Roman Holidays And Others - William Dean Howells

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more revolting viscera of the less-recognizable animals.

      The poor people worming in and out around your cab are very patient of your progress over the terrible floor of their crooked thoroughfare, perhaps because they reciprocate your curiosity, and perhaps because they are very amiable and not very sensitive. They are not always crowded into these dismal chasms; their quarter expands here and there into market-plates, like the fish-market where the uprising of the fisherman Masaniello against the Spaniards fitly took place; and the Jewish market-place, where the poor young Corra-dino, last of the imperial Hohenstaufen line, was less appropriately beheaded by the Angevines. The open spaces are not less loathsome than the reeking alleys, but if you have the intelligent guide we had you approach them through the triumphal arch by which Charles V. entered Naples, and that is something. Yet we will now talk less of the emperor than of the guide, who appealed more to my sympathy.

      He had been six years in America, which he adored, because, he said, he had got work and earned his living there the very day he landed. That was in Boston, where he turned his hand first to one thing and then another, and came away at last through some call home, honoring and loving the Americans as the kindest, the noblest, the friendliest people in the world. I tried, politely, to persuade him that we were not all of us all he thought us, but he would not yield, and at one place he generously claimed a pre-eminence in wickedness for his fellow-Neapolitans. That was when we came to a vast, sorrowful prison, from which an iron cage projected into the street. Around this cage wretched women and children and old men clustered till the prisoners dear to them were let into it from the jail and allowed to speak with them. The scene was as public as all of life and death is in Naples, and the publicity seemed to give it peculiar sadness, which I noted to our guide. He owned its pathos; “but,” he said, “you know we have a terrible class of people here in Naples.” I protested that there were terrible classes of people everywhere, even in America. He would not consent entirely, but in partly convincing each other we became better friends. He had a large black mustache and gentle black eyes, and he spoke very fair English, which, when he wished to be most impressive, he dropped and used a very literary Italian instead. He showed us where he lived, on a hill-top back of our gardened quay, and said that he paid twelve dollars a month for a tenement of five rooms there. Schooling is compulsory in Naples, but he sends his boy willingly, and has him especially study English as the best provision he can make for him—as heir of his own calling of cicerone, perhaps. He has a little farm at Bavello, which he tills when it is past the season for cultivating foreigners in Naples; he expects to spend his old age there; and I thought it not a bad lookout. He was perfectly well-mannered, and at a hotel where we stopped for tea he took his coffee at our table unbidden, like any American fellow-man. He and the landlord had their joke together, the landlord warning me against him in English as “very bad man,” and clapping him affectionately on the shoulder to emphasize the irony. We did not demand too much social information of him; all the more we valued the gratuitous fact that the Neapolitan nobles were now rather poor, because they preferred a life of pleasure to a life of business. I could have told him that the American nobles were increasingly like them in their love of pleasure, but I would not have known how to explain that they were not poor also. He was himself a moderate in politics, but he told us, what seems to be the fact everywhere in Italy, that singly the largest party in Naples is the Socialist party.

      He went with me first one day to the beautiful old Church of Santa Chiara, to show me the Angevine tombs there, in which I satisfied a secret, lingering love for the Gothic; and then to the cathedral, where the sacristan showed us everything but the blood of St. Jannarius, perhaps because it was not then in the act of liquefying; but I am thankful to say I saw one of his finger-bones. My guide had made me observe how several of the churches on the way to this were built on the sites and of the remnants of pagan temples, and he summoned the world-old sacristan of St. Januarius to show us evidences of a rival antiquity in the crypt; for it had begun as a temple of Neptune. The sacristan practically lived in those depths and the chill sanctuary above them, and-he was so full of rheumatism that you could almost hear it creak as he walked; yet he was a cheerful sage, and satisfied with the fee which my guide gave him and which he made small, as he explained, that the sacristan might not be discontented with future largesse. I need not say that each church we visited had its tutelary beggar, and that my happy youth came back to me in the blindness of one, or the mutilation of another, or the haggish wrinkles of a third. At Santa Chiara I could not at first make out what it was which caused my heart to rejoice so; but then I found that it was because the church was closed, and we had to go and dig a torpid monk out of his crevice in a cold, many-storied cliff near by, and get him to come and open it, just as I used, with the help of neighbors, to do in the past.

      Our day ended at sunset—a sunset of watermelon red—with a visit to the Castel Nuovo, where my guide found himself at home with the garrison, because, as he explained, he had served his term as a soldier. He was the born friend of the custodian of the castle church, which was the most comfortable church for warmth we had visited, and to which we entered by the bronze gates of the triumphal arch raised in honor of the Aragonese victory over the Angevines in 1442, when this New Castle was newer than it is now. The bronze gates record in bas-relief the battles between the French and Spanish powers in their quarrel over the people one or other must make its prey; but whether it was to the greater advantage of the Neapolitans to be battened on by the house of Aragon and then that of Bourbon for the next six hundred years after the Angevines had retired from the banquet is problematical. History is a very baffling study, and one may be well content to know little or nothing about it. I knew so little or had forgotten so much that I scarcely deserved to be taken down into the crypt of this church and shown the skeletons of four conspirators for Anjou whom Aragon had put to death—two laymen and an archbishop by beheading, and a woman by dividing crosswise into thirds. The skeletons lay in their tattered and dusty shrouds, and I suppose were authentic enough; but I had met them, poor things, too late in my life to wish for their further acquaintance. Once I could have exulted to search out their story and make much of it; but now I must leave it to the reader's imagination, along with most other facts of my observation in Naples.

      I was at some pains to look up the traces of my lost youth there, and if I could have found more of them no doubt I should have been more interested in these skeletons. For forty-odd years I had remembered the prodigious picturesqueness of certain streets branching from a busy avenue and ascending to uplands above by stately successions of steps. When I demanded these of my guide, he promptly satisfied me, and in a few moments, there in the Chiaja, we stood at the foot of such a public staircase. I had no wish to climb it, but I found it more charming even than I remembered. All the way to the top it was banked on either side with glowing masses of flowers and fruits and the spectacular vegetables of the South, and between these there were series of people, whom I tacitly delegated to make the ascent for me, passing the groups bargaining at the stalls. Nothing could have been better; nothing that I think of is half so well in New York, where the markets are on that dead level which in the social structure those above it abhor; though there are places on the East River where we might easily have inclined markets.

      Other associations of that far past awoke with my identification of the hotel where we had stayed at the end of the Villa Nazionale. In those days the hotel was called, in appeal to our patriotism, more flattered then than now in Europe, Hotel Washington; but it is to-day a mere pension, though it looks over the same length of palm-shaded, statue-peopled garden. The palms were larger than I remembered them, and the statues had grown up and seemed to have had large families since my day; but the lovely sea was the same, with all the mural decorations of the skyey horizons beyond, dim precipices and dreamy island tops, and the dozing Vesuvius mistakable for any of them. At one place there was a file of fishermen, including a fisherwoman, drawing their net by means of a rope carried across the carriage-way from the seawall, with a splendid show of their black eyes and white teeth and swarthy, bare legs, and always there were beggars, both of those who frankly begged and those who importuned with postal-cards. This terrible traffic pervades all southern Europe, and everywhere pesters the meeting traveller with undesired bargains. In its presence it is almost impossible to fit a scene with the apposite phrase; and yet one must own that it has its rights. What would those boys do if they did not sell, or fail to sell, postal-cards. It is another aspect of the labor problem, so many-faced in our time. Would it be better that they should take to open

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