone causeway where now the fishermen mend their blackened nets! Ischia never wants for devotees, however, and already a quarter-century has sufficed to dull the horror of that July night when Casamicciola paid its quota of three thousand lives to the dread greed of the earthquake. To-day one lingers, undisturbed by such memories, amidst the pretty whitewashed cottages set in olive groves and vineyards, loiters among the picturesque straw plaiters of Lacco, or dreams to the drowsy tinkle of goat bells in the myrtle and chestnut groves on the slopes of Mont’ Epomeo.
Shadowy Capri, isle of enchantment, lies soft and dim off the Sorrento headland as we swing our little vessel toward the city. It seems only a delightful dream that a few mornings ago mydéjeunerwas served on a cool terrace of the Quisisana there, and that I looked down over the coffee-urn on olive groves and sloping hillsides green with famous vineyards. With joy I relive the row around its precipitous shores, the eerie swim in the elfland of the Blue Grotto, the drive down the white, dusty road from the lofty perch of Anacapri to the pebbly beaches of Marina Grande, before a fascinating, unfolding panorama of verdant lawns, fruited terraces, snowy villas, and bold cliffs crowned with fantastic ruins. Sinister Tiberius and his unspeakable companions havesmall place in our permanent memories of Capri; one is more apt to recall the charming blue and white Virgin in the cool grotto beside the old Stone Stairs.
A faint rim of lights on the mainland marks Sorrento, and a patch nearer the city, Castellammare; and were we nearer, the great white hotels would doubtless be found brilliant and musical. Could we but see it now, we should find the moonlit statue of Tasso in the little square vastly more tolerable than by day, and this would be a pleasant hour to spend on the old green bench before it absorbed in stirring thoughts of the “Gerusalemme Liberata” in the place where its author was born. Monte Sant’ Angelo looms above Castallammare spectre-like in night shadows, and the royal ilex groves must be taken on faith. The crested hoopoes, crowned of King Solomon, have long been asleep on the mountain-sides, but Italian Fashion, devoted to its Castellammare, having idled and rested all day in thebagni, now flirts and dances at the verandaedstabilimenti. An occasional faint breath of fragrance recalls the floral luxuriance that is so notable here—the gorgeous scarlet geraniums, snowy daturas, cactus, and aloe, festoons of smilax, and the carmine oleanders that they call “St. Joseph’s Nosegay.”
Far away to the southeastward, vague and ghostly headlands are dimming toward regions of rarest beauty—Amalfi, Majori, Cetara, Salerno. In our happy thoughts the smooth, white Corniche road lies like adelicate 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 meOf 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 feetIn the tideless summer seas.”
“Sweet the memory is to meOf 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 feetIn the tideless summer seas.”
“Sweet the memory is to meOf 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 feetIn the tideless summer seas.”
“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 atmora; 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 ourlanding 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 childwho is, at the same time, a very ragged and dirty one. Life, as it is found in the Mercato, is exuberancein 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’sdefinitive 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, 1oprimo,” 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 outin the play of feeble street lamps and the dejected, half-hearted lights of dingy, cavernous shops and eating-places. Acomme il fautcostume 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 youngsterin puris naturalibusis 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 asoldoof 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 greatbundles 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-lungedpadulanowhen 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. Thereis 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 asoldo, 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. Hisvendettamay, 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 smokytrattoriaand family eating-place. One would scarcely hazard an opinion as to the number of bowls of macaroni, quantities ofpolenta, and whole nations of snails and frogs that are being devoured between appreciative gestures and puffs of cigarettes, and washed down unctiously withminestrasoup 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 callfondaco, 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; weknow 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 themololighthouse. 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 neighborhoodfestaand 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-conductedmultitude 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 waxingtheir 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;artistiin 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 somecircolo; swarthycontadini, 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 militaryrara 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 covetedlaureadegree 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 politicalcoupswhen the Government’s candidates come up for election; and, most dejected and dangerous of all, the unemployed men of education, thespostati, 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 VittorioEmmanuele. 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 andan additionalpourboireto 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!”