Naples, Past and Present
by Arthur H. Norway · English · Gutenberg #39100 · 651,597 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Naples, Past and Present
Author: Arthur H. Norway
Illustrator: Maurice Greiffenhagen
Release date: March 11, 2012 [eBook #39100]
Language: English
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Produced by Melissa McDaniel and the Online Distributed
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Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
NAPLES
[Illustration: BAY OF NAPLES FROM THE VOMERO]
NAPLES
PAST AND PRESENT
BY
ARTHUR H. NORWAY
AUTHOR OF "HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS IN DEVON AND CORNWALL"
"PARSON PETER," ETC.
WITH TWENTY-FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR
BY MAURICE GRIEFFENHAGEN
SECOND EDITION
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
_First Published_ _May 1901_
_Second Edition_ _June 1905_
TO MY FRIENDS
BARON AND BARONESS MARIO NOLLI
OF NAPLES, AND OF ARI, IN THE ABRUZZI
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
IN TOKEN THAT THOSE WHO ARE DIVIDED
BY BOTH SEA AND LAND
MAY YET BE UNITED IN THEIR LOVE
FOR ITALY
PREFATORY NOTE
I have designed this book not as a guide, but as supplementary to a
guide. The best of guide-books--even that of Murray or of
Gsell-Fels--leaves a whole world of thought and knowledge untouched,
being indeed of necessity so full of detail that broad, general views
can scarcely be obtained from it.
In this work detail has been sacrificed without hesitation. I have
omitted reference to a few well-known places, usually because I could
add nothing to the information given in the handbooks, but in one or
two cases because the considerations which they raised lay too far
from the thread of my discourse.
I have thrown together in the form of an appendix such hints and
suggestions as seemed likely to assist anyone who desires wider
information than I have given.
A. H. N.
EALING, 1901
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I PAGE
THE APPROACH TO NAPLES BY THE SEA 1
CHAPTER II
THE ANCIENT MARVELS OF THE PHLEGRAEAN FIELDS 21
CHAPTER III
THE BEAUTIES AND TRADITIONS OF THE POSILIPO, WITH SOME
OBSERVATIONS UPON VIRGIL, THE ENCHANTER 49
CHAPTER IV
THE RIVIERA DI CHIAIA, AND SOME STRANGE THINGS WHICH
OCCURRED THERE 68
CHAPTER V
THE ENCHANTED CASTLE OF THE EGG, AND THE SUCCESSION
OF THE KINGS WHO HELD IT 85
CHAPTER VI
THE BARBARITIES OF FERDINAND OF ARAGON, WITH CERTAIN
OTHER SUBJECTS WHICH PRESENT THEMSELVES IN STROLLING
ROUND THE CITY 101
CHAPTER VII
CHIEFLY ABOUT CHURCHES--WITH SOME SAINTS, BUT MORE
SINNERS 121
CHAPTER VIII
A GREAT CHURCH AND TWO VERY NOBLE TRAGEDIES 143
CHAPTER IX
VESUVIUS AND THE CITIES WHICH HE HAS DESTROYED--HERCULANEUM,
POMPEII, AND STABIAE 178
CHAPTER X
CASTELLAMMARE: ITS WOODS, ITS FOLKLORE, AND THE TALE OF THE
MADONNA OF POZZANO 226
CHAPTER XI
SURRIENTO GENTILE: ITS BEAUTIES AND BELIEFS 251
CHAPTER XII
CAPRI 273
CHAPTER XIII
LA RIVIERA D'AMALFI AND ITS LONG-DEAD GREATNESS 299
CHAPTER XIV
THE ABBEY OF TRINITA DELLA CAVA, SALERNO, AND THE RUINED
MAJESTY OF PAESTUM 327
APPENDIX 345
INDEX 357
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Bay of Naples from the Vomero _Frontispiece_
PAGE
Pozzuoli 24
Pozzuoli 32
Columns in the Serapeon Pozzuoli 35
Castle of Baiae 44
Fishing Stage, Santa Lucia 54
Strada di Chiaia 68
Porta Mercantile 72
Boats at the Mergellina 76
Gradoni di Chiaia 78
Naples 90
Castle of St. Elmo 97
Old Town 113
Bay of Naples from San Martino 116
The Church of the Carmine 156
In the Strada di Tribunali 168
Card-players 188
A Slum 195
In the Strada di Tribunali 209
Porta Capuana 220
Roof top, Modern Naples 259
Courtyard in the Old Town 268
Unloading Boats, Bay of Naples 284
Naples: on the modern side, looking towards Capri from the
Corso Vittorio Emmanuele 288
Gossip 334
NAPLES
PAST AND PRESENT
CHAPTER I
THE APPROACH TO NAPLES BY THE SEA
On a fine spring morning when the sun, which set last night in gold
and purple behind the jagged mountain chain of Corsica, had but just
climbed high enough to send out shafts and flashes of soft light
across the opalescent sea, I came up on the deck of the great steamer
which carried me from Genoa to watch for the first opening of the Bay
of Naples. It was so early that the decks were very quiet. There was
no sound but the perpetual soft rustle of the wave shed off from the
bow of the steamer, which slipped on silently without sense of motion.
The Ponza Islands were in sight, desolate and precipitous, showing on
their dark cliffs no house nor any sign of life, save here and there a
seabird winging its solitary way round the crags and caverns of the
coast. Far ahead, in the direction of our course, lay one or two dim,
cloudy masses, too faint and shadowy to be detached as yet from the
grey skyline which bounded the crystalline sparkles of the sea. And
so, having strained my eyes in vain effort to discover the high peak
of Ischia, I fell to wondering why any man who is at liberty to
choose his route should dream of approaching this Campanian coast
otherwise than by the sea.
For Naples is the city of the siren--"Parthenope," sacred to one of
those sea nymphs whose marvellous sweet singing floated out across the
waves and lured the ancient seamen rowing by in their strange old
galleys, shaped after a fashion now long since forgotten, and carrying
merchandise from cities which thirty centuries ago and more were
"broken by the sea in the depths of the waters" so that "all the
company in the midst of them did fail." How many generations had the
line of sailors stretched among whom Parthenope wrought havoc before
Ulysses sailed by her rock, and saw the heaps of whitening bones, and
last of all men heard the wondrous melodies which must have lured him
too, but for the tight thongs which bound him to the mast! So
Parthenope and her two sisters cast themselves into the sea and
perished, as the old prediction said they must when first a mariner
went by their rock unscathed. But her drowned body floated over the
blue sea till it reached the shore at Naples, and somewhere near the
harbour the wondering people built her a shrine which was doubtless
rarely lovely, and is mentioned by Strabo, the old Greek geographer,
as being shown still in his day, not long after the birth of Christ.
There is now but little navigation on these seas compared with the
relative importance of the shipping that came hither in old days.
Naples is in our day outstripped by Genoa, and hard run, even for the
goods of southern Italy, by Brindisi and Taranto. The trade of Rome
goes largely to Leghorn. If Ostia were ever purged of fever and
rebuilt, or if the schemes for deepening the Tiber so as to allow
large vessels to discharge at Rome were carried out, we might see the
port of Naples decline as that of Pozzuoli did for the selfsame
reason, the broad facts which govern the course of trade being the
same to-day as they were three thousand years ago. Even now it is
rather the convenience of passengers and mails than the necessities of
merchants which take the great ocean steamers into Naples. It is not
easy for men who realise these facts to remember that the waters of
the Campanian coast have more than once been ploughed by the chief
shipping of the world. Far back in the dawn of history, where nothing
certain can be distinguished of the deeds of men or nations, the
presence of traders, Phoenician and Greek, can be inferred upon
these shores. The antiquity of shipping is immense and measureless.
Year by year the spade, trenching on the sites of ancient
civilisation, drives back by centuries the date at which man's
intellect began to gather science; and no one yet can put his finger
on any point of time and say, "within this space man did not
understand the use of sail or oar." The earliest seamen of whom we
know anything at all were doubtless the successors of many a
generation like themselves. It cannot be much less than a thousand
years before Christ was born when Greek ships were crossing the sea
which washed their western coasts bound for Sicily and the Campanian
shores. Yet how many ages must have passed between the days when the
Greeks first went afloat and those in which they dared push off toward
the night side of the world, where the mariners of the dead went to
and fro upon the sea, where the expanse of ocean lay unbroken by the
shelter of any friendly island, and both winds and currents beat
against them in their course, or even by coasting up and down the
Adriatic set that dreaded sea between them and their homes! Superstition,
hand in hand with peril, barred their way, yet they broke through! But
after what centuries of fearful longing,--curiosity, and love of salt
adventure struggling in their hearts with fear of the unknown, till
courage gained the mastery and the galleys braved the surf and smoke
of the _planctae_, the rocks that struck together, "where not even do
birds pass by, no, not the timorous doves which carry ambrosia for
Zeus, but even of them the sheer rock ever steals one away, and the
father sends in another to make up the number."
Then the rowers saw the rock of Scylla and her ravening heads thrust
forth to prey on them, while beneath the fig tree on the opposite crag
Charybdis sucked down the black seawater awfully, and cast it forth
again in showers of foam and spray. These fabled dangers passed, there
remained the Island of the Sirens, which legend placed near Capri,
where Ulysses passed it when he sailed south again; and so the
wonderful tradition of the Sirens dominates the ancient traffic of
mankind upon these waters, and the harbour where the shrine of
Parthenope was reflected in the blue sea claims a lofty place in the
realms whether of imagination or of that scholarship which cares
rather for the deeds of men than for the verbal emendations of a text.
The shrine has gone. The memory remains only as a fable, whose dim
meaning rests on the vast duration of the ages through which men have
gone to and fro upon these waters. But here, still unchanged, is the
pathway to the shrine--the Tyrrhene Sea, bearing still the selfsame
aspect as in the days when the galleys of AEneas beat up the coast from
Troy, and Palinurus watched the wind rise out of the blackening west.
Since those old times the surface of the land has changed as often
almost as the summer clouds have swept across it. Volcanic outbursts
and the caprice of many masters have wrought together in destruction;
so that he who now desires to see what Virgil saw must cheat his eyes
at every moment and keep his imagination ever on the stretch. Even the
city of mediaeval days, the capital of Anjou and Aragon, is so far lost
and hidden that a man must seek diligently before he cuts the network
of old streets, unsavoury and crowded, in which he can discover the
lanes and courtyards where Boccaccio sought Fiammetta, or the walls on
which Giotto painted.
But here, upon the silent sea, at every moment fresh objects are
coming into sight which have lain unchanged under dawn and dusk in
every generation. Already the volcanic cone of Monte Epomeo towers out
of Ischia, a menace of destruction which not twenty years ago
fulfilled itself and shook the town of Casamicciola in a few seconds
into a mere rubble heap. It is a sad thing still to stroll round that
once smiling town. Ruins project on every side. The cathedral lies
shattered and untouched; there is not enough money in the island to
rebuild it. The visitors, to whom most of the old prosperity was due,
have not yet recovered from the attack of nerves brought on by the
earthquake. But there remains wonderful beauty at Casamicciola and
elsewhere on Ischia; the "Piccola Sentinella" is an excellent hotel;
some day, surely, the lost ground will be recovered, and prosperity
return.
The new town lies gleaming on the flat at the foot of the great
mountain. Far away towards my right Capri, loveliest of islands,
floats upon the sea touched with blue haze; and there, stretching
landwards, is the mountain promontory of Sorrento, Monte St. Angelo
towering over Monte Faito, and the whole mass dropping by swift, steep
slopes to the Punta di Campanella, the headland of the bell, whence in
the old days of corsairs the warning toll swung out across the sea as
often as the galleys of Dragut or of Barbarossa hove in sight, echoing
from Torre del Greco, Torre Annunziata, and many another watchtower of
that fair and wealthy coast, while the artillery of the old castle of
Ischia, answering with three shots, gave warning of the coming peril.
Even now I can see that ancient castle, standing nobly on a rock that
seems an island, though, in fact, it is united with the land by a low
causeway; and it comes into my mind how Vittoria Colonna took refuge
from her sorrows there, spending her widowhood behind the battlements
on which she had played with her husband as a child. Doubtless the two
children listened awestruck on many a day to the cannon-shots which
warned the fishers. Perhaps Vittoria may even have been pacing there
when, as Brantome writes, a party of French knights of Malta came
sailing by with much treasure on their ship, and hearing the three
shots took them arrogantly for a salute in honour of their flag, and
so, thinking of nothing but their dignity, made a courteous salute in
answer, and kept on their way. Whereupon the spider Dragut, who at
that moment was sacking Castellammare, just where the peninsula joins
the mainland, driving off as captive all those men or women who had
not fled up into the wooded hills in time, swooped out with half a
dozen galleys, and added the poor knights and their treasure to his
piles of plunder.
Many tales are told about that castle, so near and safe a refuge from
the turbulence of Naples. But already it is dropping astern, and the
lower land of Procida usurps its place, an island which in the days
of Juvenal was a byword of desolation, though populous and fertile in
our own. The widening strait of water between the low shore and the
craggy one played its part in a tale as passionate, though not so
famous, as that of Hero and Leander. For Boccaccio tells us that
Gianni di Procida, nephew and namesake of a man whose loyalty popular
tradition will extol until the end of time, loved one Restituta
Bolgaro, daughter of a gentleman of Ischia; and often when his love
for her burnt so hotly that he could not sleep, used to rise and go
down to the water, and if he found no boat would plunge into the black
sea, swim the channel, and lie beneath the walls of Restituta's house
all night, swimming back happy in the morning if he had but seen the
roof which sheltered her. But one day when Restituta was alone upon
the shore she was carried off by pirates out of Sicily, who, wondering
at her beauty, took her to Palermo and showed her to King Federigo,
who straightway loved her, and gave her rooms in his palace, and
waited till a day might come when she would love him. But Gianni armed
a ship and followed swiftly on the traces of the captors, and found at
last that Restituta was in Palermo. Then, led by love, he scaled the
palace wall by night and crossed the garden in the dark and gained the
poor girl's chamber, and might have borne her off in safety had not
the King, suspecting that all was not well, come with torches in the
darkness and discovered Gianni and cast him into prison, where he lay
till he was sentenced to be taken out and burned at the stake in the
Piazza of Palermo together with the girl who had dared to flout the
affection of a king. And burned they would have been had not the great
Admiral Ruggiero di Loria chanced to pass that way as they stood
together at the stake and known Gianni as the nephew of that great
plotter who conceived the massacre of the Sicilian Vespers, whereby
the crown of Sicily was set upon the head of Aragon. Straightway he
hastened to the King, who forthwith released Gianni and gave him
Restituta, and sent both home laden with rich gifts to Ischia, where
they lived happy for many a year, till they were overcome at last by
no worse fate than that which is reserved for all humanity whether
glad or sorry.
No man can prove this story true; but it is at least so happily
conceived as to be worth credence, like others told us by the same
immortal writer, who, though a Florentine, knew Naples well, and
doubtless wove into the _Decameron_ many an anecdote picked up in the
taverns which survives now in no other form. For there was no Brantome
to collect for us the gossip of the days when Anjou drove out
Hohenstaufen from this kingdom; and if we would know what happened on
the coast in those tragic and far-distant times we must take the tales
set down by Boccaccio for what they may be worth.
I am not sure that Gianni, the hot-passioned lad who used to swim this
strait by night, does not emerge out of the darkness of the centuries
more clearly than his greater uncle--that mighty plotter who, using
craft and guile where he had no strength, is fabled to have built up a
conspiracy and engineered a massacre which has no parallel save in the
St. Bartholomew. Yet it is not to be judged without excuse like that
foul act of cold-blooded treachery, but was in some measure an
expiation of intolerable wrongs, as may be discovered even now by
anyone who will study the plentiful traditions of that March night
when eight thousand French of every age and either sex perished in
two hours, slain at the signal of the vesper bell ringing in Palermo.
That bloodshed split the kingdom of the two Sicilies in twain. It did
more: it scored men's minds with a memory so deep that even now there
is no child in Sicily who could not tell how the massacre began. To
men then living it appeared a cataclysm so tremendous that they must
needs date time from it, as from the birth of Christ or the foundation
of the world. In documents written full four centuries later the
passage of the years is reckoned thus; and in Palermo to this day the
nuns of the Pieta sing a litany on the Monday after Easter in memory
of the souls of the French who perished on that night of woe. So
memorable was the deed ascribed by tradition to the plotter, Giovanni
di Procida, lord of that little island which is already slipping past
me out of sight.
The steamer slips on noiselessly as ever. Procida falls away into the
background, with its old brown town clinging to the seaward face of a
precipitous cliff; and I can look down the Bay of Baiae, where in old
Roman days every woman who went in a Penelope came out a Helen, and
almost catch a glance at Cumae, where Daedalus put off his weary wings
after that great flight from Crete which no man since has contrived to
imitate. There lies the Gate of Hell down which AEneas plunged in
company with the Sibyl; and round it all the land of the Phlegraean
fields, heaving and steaming with volcanic fires. There too is the
headland of Posilipo, where Virgil dwelt and where he wrought those
enchantments concerning which I shall have much to say hereafter; for
though Virgil is a poet to the world at large, he is a magician in the
memory of the Neapolitans. And who shall say their tradition is not
true?
Next, sweeping round towards my right hand in a perfect curve, comes
the shore of the Riviera di Chiaia, once a pleasant sandy beach,
broken midway by the jutting rock and island on which stood the church
and monastery of San Lionardo. It is long since church and island
disappeared, and few of those gay Neapolitans who throng the Via
Caracciolo, that fine parade which now usurps the whole seafront from
horn to horn of the bay, could even point out where it stood. In these
days the whole shore is embowered in trees and gardens skirting the
fine roadway; and there stands the wonderful aquarium, which has no
equal in the world, and where the wise will spend many afternoons and
yet leave its marvels unexhausted.
My eyes have travelled on to the other horn of this fine bay, and are
arrested by what is surely the most picturesque object in all Naples.
For at this point the spine or backbone of land which breaks the
present city into two, leaving on the right the ancient town and on
the left the modern, built along the pretty shore of which I have just
spoken,--at this point the ridge sweeps down precipitously from the
Castle of St. Elmo on the height, breaks off abruptly in the sheer
cliff of the Pizzo-Falcone, "The Falcon's Beak," and then sends
jutting out into the sea a small craggy island which bears an old
hoary castle low down by the water's edge. On this grey morning the
sea breaks heavily about the black reef on which the castle stands,
and the walls, darkened almost to the colour of the rock itself,
assume a curious aspect of vast age, such as disposes one to seek
within their girth for some at least among the secrets of old Naples.
Nor will the search be vain; for this hoary fortress is Castel
dell'Uovo, "The Castle of the Egg," so called, if we may lend an ear
to Neapolitan tradition, because Virgil the Enchanter built it on an
egg, on which it stands unto this hour, and shall stand until the egg
is broken. Others again say that the islet is egg-shaped, which it is
not, unless my eyes deceive me; and of other explanations I know none
at all, so that any man who can content himself with neither of these
may resign himself to contemplate an unsolved puzzle for as long as he
may stay in Naples.
Apart, however, from the wizard Virgil and the idle tale of the
enchanted egg, there is something so arresting in the sight of this
ancient castle thrust out into the sea that I cannot choose but see in
it the heart of the interest of Naples. It is by far the oldest castle
which Naples owns, and as its day came earliest so it passed the
first. Castel Nuovo robbed it of its consequence, both as a royal
dwelling and a place of arms; and now the noisy, feverish tide of life
that beats so restlessly from east to west through the great city
finds scarce an echo on the silent battlements of the Egg Castle,
where Norman monarchs met their barons and royal prisoners languished
in the dungeons. Inside the walls there is nothing to attract a
visitor but memories. Yet those gather thick and fast as soon as one
has crossed the drawbridge, and there is scarce one other spot in
Naples where a man who cares for the past of the old tragic city can
lose himself more easily in dreams.
But again the steamer turns her course a little, and suddenly the
Castel dell'Uovo slips out of sight, the old brown city passes across
my line of vision like a picture on the screen of a camera oscura when
the lens is moved, and I am gazing out beyond the houses across the
wide rich plain out of which the vast bulk of Vesuvius rears itself
dark and tremendous, towering near the sea. There are other mountains
far away, encircling the plain like the walls of some great
amphitheatre, but they are beyond the range of volcanic catastrophe,
and stood unmoved while the peaks of Vesuvius were piled up and blown
away into a thousand shapes, sometimes green and fertile, the haunt of
wild boars and grazing cattle, at others rent by fire and subterranean
convulsion so as to give reality to the most awful visions which the
imagination of mankind has conceived concerning the destruction which
befell the sinful cities of the plain.
The plain is the Campagna Felice, a happy country, notwithstanding the
perpetual menace of the smoking mountain, which time after time has
convulsed the fields, altered the outline of the coast, and
overwhelmed cities, villages, and churches. Throughout the last
eighteen hundred years a destruction like to that which befell the
cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii has been overtaking hamlets and
buildings of less note. The country is a palimpsest. What is now
written on its surface is not a tithe of what was once inscribed
there. In 1861 an earthquake at Torre del Greco made a fissure in the
main street. Those who dared descend it found themselves in a church,
long since buried and forgotten. So it is in every direction
throughout the Campagna Felice. The works of man are overwhelmed in
countless numbers by the ejections from Vesuvius, and the green fields
of beans and lupins which stretch so pleasantly across the wide spaces
between the Sarno and the Sebeto cover the ruins of innumerable homes.
It seems strange that a land exposed to such great and constant perils
should be densely populated. The coast is lined with towns, all
shining in the sun, and the first graceful slopes of Vesuvius itself
are studded with white buildings, planted here and there in apparent
oblivion of the floods of red-hot lava which have so often forced
their way down the inclines towards the sea. There must be many
dwellers in those towns who saw the lava break out from new vents in
1861 among the cultivated fields. Yet the fields are cultivated still,
and in time of eruption the peasants will continue working in the
vineyards within a few hundred yards of the crawling stream, knowing
well how often its progress is arrested by the cooling of the fiery
mass. There is, moreover, the power of the saints to be considered.
How often has not San Gennaro arrested the outbreaks, and brought
peace to the frightened city! On the Ponte della Maddalena he stands
unto this day, his outstretched arm, pointing to the mountain with a
gesture drawn from the mimic language of the people, bids it "Halt!"
And then the fertility of the volcanic soil! Vesuvius, if a rough
friend, is a kindly one. He may drive the people to their prayers from
time to time, which is no great harm! but, if a balance be struck, his
benefits are as many as his injuries, and the peasants, looking up, as
they hoe their fields, at the coiling wreaths of copper-coloured smoke
which issue from the cone, are content to take their chance that death
may some day meet them too in a cloud of scorching ashes as it did
those who dwelt in Pompeii so very long ago.
The great steamer is already near her moorings. The western or newer
half of Naples is hidden by the hill, and I have before my eyes only
the densely peopled ancient city, a rabbit warren of tortuous and
narrow streets, unsavoury and not too safe, yet full of interest if
not of beauty, and possessing a picturesqueness which is all their
own. One salient feature only arrests the eye wandering over this
intricate mass of balconies and house-fronts--the handsome steeple of
the Carmine, a church sorely injured and defaced, but still abounding
in romance. For there lies the boy-king Conradin, slaughtered by
Charles of Anjou in the market-place just outside; and there, too, the
fisherman Masaniello met his end, after a trick of fortune had made
him ruler of Naples for eight days. There is no church in all the city
so full of tragedies as this, which was founded by hermits fleeing
from Mount Carmel twelve hundred years ago, and which ever since has
been close to the heart of the passionate and fierce-tempered people
dwelling round its walls.
I do not doubt there was a time when travellers, arriving at Naples by
sea, found themselves greeted by persons of aspect more pleasing than
those who accost the astonished pilgrim of to-day. There was surely an
age when the lazzaroni were really picturesque, when they lay on the
warm sand in the sunshine, while the bay resounded with the chant of
fishermen, the light-hearted people beguiling their unbounded leisure
with the tuneful strains of "Drunghe, drunghete," of "Tiritomba," or
even the too familiar "Santa Lucia." It cannot be that travellers lied
when they wrote of the amazing picturesqueness of the Neapolitans,
that they painted brown purple, and put on their spectacles of rose as
they approached the land! I wish I had those spectacles; for indeed
the aspect of the quays and wharves of Naples is not attractive, while
the people who throng the boats now pushing off towards the steamer
are just such a crowd of expectant barterers as one may see wherever a
great steamer touches. In the stern of the first stands a naked boy,
brown and lithe. His accomplishment is to dive for pence, which he
does with singular dexterity, cramming all the coins as he catches
them into his mouth, which yet is not so full as to impede his
bellowing like a bull in the effort to attract more custom. Did I
complain of the lack of music? I was hasty; for there comes a second
boat, carrying two nymphs whose devotion to the art has caused them to
forget the use of water, unless it be internally. One has a hoarse
voice, the other a shrill one; and with smiles and antics they pipe
out the cheapest of modern melodies, chanting the eternal "Funicoli,
Funicola," till one wishes the writer of that most paltry song could
be keelhauled, or taught by some other process of similar asperity how
grave is the offence of him who casts one more jingle into the hoarse
throats of the street musicians of to-day. If I flee to the further
side of the steamer and stop my ears from the cacophony, my face is
tickled by the foliage of huge nosegays thrust up on the ends of poles
from a boat so low in the water that I cannot see it. The salt air
grows heavy with the scent of violets and roses. None of my senses is
at peace.
But in another hour the landing was happily accomplished. The
recollection of the mob through which one struggled to the quay, the
noise, the extortion, and the smells had faded away into the limbo of
bad dreams, and I was free to go whither I would in the small portion
of the day remaining and taste whichever sight of Naples pleased me
first. There is nothing more bewildering to a stranger than to be
turned loose in a great city with which he is imperfectly acquainted.
I looked east towards the Carmine; but the handsome campanile lay far
from the centre of the city. I gazed before me, up a long straight
street which cleft the older city with a course as straight as any bow
shot, the house fronts intricate with countless balconies and climbing
plants. It is the Strada del Duomo; but I knew it to be new through
all its lower length, and it leads into the very heart of the dense
old town, where, lost in a maze of vicoli, I could never grasp the
broad and general aspect of this metropolis of many kings.
At that moment I remembered the hill on which the Castle of St. Elmo
stood; and turning westwards along the street which borders the quays,
I came out in no great distance on the Piazza del Municipio, bordered
on the further side by the walls and towers of Castel Nuovo, that old
royal castle of Anjou and Aragon, which saw so many tragedies wrought
within its walls, and holds some still, as I shall tell in time, for
the better persuasion of any who may be disposed to set down the
accusations of history as distant and vague charges, which cannot
nowadays be brought to the test of sight. Before my eyes rises the
white priory of San Martino topping the hillside high above the town,
and it is to that point that I am hastening ere the gold light of the
afternoon fades off the bay, and the grey shades of the early dusk rob
the islands of their sunset colours. It is a long climb up to the
belvedere of the low white building. The Neapolitans believed in days
not long distant that vast caverns of almost immeasurable extent
branched out laterally from the dungeons of St. Elmo and ran down
beneath the city even to Castel Nuovo, making a secret communication
between the garrisons of the two fortresses on which the security of
Naples most depended. The story is not true. The vaults of St. Elmo do
not reach so far, and are not more extensive than the circuit of the
castle. But indeed these hillsides on which Naples lies are pierced so
frequently by caverns, so many tales are told of grottoes known and
unknown in every spine of rock, that the wildest stories of mysterious
passages have found ready credence; and there are doubtless many
children, old and young, in Naples who believe that one may walk
beneath the earth from St. Elmo to Castel Nuovo no less firmly than
they credit the existence of vast caverns filled with gold and jewels
lying underneath Castel dell'Uovo, guarded for ever from the sight of
man by the chafing of the waves.
Naples presents us with a strange blend of romance and common
sense--the modern spirit, practical and useful, setting itself with
something like the energy of the old Italian genius towards the
gigantic task of acquiring the arts of government, and turning a
people enslaved for centuries into one which can wield the hammer of
its own great destinies. "L'Italia e fatta," said Massimo d'Azeglio,
"ma chi fara ora gli Italiani?" It was the question of a patriot, and
it may be that it is not wholly answered yet. The most careless of
observers can see that some things still go wrong in Italy, that the
Italians are not yet wholly made, and it is the easiest as it is the
stupidest of tasks to demonstrate that thirty years of freedom have
not taught the youngest nation what the oldest took eight centuries to
learn. It galls me to hear the supercilious remarks dropped by
strangers coming from a country where serious difficulties of
government have not existed in the memory of man, the casual wisdom of
critics who look around too carelessly to note the energy with which
one by one the roots of evil are plucked up, and the refuse of the
long tyranny cleared away. I am not writing a political tract; but I
say once for all that the recent history of Italy can show more
triumphs than its failures; and the day will surely come when the
indomitable courage of her rulers shall purge the country of those
cankers which for centuries ate out her manhood.
"We do not serve the dead--the past is past.
God lives, and lifts his glorious mornings up
Before the eyes of men awake at last,
Who put away the meats they used to sup,
And down upon the dust of earth outcast
The dregs remaining of the ancient cup,
Then turn to wakeful prayer and worthy act."
Dear prophetess and poet, who once from Casa Guidi sang so bravely of
the future, kindling the love of Italy in many a heart where it has
since grown into a passion,--it is coming true! It may be that
fulfilment loiters, but Heaven does not disappoint mankind of hopes so
great as these. They are of the sort with which God keeps troth. The
child who went by singing "O bella liberta, o bella!" does not flute
so sweetly now he is a man, but his hands have taken hold, and his
heart is set on the greatness of his motherland.
The sun lies thick and hot in the Toledo, that long and crowded street
which is the chief thoroughfare of Naples. It is hotter still when,
having toiled as far as the museum, I turn off along the Corso
Vittorio Emmanuele, which winds along the hillside, giving at each
turn grand views across the town and harbour towards Capri shining in
the west. A little way down the Corso is a flight of steps, long,
tortuous and steep, yet forming much the pleasantest approach to the
white priory whither every visitor to Naples goes once at least
towards the hour of sunset. As one mounts, the city drops away, and
the long semicircle of hills behind it rises into sight, green rounded
hills, bearing on their summits palms which stand out sharp and dark
against the sky. With every convolution of the stairs one sees more
and more of the great plain out of which Vesuvius rises,--the Campagna
Felice, a purple flat, stretching from the base of the volcano as far
as that mountain chain which marks the limit of its power. Out of the
mountains comes a fresh cool wind, and all the city sparkles in the
sun.
So I went up among the housetops till at length I reached an open
space bounded by a rampart whence one looked down upon the town. On
the further side a gateway gave admission to a courtyard, and that
again to a corridor of the old priory, through which a guide led me
with vain pointings toward the chamber containing the "Presepe," a
vast model of the scene of the Nativity. Mary sits upon a height under
a fragment of an old Greek building; while all the valleys are filled
with the procession of the kings. Their goods are being unloaded from
the troops of asses which bore them. In the meadows sheep are grazing,
cows are being milked; and the sky is filled with choirs of angels. It
is an ingenious, theatrical toy, but not half so pretty as the sunset,
which I came to see. So, with some indignation of my guide, I pressed
on through an exquisitely cool arcaded courtyard of white marble, its
centre occupied by a garden wherein palms and roses grew almost
profuse enough to hide the ancient draw well, with its chain and
bucket lying as if they waited for some brother told off by the Prior
to draw water for the rest. In one corner of this courtyard a doorway
gives admission to the belvedere, a little chamber with two windows,
whereof one looks towards the plain behind Vesuvius, and the other
gives upon Posilipo.
As I stepped out on the belvedere the sun was dropping fast towards
Posilipo, and wide flashes of gold were spreading over all the
cup-shaped bay. Far out at sea, between the two horns of the gulf, the
dark peaks of Capri caught the light, and presently the glow blazed
more brightly in the west, and all the shores where Sorrento lies
began to quiver softly in the sunset. Vesuvius was grim and black; a
pillar of dark smoke mounted slowly from its summit, and stretched
across the paling sky like a banner floating defiantly from some tall
citadel. Deep down beneath me lay the white city, a forest of domes
and house-fronts which seemed at first impenetrable. But ere long the
royal palace detached itself from the other buildings, and I could
distinguish Castel Nuovo, with its old round towers, looking very dark
and grim, while on the left a forest of domes and spires rose out of
the densely crowded streets which have known so many masters and have
allured conquerors from lands so very far away. A faint brown haze
crept down from the hilltops, the first touch of evening chilled the
air, but the seaward sky was marvellously clear, and the wide bay
gleamed with gold and purple lights.
CHAPTER II
THE ANCIENT MARVELS OF THE PHLEGRAEAN FIELDS
It is a morning of alternate sun and shadow. The clouds are flying low
across the city, so that now one dome and now another flashes into
light and the orange groves shine green and gold among the square
white houses. All the high range of the Sorrento mountains lies in
shadow, but on the sea the colours are glowing warm and bright, here a
tender blue, there deepening into grey, and again, nearer into shore,
a marvellous rich tint which has no name, but is azure and emerald in
a single moment. Away across the crescent of the gulf a crowd of
fishing boats are putting forth from Torre del Greco or Torre dell'
Annunziata. Even at this distance one can see how they set their huge
triangular sails and scatter, some one way, some another, searching
each perhaps for his favourite volcanic shoal; for the largest fish
lurk always in the hollows of those lava reefs which have from time to
time burst out of the bottom of the bay. Some, perhaps, are sailing
for the coral fishery upon the coast of Africa, to which great numbers
go still in this month of April out of all the harbours beneath
Vesuvius, though the profits are not what they were, and the trade is
falling upon evil days. As for the mountain, he has cleared himself of
clouds, and from his summit a heavy coil of smoke uncurls itself
lazily and spreads like a pennant stretching far across the sky.
All these things and more I have time to notice while I trudge along
above the housetops of the city, those flat roofs named _astrici_
which are such pleasant lounges on the summer evenings when the blue
bay is dotted over with white sails and the shadows deepen on the
flanks of Vesuvius or the distant line of the Sorrento coast. At
length the road approaching the ridge of hill whose point forms the
headland of Posilipo drops swiftly, and I find myself in face of a
short ascent leading to the mouth of the very ancient grotto by which,
these two thousand years and more, those who fared from Naples unto
Pozzuoli have saved themselves the trouble of the hill.
It is absolutely necessary to pause and consider this hill, to which
so much of the rare beauty of Naples is to be attributed. For the
moment I set aside its legends and traditions, and turn my attention
to the eminence itself. It is a cliff of yellow rock, whose
consistency somewhat resembles sandstone, evidently worked without
much difficulty, since it has been quarried out into vast cavities.
The rock is tufa. It is a volcanic product, and forms the staple not
only of the headland, but also of all the site of Naples and the
rising ground behind it up to the base of the blue Apennines, which
are seen continually towering in the distance beyond Vesuvius.
Thus at Naples one may distinguish between the eternal hills and those
which have no title to the name. Of the latter is Posilipo, formed as
I said out of volcanic ash. That ash was ejected underneath the sea,
and having been compacted into rock by the action of the water was
upreared by some convulsion long since forgotten. It is an intrusion
on the landscape--a very ancient one, certainly--but it has nothing
to do with the great mountain-chain which hems in the Neapolitan
Campagna and ends at last in the Sorrento peninsula and Capri. All the
most fertile plain which lies within that barrier was once beneath the
sea, which flowed up to the bases of the mountains. There is no doubt
about it. The rock of Posilipo contains shells of fish now living in
the bay. From Gaeta to Castellammare stretched one wide inlet of the
sea. But underneath the water volcanic ash was being cast out, as it
is still at certain spots within the bay; the heaps of ash and pumice
stone grew into shoals and reefs, were uplifted into hills, the sea
flowed back from its uptilted bed, and the coasts of Naples and of
Baiae assumed some outline roughly similar to that which they possess
at present.
Of course all this is very ancient history, far beyond the ken of
written records, or even the faintest whisper of tradition, unless,
indeed, in the awe with which ancient writers alluded to the Phlegraean
fields, fabled in old time to be the gate of hell, we may detect some
lingering memory of the horrible convulsion which drove back the sea,
and out of its deserted bed reared up this wilderness of ash and
craters. But speculations of this kind are rather idle. We had better
turn towards the grottoes, which are, at least in part, the work of
men whose doings on this earth are known to history. The one, of
course, is wholly modern, a construction of our own age for the
accommodation of the steam tramway; but the other, through which one
walks or drives, is certainly as old as the Emperor Augustus, and has
sometimes been supposed to possess an antiquity far greater than that.
It seems remarkable that the Romans should have esteemed it easier to
bore through the cliff than to make a road across the headland.
Indeed, there were villas on Posilipo, and there must surely have been
a road of some sort from very early times, though it must be admitted
that the founders of Naples did not go to Pozzuoli by the coast as we
do. The old road climbed up directly from the city to Antignano, in
the direction of Camaldoli, and kept along the ridge as far as
possible. The coast road began to be used when the tunnel had been
made. Still there must have been at least a track across the headland,
and one wonders why the Romans did not improve it, in preference to
boring underground. The ease with which the soft stone can be worked
may account partially for their choice; but it is not to be forgotten
that numberless caves, whether natural or artificial, exist in the
cliffs at Posilipo and Pizzofalcone, giving occasion to the quick
fancy of the Neapolitans to devise wild tales of buried treasure and
of strange fierce beasts which guard it from the greed of men. The old
legends of the Cimmerians who dwelt in dark caverns of the Phlegraean
fields present themselves to mind in this connection, and without
following out this mysterious subject further into the mists which
envelope it, we may recognise the possibility that some among these
caverns are far older than is commonly believed. Of course the
preference of the Romans for tunnelling is explained at once, if we
may suppose that by enlarging existing caverns they found their tunnel
already partly made.
[Illustration: POZZUOLI]
"I do not know," cries Capaccio, an ancient topographer who may yet be
read with pleasure, though the grapes have ripened three hundred times
above his tomb, "I do not know whether the Posilipo is more adorned by
the grotto or the grotto by Posilipo." I really cannot guess what he
meant. It sounds like the despairing observation of a writer at a
loss for matter. We will leave him to resolve his own puzzle and go on
through the darkness of the ill-lighted grotto--no pleasanter now than
when Seneca grumbled at its dust and darkness--sparing some thought
for that great festival which on the 7th of September every year turns
this dark highway into a pandemonium of noise and riot. The festival
of Piedigrotta is held as much within the tunnel as on the open space
outside, where stands the church whose Madonna furnishes a devotional
pretext for all the racket. Indeed it is almost more wild and whirling
within than without; for one need not become a boy again to understand
that the joys of rushing up and down, wearing a fantastic paper cap,
blowing shrieks upon a catcall, and brandishing a Chinese lantern,
must be infinitely greater in the bowels of the hill than in the open
air. Of course it is not only, nor even chiefly, a feast for children.
All the lower classes rejoice at Piedigrotta, and often with the best
of cause; for it happens not infrequently that the sky, which for many
weeks has been pitiless and brazen, clouds and breaks about that time,
the welcome rain falls, the streets grow cool again, and laughter
rises from end to end of the reviving city.
Of Fuorigrotta, the unpleasing village at the further end of the
grotto, I have nothing to say, unless it be to express the wish that
Giacomo Leopardi, who lies in the church of San Vitale, lay elsewhere.
That superb poet and fine scholar whose verses upon Italy not yet
reborn rank by their majesty and fire next after those of Dante, and
who yet could produce a poem rendering so nobly the solitude of
contemplation as that which commences--
"Che fai tu luna in ciel, dimmi, che fai,
Silenziosa luna!"
this man should have lain upon some mountain-top, among the scent of
rosemary and of fragrant myrtle, rather than in such a reeking dirty
village as Fuorigrotta.
But I forget!--the compelling interest of this day's journey is not
literary. A short walk from Fuorigrotta brings me to a point where the
road turns slightly upward to the right, leading me to the brow of a
hill, over which I look into a wooded hollow--none other than the Lago
d'Agnano, once a crater, then a volcanic lake. Oddly enough, it is not
mentioned as a lake by any ancient writer. Pliny describes the Grotta
del Cane, which we are about to visit, but says not a word of any
lake. This fact, with some others, suggests that the water appeared in
this old crater only in the Middle Ages; though it really does not
matter much, for it is gone now. The bottom has been reft from the
fishes and converted into fertile soil. The sloping heights which wall
the basin have a waste and somewhat blasted aspect; but I was not
granted time to muse on these appearances before a smiling but
determined brigand, belonging to the class of guides, sauntered up
with a small cur running at his heels and made me aware that I had
reached the entrance of the Dog Grotto.
I might have known it; for, in fact, through many centuries up to that
recent year when it pleased the Italians to drain the lake, the life
of the small dogs dwelling in this neighbourhood has been composed of
progresses from grotto to lake and back again, first held up by the
heels to be stifled by the poisonous gas, then soused head over ears
in the lake with instructions to recover quickly because another
carriage was coming down the hill. Thus lake and grotto were twin
branches of one establishment, now dissolved. Perhaps the lake was the
more important of the two, since it is easier to stifle a dog or man
than to revive him; and on many occasions there would have been
melancholy accidents had not the cooling waters been at hand. For
instance it is related by M. de Villamont, who came this way when the
seventeenth century was very young indeed, that M. de Tournon, a few
years before, desiring to carry off a bit of the roof of the grotto,
was unhappily overcome by the fumes as he stood chipping off the piece
he fancied, and tumbled on the floor, as likely to perish as could be
wished by the bitterest foe of those who spoil ancient monuments. His
friends promptly dragged him out and tossed him into the lake. It is
true the cure found so successful with dogs proved somewhat less so
with M. de Tournon, for he died a few days later. Yet had the lake
been dry, as it is to-day, he would have died in the cave, which would
surely have been worse.
The little dog--he was hardly better than a puppy--looked at me and
wagged his tail hopefully. I understood him perfectly. He had detected
my nationality; and I resolved to be no less humane than a
countrywoman of my own who visited this grotto no great while ago, and
who, when asked by the brigand whether he should put the dog in,
answered hastily, "Certainly not." "Ah!" said the guide, "you are
Englees! If you had been American you would have said, 'Why,
certainly.'" I made the same condition. The fellow shrugged his
shoulders. He did not care, he knew another way of extorting as many
francs from me; and accordingly we all went gaily down the hill,
preceded by the happy cur, running on with tail erect, till we reached
a gate in the wall through which we passed to the Grotta del Cane.
A low entrance, hardly more than a man's height, a long tubular
passage of uniform dimensions sloping backwards into the bowels of the
hill--such is all one sees on approaching the Dog Grotto. A misty
exhalation rises from the floor and maintains its level while the
ground slopes downwards. Thus, if a man entered, the whitish vapour
would cling at first about his feet. A few steps further would bring
it to his knees, then waist high, and in a little more it would rise
about his mouth and nostrils and become a shroud indeed; for the gas
is carbonic acid, and destroys all human life. King Charles the Eighth
of France, who flashed across the sky of Naples as a conqueror, came
here in the short space of time before he left it as a fugitive,
bringing with him a donkey, on which he tried the effects of the gas.
I do not know why he selected that animal; but the poor brute died. So
did two slaves, whom Don Pietro di Toledo, one of the early Spanish
viceroys, used to decide the question whether any of the virtue had
gone out of the gas. That question is settled more humanely now. The
guide takes a torch, kindles it to a bright flame, and plunges it into
the vapour. It goes out instantly; and when the act has been repeated
some half-dozen times the gas, impregnated with smoke, assumes the
appearance of a silver sea, flowing in rippling waves against the
black walls of the cavern.
With all its curiosity the Dog Grotto is a deadly little hole, in
which the world takes much less interest nowadays than it does in many
other objects in the neighbourhood of the Siren city, going indeed by
preference to see those which are beautiful, whereas not many
generations ago it rushed off hastily to see first those which are
odd. For that reason many visitors to Naples neglect this region of
the Phlegraean fields and are content to wait the natural occasion for
visiting the mouth of Styx, over which all created beings must be
ferried before they reach the nether world. It is a pity; for, judged
from the point of beauty solely, there is enough in the shore of the
Bay of Baiae to content most men. The road mounts upon the ridge which
parts the slope of Lago d'Agnano from the sea. One looks down from
the spine over a broken land of vineyards to a curved bay, an almost
perfect semicircle, bounded on the left by the height of Posilipo,
with the high crag of the Island of Nisida, and on the right by Capo
Miseno, the point which took its name from the old Trojan trumpeter
who made the long perilous voyage with AEneas, but perished as he
reached the promised land where at last the wanderers were to find
rest. The headland, which, like every other eminence in sight, is
purely volcanic, is a lofty mass of tufa, united with the land by a
lower tongue, like a mere causeway; and on the nearer side stands the
Castle of Baiae, with the insignificant townlet which bears on its
small shoulders the burden of so great a name. Midway in the bay the
ancient town of Pozzuoli nestles by the water's edge, deserted this
long while by all the trade which brought it into touch with
Alexandria and many another city further east, filling its harbour
with strange ships, crowding its quays with swarthy sailors, and with
silks and spices of the Orient. All that old consequence has gone now
like a dream, and no one visits the cluster of old brown houses for
any other reason than to see that which is still left of its ancient
greatness. But before going down the hill, I turn aside towards a
gateway on my right, which admits me to a place of strange and curious
interest. It is the Solfatara, and is nothing more or less than the
crater of a half-extinct volcano, which, having lain torpid for full
seven centuries, is now a striking proof of the fertility of volcanic
soil, and the speed with which Nature will haste to spread her lushest
vegetation even over a thin crust which covers seething fires. It was
so once with the crater of Vesuvius, which, after five centuries of
rest, filled itself with oaks and beeches, and covered its slopes with
fresh grass up to the very summit.
Indeed, on entering the inclosure of the Solfatara, one receives the
impression of treading the winding alleys of a well-kept and lovely
park. The path runs through a pretty wood. The trees are scarcely more
important than a coppice; but under their green shade there grows a
wealth of flowers of every colour, glowing in the soft sunshine which
filters through the boughs. There is the white gum-cistus, which is so
strangely like the white wild rose of English hedges, and the
branching asphodel, with myriads of those exquisite anemones, lilac
and purple, which make the woods of Italy in springtime a perpetual
joy to us who come from colder climates; and among these, a profusion
of smaller blossoms trailing on the ground, crimson, white and orange,
making such a mass of colour as the most cunning gardener would seek
vainly to produce. One lingers and delays among these woods, doubting
whether any sight which may be shown one further on can compensate for
the loss of the cool glades.
But already over the green coppice bare grey hillsides have come in
sight. They are the walls of the old crater, and here and there a puff
of white smoke curling out of a cleft reminds me that the flowers are
only here on sufferance, and that the whole hollow is in fact but
waiting the moment when its hidden fires will break forth again, and
vomit destruction over all the country. A few yards further on the
coppice falls away. The flowers persist in carpeting the ground; but
in a little way they too cease, the soil grows grey and blasted. Full
in front there rises a strange scene of desolation. The wall of the
crater is precipitous and black. At its base there are openings and
piles of discoloured earth which suggest the debris of some factory of
chemicals, an impression which is driven home by the yellow stains of
sulphur which lie in every direction on the grey bottom of the crater.
From one vast rent in the soil a towering pillar of white smoke pours
out with a loud hissing noise, and blows away in wreaths and coils
over the dark surface of the cliff.
There is something curiously arresting in this quick passage from a
green glade carpeted with flowers to the calcined ash and the grey
desolation of this broken hillside. Of vegetation there is almost
none, except a stunted heather which creeps hardily towards the blast
hole. A little way off, towards the right, lies a level space sunk
beneath the surrounding land, not unlike the fashion of an asphalt
skating rink, so even in its surface that it resembles the work of
man, and one strolls towards it to discover with what purpose anyone
had dared to tamper with the soil in a spot where so thin a crust lies
over bottomless pits of fire. But when one steps out upon the level
flat, it reveals itself at once to be no human work. The guide stamps
with his foot, and remarks that the sound is hollow. It is indeed,
most unpleasantly so. He jumps upon it, and the surface quivers. You
beg him to spare you further demonstrations, and walking gingerly on
tiptoe, wishing at each step that you were safe in Regent Street once
more, you follow him out towards the middle of this devilish crust,
which rocks so easily and covers something which you hope devoutly you
may never see. Midway in the expanse the fellow pauses in triumph--he
has reached what he is confident will please you. He is standing by a
hole, just such an opening as is made in a frozen lake in winter for
the watering of animals. From it there emerges a little vapour and a
curious low sound, like that which a child will make with pouting
lips. The guide grins, crouching by the opening; you, on the other
hand, hang back, in doubt whether the crust may not break off and
suddenly enlarge the hole. You are encouraged forwards, and at last,
peering nervously down the hole, you see with keen and lively interest
that the crust appeared to have about the thickness of your
walking-stick, at which depth there is a lake of boiling mud. The grey
mud stirs and seethes in the round vent-hole, rising and falling,
while on its surface the gas collects slowly into a huge bubble, which
forms and bursts and then collects again.
For my part I do not deny that the sight fascinated me, but it
deprived me of all wish to tread further on that shaking crust, and I
sped back as lightly as I might, wishing all the way for wings, to
where there was at least sound, green earth for a footing, in place of
pumice stone and hardened mud, which some day, surely, will fly into
splinters, and leave the seething, steaming lake once more open to the
heavens.
[Illustration: POZZUOLI]
From the hillside just beyond the gate of the Solfatara one gazes down
on the town of Pozzuoli, brown and ancient, looking, I do not doubt,
much the same unto this hour as when the Apostle Paul landed there
from the _Castor and Pollux_, a ship of Alexandria which had wintered
in the Island of Melita. But if the town itself, the very houses
clustered on the hill, preserve the aspect which they bore twenty
centuries ago, so much cannot be said for the sea-front, which is
vastly changed. Pozzuoli in those days must have rung with the noise
of ships entering or departing. Its quays were clamorous with all
the speeches of the East; its great trade in corn needed long
warehouses near the water's edge; its amphitheatre was built for the
games of a people numbering many thousands. But now the little boats
which come and go are too few to break the long silence of the city,
and there are scarce any other noises in the place than the shout of
children at their games, or the loud crack of the vetturino's whip as
the strangers rattle through the streets on their way to Baiae.
It was the fall of Capua which made the trade of Pozzuoli, and it was
the rise of Ostia that destroyed it. Capua, long the first town of
Italy by reason of its commerce and its luxury, lost that pre-eminence
in the year 211 B.C., when the Romans avenged the adhesion of the city
to the cause of Hannibal. That act of punishment made Rome the chief
mart of merchants from the East, and the nearest port to the Eternal
City being Pozzuoli, the trade flowed thither naturally. Naples no
doubt had a finer harbour; but Naples was not in Roman hands, while
Pozzuoli was. Ostia, before the days of the Emperor Claudius, who
carried out great works there, was a port of smallest consequence.
Thus the harbour of Pozzuoli was continually full of ships. They came
from Spain, from Sardinia, from Elba, bringing iron, which was wrought
into fine tools by cunning workmen of the town; from Africa, from
Cyprus, and all the trading ports of Asia Minor and the isles of the
AEgean. Thither came also the merchants of Phoenicia, bringing with
them all those gorgeous wares which moved the prophet Ezekiel to utter
so great a chant of glory and its doom. "Tarshish was thy merchant by
reason of the multitude of all kinds of riches; with silver, iron,
tin, and lead they traded in thy fairs.... These were thy merchants in
all sorts of things, in blue clothes and broidered work and in chests
of rich apparel, bound with cords and made of cedar among thy
merchandise. The ships of Tarshish did sing of thee in thy market.
Thou wast replenished and made very glorious in the midst of the
seas." All that most noble description of the commerce of Tyre returns
irresistibly upon the mind when one looks back on the greatness of
Pozzuoli, where the Tyrians themselves had a mighty factory and all
the nations of the East brought their wares for sale. Most of all the
town rejoiced when the great fleet hove in sight which came each year
from Egypt in the spring. Seneca has left us a description of the
stir. The fleet of traders was preceded some way in advance by light,
swift sailing ships which heralded its coming. They could be known a
long way off, for they sailed through the narrow strait between Capri
and the mainland with topsails flying, a privilege allowed to none but
ships of Alexandria. Then all the town made ready to hasten to the
water's edge, to watch the sailors dancing on the quays, or to gloat
over the wonders which had travelled thither from Arabia, India, and
perhaps even far Cathay.
Well, all this is an old story now--too old, perhaps, to be of any
striking interest--yet here upon the shore is still the vast old
Temple of Serapis, the Egyptian deity whom the strangers worshipped.
One knows not by what slow stages the Egyptians departed and the
ancient temple was deserted. The only certain fact is that at some
period the whole inclosure was buried deep beneath the sea, and after
long centuries raised up again by some fresh movement of the swaying
shore.
[Illustration: COLUMNS IN THE SERAPEON, POZZUOLI]
Strange as this seems to those who have not watched the perpetual
heavings and subsidences of a volcanic land, the testimony of the fact
is unmistakably in sight of all. For the sacred inclosure once
hallowed to the rite of Serapis is still not allotted to any other
purpose; and the visitor who enters it finds many of the ancient
columns still erect. It is a vast quadrangle, once paved with squares
of marble. There was a covered peristyle, and in the centre another
smaller temple. Many of the columns of fine marble which once adorned
the abode of the goddess were reft from her in the last century, when
the spot was cleared of all the soil and brushwood which had grown up
about it; but three huge pillars of cipollino, once forming part of
the pronaos, are still erect; and what is singular about them is that,
beginning at a height of some twelve feet from the ground and
extending some nine feet further up, the marble is honeycombed with
holes, drilled in countless numbers deep into the round surface of the
columns.
There is no animal in earth or air which will attack stone in this
destructive manner; but in the sea there is a little bivalve, called
by naturalists "lithodomus," whose only happiness lies in boring. This
animal is still found plentifully in the Bay of Baiae. His shells still
lie in the perforations of the columns; and it is thus demonstrated
that the ancient temple must have been plunged beneath the sea, that
it lay there long ages, till at length some fresh convulsion reared it
up once more out of the reach of fish. Surely few buildings have
sustained so strange a fate!
The holes drilled by the patient lithodomus, as I have said, do not
extend through the whole height of the column, but have a range of
about nine feet only, which is thus the measure of the space left for
the operations of the busy spoiler. Above the ring of perforations one
sees the indications of ordinary weathering, so that the upper edge
of the holes doubtless marks the level of high water, and the summit
of the columns stood up above the waves. But one does not see readily
what protected the lower portion of the marble. Possibly, before the
land swayed downwards something fell which covered them.
In the twelfth century the Solfatara broke forth into eruption for the
last time. The scoriae and stones fell thick in Pozzuoli, and they
filled the court of the Serapeon to the height of some twelve feet.
Probably the sea had then already stolen into the courtyard; and it
may be that the earthquakes attending the eruption caused the
subsidence which left the lithodomus free to crawl and bore upon the
stones which saw the ancient mysteries of Serapis. At any rate it was
another volcanic outburst which raised the dripping columns from the
sea in 1538, since which time the land has been swaying slowly down
once more, so that now if anyone cares to scratch the gravel in the
courtyard he will find he has constructed a pool of clear sea water.
It is a strange and terrible thing to realise the existence of hidden
forces which can sway the solid earth as lightly as a puff of wind
disturbs an awning; none the less terrible because the ground has
risen and fallen so very gently that the pillars stand erect upon
their bases. Once more, as at the Solfatara, one has the sense of
treading over some vast chasm filled with a sleeping power which may
awake at any moment. Let us go on beyond the city and see what has
happened elsewhere upon this bay, so beautiful and yet so deadly, a
strange dwelling-place for men who have but one life to pass on the
surface of this earth.
In passing out of Pozzuoli one sees upon the right the vine-clad
slopes of Monte Barbaro. That also is a crater, the loftiest in the
Phlegraean fields, but long at rest. The peasants believe the mountain
to contain vast treasures--statues of kings and queens, all cast of
solid gold, with heaps of coin and jewels so immense that great ships
would be needed to carry them away. These tales are very old. I
sometimes wonder whether they may not have had their source in dim
memory of the great hoard of treasure which the Goths stored in the
citadel of Cumae, and which, when their power was utterly broken, they
were supposed to have surrendered to the imperial general Narses.
Perhaps they did not; perhaps--but what is the use of suppositions?
Petrarch heard the stories when he climbed Monte Barbaro in 1343. Many
men, his guides told him, had set out to seek the treasure, but had
not returned, lost in some horrible abyss in the heart of the
mountain. They must have neglected the conditions of success. They
should have watched the moon, and learnt how to catch and prison down
the ghosts which guard the precious heaps, otherwise the whole mass,
even if found, will turn to lumps of coal!
What a wilderness of craters! Small wonder if wild tales exist yet in
a district which in old days, and even modern ones, has been
encompassed with fear. One volcano is enough to fill the country east
of Naples with terror. But here are many--active, doubtless, in very
different ages--Monte Barbaro, Monte Cigliano, Monte Campana, Monte
Grillo, which hems in the more recent crater of Avernus much as Somma
encircles the eruptive crater of Vesuvius. What terrible sights must
have been witnessed here in those far-distant days when these and
other craters were in action!--"affliction such as was not from the
beginning of the creation which God created" until then! But a few
miles away across the sea is Monte Epomeo, towering out of Ischia.
That was the chief vent of the volcanic forces in Roman times; and
then the Phlegraean fields were still. Epomeo has been silent for five
centuries; but that proves nothing, and there are people who suggest
that the awful earthquake which destroyed Casamicciola may be just
such a prelude to the awakening of Epomeo as was the convulsion which
shook Pompeii to its foundations sixteen years before its final
destruction. _Di avertite omen!_
We need not, however, go back five centuries for facts that bid men
heed what may be passing underground about the shores of this blue
bay. Here is one too large to be overlooked, immediately in front of
us--no other than the green slope of Monte Nuovo, a hill of aspect
both innocent and ancient, ridged with a few pine trees by whose aid
the mountain contrives to look as if it had stood there beside the
Lucrine Lake as long as any eminence in sight. This is a false
pretension. There was no such mountain when Petrarch climbed the
neighbouring height, nor for full two centuries afterwards. What
Petrarch saw exists no longer. He looked down upon the Lucrine Lake
connected with the sea by a deep channel, and formed with Lake Avernus
into one wide inlet fit for shipping. This was the Portus Julius, a
harbour so large that the whole Roman fleet could manoeuvre in it.
The canals and piers were in existence less than four centuries ago;
and this great work, so remarkable a witness to the sea power of the
Romans, would doubtless have lasted unto our day had it not been for
the intrusion of Monte Nuovo, which destroyed the channels and
reduced the Lucrine Lake to the dimensions of a sedgy duck pond.
The catastrophe is worth describing, for no other in historic times
has so greatly changed the aspect of this coast or robbed it of so
large a portion of its beauty. For full two years there had been
constant earthquakes throughout Campania. Some imprisoned force was
heaving and struggling to release itself, and all men began to fear a
great convulsion. On the 27th of September, 1538, the earth tremors
seemed to concentrate themselves around the town of Pozzuoli. More
than twenty shocks struck the town in rapid succession. By noon upon
the 28th the sea was retreating visibly from the pleasant shore beside
the Lucrine Lake, where stood the ruined villa of the Empress
Agrippina, and a more modern villa of the Anjou kings, who were used,
like all their predecessors in Campania, to take their ease in summer
among the luxuriant vegetation of the hills whose volcanic forces were
believed to be lulled in a perpetual sleep.
For three hundred yards the sea fell back, its bottom was exposed, and
the peasants came with carts and carried off the fish left dry upon
the strand. The whole of the flat ground between Lake Avernus and the
sea had been heaved upwards; but at eight o'clock on the following
morning it began to sink again, though not as yet with any violence.
It fell apparently at one spot only, and to a depth of about thirteen
feet, while from the hollow thus formed there burst out a stream of
very cold water, which was investigated cautiously by several persons,
some of whom found it by no means cold, but tepid and sulphurous. Ere
long those who were examining the new spring perceived that the sunken
ground was rising awfully. It was upreared so rapidly that by noon
the hollow had become a hill, and as the new slopes swelled and rose
where never yet had there been a rising ground, the crest burst and
fire broke out from the summit.
"About this time," says one Francesco del Nero, who dwelt at Pozzuoli,
"about this time fire issued forth and formed the great gulf with such
a force, noise, and shining light that I, who was standing in my
garden, was seized with great terror. Forty minutes afterwards, though
unwell, I got upon a neighbouring height, and by my troth it was a
splendid fire, that threw up for a long time much earth and many
stones. They fell back again all round the gulf, so that towards the
sea they formed a heap in the shape of a crossbow, the bow being a
mile and a half and the arrow two-thirds of a mile in dimensions.
Towards Pozzuoli it has formed a hill nearly of the height of Monte
Morello, and for a distance of seventy miles the earth and trees are
covered with ashes. On my own estate I have neither a leaf on the
trees nor a blade of grass.... The ashes that fell were soft,
sulphurous, and heavy. They not only threw down the trees, but an
immense number of birds, hares, and other animals were killed."
Amid such throes and pangs Monte Nuovo was born, and the events of
that natal day suggest hesitation before we label any crater of the
Phlegraean fields with the word "extinct." It is granted that in the
course of geologic ages volcanic forces do expend themselves. The
British Isles, for instance, contain many dead volcanoes, once at
least as formidable as any in the world. But the exhaustion has been
the work of countless ages, and many generations of mankind will come
and go upon this planet before the coasts of Baiae and Misenum are as
safe as those of Cumberland.
While speaking of these terrors, I have been halting by the wayside at
a point, not far beyond the outskirts of Pozzuoli, where two roads
unite, the one going inland beneath the slope of Monte Barbaro, the
other following the outline of the curved shore on which Baiae stands.
The inland road is the one which goes to Cumae, and is entitled to
respect, if not to veneration, as being among the oldest of Italian
highways, the approach to the most ancient Greek settlement in Italy,
mother city of Pozzuoli and of Naples, not to mention the mysterious
Palaeopolis, whose very existence has been disputed by some scholars.
Some say it was more than ten centuries before Christ's birth that the
bold Greeks of Euboea came up this coast, where already their
kinsmen were known as traders, and having settled first on Ischia
moved to the opposite mainland, and built their acropolis upon a crag
of trachyte which overhung the sea. Their life was a long warfare.
More than once they owed salvation to the aid of their kinsmen from
Sicilian cities, yet they made their foundation a mighty power in
Italy. With one hand they held back the fierce Samnite mountaineers
who coveted their wealth, and gave out with the other more and more
freely that noble culture which has had no rival yet.
One must wonder why these strangers coming from the south passed by so
many gulfs and harbours shaped out of the enduring rock only to choose
a site for their new city at the foot of all these craters. It may be
that chance had its part in the matter; in some slight indication of
wind or wave they may have seen the guidance of a deity. Indeed, an
ancient legend says their ships were guided by Apollo, who sent a dove
flying over sea to lead them. But again, the fires of the district
were sacred in their eyes. The subterranean gods were near at hand,
and on the dark shore of Lake Avernus they recognised the path by
which Ulysses sought the shades. The mysteries of religion drew them
there, and the cave of the Cumaean sibyl became the most venerated
shrine in Italy. Lastly, one may perceive that the volcanic tract,
full of terrors for the Etruscan or Samnite mountaineer who looked
down upon its fires from afar, must have made attack difficult from
the land.
Greek cities, such as Cumae, studded the coast of southern Italy.
"Magna Graecia" they called the country; and Greek it was, in blood, in
art, and language. How powerful and how rich is better understood at
Paestum than it can be now at Cumae, where, with the single exception of
the Arco Felice, there remains no dignity of ruin, nothing but waste,
crumbling fragments, half buried in the turf of vineyards. Such
shattered scraps of masonry may aid a skilful archaeologist to imagine
what the city was; but in the path of untrained men they are nothing
but a hindrance, and anyone who has already in his mind a picture of
the greatness of Euboean Cumae had better leave it there without
attempt to verify its accuracy on the spot.
Observations similar to these apply justly to most of the remaining
sights in this much-vaunted district. The guides are perfectly
untrustworthy. They give high-sounding names to every broken wall, and
there is not a burrow in the ground which they cannot connect with
some name that has rung round the world. It is absolutely futile to
hope to recapture the magic with which Virgil clothed this country.
The cave of the Sibyl under the Acropolis of Cumae was destroyed by the
imperial general Narses when he besieged the Goths. The dark, wet
passage on the shore of Lake Avernus, to which the name of the Sibyl
is given by the guides, is probably part of an old subterranean road,
not devoid of interest, but is certainly not worth the discomfort of a
visit. The Lake of Avernus has lost its terrors. It is no longer dark
and menacing, and anyone may satisfy himself by a cursory inspection
that birds by no means shun it now.
The truth is that this region compares ill in attractions with that
upon the other side of Naples. In days not far distant, when brigands
still invested all the roads and byways of the Sorrento peninsula,
strangers found upon the Bay of Baiae almost the only excursion which
they could make in safety; and imbued as every traveller was with
classical tradition, they still discovered on this shore that fabled
beauty which it may once have possessed. There is now little to
suggest the aspect of the coast when Roman fashion turned it into the
most voluptuous abode of pleasure known in any age, and when the shore
was fringed with marble palaces whose immense beauty is certainly not
to be imagined by contemplating any one of the fragments that stud the
hillside, though it may perhaps be realised in some dim way by anyone
who will stand within the atrium of some great house at Pompeii, say
the house of Pansa, who will note the splendour of the vista through
the colonnaded peristyle, and will then remember that the Pompeiian
houses were not famed for beauty, while the palaces of Baiae were.
Baiae, like Cumae, is lost beyond recall. Fairyland is shattered into
fragments; and the guides who baptise them with ridiculous names know
no more than any one of us what it is they say. Really, since the
tragedy of that first great outbreak of Vesuvius did, as Goethe said,
create more pleasure for posterity than any other which has struck
mankind, one is disposed to wish that it had been more widespread. If
only the ashes had rained down a trifle harder at Misenum and at Baiae,
what noble Roman buildings might have survived unto this day,
conserved by the kind wisdom of the mountain! What matter if more of
that generation had been left houseless? It nearly happened, if
Pliny's letter is not exaggerated. "The ashes now began to fall on
us," he says, of his escape with his mother from the palace at
Misenum, "though in no great quantity. I turned my head, and observed
behind us a thick smoke which came rolling after us like a torrent. We
had scarce stepped out of the path when darkness overspread us, not
like the darkness of a cloudy night, nor that when there is no moon,
but that of a closed room when all the lights are out. Nothing was to
be heard but the shrieks of women, the screams of children, and the
cries of men, some calling for their children, others for their
parents, others for their husbands, and only distinguishing each other
by their voices.... At length a glimmering light appeared, which we
imagined to be rather the forerunner of an approaching burst of
flames, as in truth it was, than the return of day. However, the fire
fell at some distance from us. Then again we were immersed in thick
darkness, and a heavy shower of ashes rained upon us, which we were
obliged every now and then to shake off, otherwise we should have been
crushed and buried in the heap...." It is an awful tale. Anyone can
see how nearly all this region escaped the fate of Pompeii, and how
narrowly the modern world lost a greater joy than that of
contemplating the city by the Sarno.
[Illustration: CASTLE OF BAIAE]
However, it did not happen so, and there is comparatively little
satisfaction in describing all the melancholy scraps of what was
marvellously beautiful. I have nothing to say about them which is
not said as fully in the guide-books. There is, however, something
which more piques my interest in the narrow tongue of land parting the
Lucrine Lake from the sea. There is, or was, a causeway here so
ancient that even the Greeks, who settled at Cumae so many centuries
before our era, did not know who built it; and being in the dark about
the matter, put down the construction to no less a person than the god
Hercules, who made it, they declared, for the passage of the oxen
which he had taken from Geryon, the monster whom he slew in Gades. It
was no small work, even for Hercules. The dam was eight stadia long,
nearly a mile, made of large stone slabs laid with such skill that
they withstood the sea for many centuries. Who could have been the
builders of this dam in days so ancient that even the Greek settlers
did not know its origin? Rome was not in those days. There were
factories and traders on the coast,--Phoenicians perhaps. But why
guess about a question so impossible to solve? The curiosity of the
thing is worth noting; for the age of civilisation on these coasts is
very great.
At this spot beside the Lucrine Lake, where the sea is lapping slowly,
almost stealthily, on the one hand, and the diminished waters of the
lake lie still and reedy on the other, one memory, more than any
other, haunts my mind. It cannot have been far from this very spot,
certainly in sight of it, that there stood in old Roman days the villa
of the Empress Agrippina, mother of the Emperor Nero, and it was at
Baiae, lying just across the blue curved bay, that he planned her
murder, as soon as he discovered that she loved power, like himself,
and stood in the way of certain schemes on which he set great store.
The fleet which lay at Capo Miseno, the great naval station of those
days, was commanded by one Anicetus, a freedman, who, being of an
ingenious mechanical turn of mind, devised a ship of a sort likely to
prove useful to any tyrant anxious to speed his friends into the
nether world without suspicion. It had much the same aspect as other
ships when viewed from without; but a careful observer of its inward
parts might notice that the usual tight boltings were replaced by
movable ones, which could be shot back at will, so that on a given
signal the whole ship would fall to pieces. This pretty toy was of
course not designed to make long voyages--it was enough if it would
reach deep water.
Nero was delighted. He saw now how to avoid all scandal. The Empress
was at that moment on the sea, homeward bound from Antium, and
designed to land at Bauli, which lay near Baiae on the bay. The ship
was prepared, the bolts were shot, and the pretty pinnace lay waiting
on the beach at Bauli when the Empress disembarked. And there too was
Nero, come from Baiae on purpose to pay duty to his mother and invite
her to spend the Feast of Minerva with him at Baiae, whither he hoped
she would cross over in the boat which he had had the pleasure of
fitting up with the splendour which was proper to her rank.
Agrippina knew her son, and was suspicious. She would go to Baiae, but
preferred to follow the road in a litter. That night, however, when
the festivities at Baiae were over, her fears vanished. Nero had been
affectionate and dutiful. He had assured her of his love. It would be
churlish to refuse to enter the boat which he had fitted out for her,
and which having been brought over from Bauli now lay waiting for her
on the sands. It was a bright night, brilliant with stars. The bay
must have looked incomparably peaceful and lovely. On the shore there
were crowds of bathers, all the fashionable world of Rome, drawn
thither by the presence of the Emperor, and attracted out by the
beauty of the night. At such a time and place nothing surely could be
planned against her. She went on board with her attendants. The rowers
put off from land. They had gone but a little way when the canopy
under which Agrippina lay crashed down on her and killed one of her
waiting women. A moment's examination showed that it had been weighted
with pigs of lead. Almost at the same moment the murderers on board
withdrew the bolts. The machinery, however, refused to act. The planks
still held together; and the sailors despairing of their bloodmoney,
rushed to the side of the ship and tried to capsize it. They succeeded
so far as to throw the Empress and her attendants into the sea.
Agrippina retained sufficient presence of mind to lie silent on the
water, supporting herself as best she could, while the sailors
thrashed the sea with oars, hoping thus to make an end of their
victim, and one poor girl who thought to save herself by crying out
that she was the Empress had her brains beaten out for her pains. At
last the shore boats, whose owners could not know that they were
interrupting the Emperor's dearest wish, arrived upon the scene,
picked up the Empress, and carried her to her villa on this Lucrine
lake.
It would have been wiser to flee to a greater distance, if indeed
there was safety in any Roman territory for the mother of the Emperor
when he desired to slay her. That night, as she lay bruised and weak,
deserted by her attendants, a band of murderers rushed in, headed by
Anicetus, who thus redeemed his credit with his master when his more
ingenious scheme had failed. "Strike the womb that bore this monster!"
cried the Empress, and so died.
"Then," says Merivale, from whose most vivid story this is but an
outline, "began the torments which never ceased to gnaw the heart
strings of the matricide. Agrippina's spectre flitted before him....
The trumpet heard at her midnight obsequies still blared with ghostly
music from the hill of Misenum."
CHAPTER III
THE BEAUTIES AND TRADITIONS OF THE POSILIPO
WITH SOME OBSERVATIONS UPON VIRGIL THE ENCHANTER
It was setting towards evening when I turned my back on Baiae and drove
through Pozzuoli along the dusty road which runs beside the sea in the
direction of Posilipo. All day I had seen the blunt headland of tufa
lying like a cloud on the further side of the blue bay; and from hour
to hour as I plodded through the blasted country, my thoughts turned
pleasantly to the great rampart which stood solid when all the region
further west was shaken like a cornfield by the wind, and beyond which
lies the city, with its endless human tragedies and its fatal beauty
unimpaired by the possession of many masters. "Bocca baciata non perde
ventura...," the scandalous old proverb has a sweet application to the
city, and the mouth which has been kissed by conquerors and tyrants is
still as fresh and rosy as when first uplifted for the delight of man.
I think this angle of the bay more beautiful than Baiae or Misenum. In
Roman times the opposite shore may have excelled it; but one does not
know the precise form of the ancient coastline. As I advanced towards
the headland, leaving behind the bathing-place of Bagnoli, and passing
out on the wide green flats which at that point occupy the valley
mouth, the lofty crag of Nisida began to detach itself from the
mainland, and a channel of blue sea shining between the two glowed
sweetly in the increasing warmth of evening light. The island is a
crater, a finely broken mass of volcanic rock and verdure, flecked
here with light and there with shadow. One side of the crater lacks
half of its rim, so that there is a little port. Down by the edge of
the many-coloured water is a pier, where half a dozen boats lie
rocking; and from a similar landing-place upon the shingly beach of
the mainland a fisherman is hailing some comrade on the island. The
answering shout floats back faint and distant through the clear air,
and a boat pushes off, sculled slowly by a man standing erect and
facing towards the bow, in the ancient fashion of the Mediterranean.
At this point I dismiss my carriage, for I have many things to think
about, and do not want the company of the chattering, extortionate
vetturino. Having seen him go off up the hill, cracking his whip like
pistol shots, and urging on his eager pony in the full hope of a fare
at the Punta di Posilipo, I stroll on up the long ascent towards the
shoulder of the hill, stopping often to watch the gold light grow
warmer on the sea, tinging the volcanic crags of Ischia, until my
enjoyment of the view is broken by an uninvited companion, who thrusts
himself upon me with a reminder that I have reached the opening of the
Grotto of Sejanus.
I had forgotten all about the grotto, though indeed it was the point
for which I should have made, and but for the interruption of the
lively little Tuscan who acts as custodian, I might have walked by
without going in. I accepted gratefully the voluble assurances that
this is indeed the most wonderful and authentic grotto on the
Posilipo, far surpassing those twin tunnels through which one goes
from Naples to Pozzuoli; and the guide, having caught up a torch of
smouldering tow, and vented a few hearty curses on the Neapolitans,
who lie, he says, without recollection of eternity, conducted me into
a long passage of utter and palpable darkness.
"Ne femmena ne tela a lume di cannela," say the Neapolitans--You must
not judge either a woman or a weft by candlelight. This is very true,
and many a man has suffered from forgetting it. But when it is a case
of grottoes, there is no choice; and accordingly I delivered myself
over to the chatter of the Tuscan.
The lively little man was extolling the superior character of his own
countrymen of Tuscany; and when his torch flickered out with no
warning, leaving us in sudden blackness in the bowels of the earth,
his indignation blazed out fiercely against the worthless knaves who
sold such tow in Naples. I paid little heed to him, for the grandeur
and the silence of the place appeal to the imagination. I was treading
on a smooth and even floor, between walls of tufa which had been
chiselled out so straight that whenever I looked back the entrance
shone behind me like a star across a vast dark sky. The air was sweet
and fresh, filtering through some hidden openings of the rock. The
relighted torch flashed now on Roman brickwork, now on arches of
massive stone built to increase the strength of the vault, and fit it
the better for those great processions of chariots and horsemen which
came and went to the villa at the further end, returning from a
hunting party with dogs which had wearied out the game on the hills of
Astroni, or escorting the gladiators landed at Pozzuoli for some
combat in the theatre which now lies so waste and desolate amid the
vineyards. How this passage must have rung with shouts and laughter in
old Roman days! But now it is as silent as the tomb; and one passes on
a full half-mile in darkness, to emerge at length with heated fancy
and high memories of Roman splendour, on nothing but a ruinous
cottage, a starved vineyard, and a paltry garden-ground of common
vegetables!
It is not possible, one thinks impatiently, that this trumpery of
vines and cabbages can be all there is to see at the further end of a
passage so ancient and hewn with such vast labour through the solid
rock; and indeed, when one's eyes are used to the sunshine, one
perceives that the garden plot lies like a dust heap on the ruins of a
splendid palace. Treading across a patch of vegetables, covering I
know not what remains of marble portico or colonnade, I peered down
through the trails of budding vines into a hollow where some fragments
of old masonry project still from the earth, and after much gazing
perceived that the sides of the hollow rise in tiers, one bank above
another, to the height of seventeen rows. So that here, on this now
lonely creek of the Posilipo, in face of Nisida and all the blue reach
of the Bay of Baiae, there was once a theatre, ringing with shouts and
applause, and by it all the other buildings of a noble mansion. It is
a poor ruin now, stripped of the marbles which once made it splendid.
There are vast structures on the slopes and in the sea itself: an
Odeon, another building seated like a theatre, and relics innumerable
of one of the greatest of all Roman villas, which must have been
incomparably lovely. If only one such might have lasted to our day!
The long darkness of the grotto, the exit on the hillside, where the
ancient splendour is so shattered, combine to create a sense of
mystery which one never loses on the Posilipo. The sea frets and
chafes about the jagged reefs at the base of the headland, echoing and
resounding in caves of vast antiquity, where broken marbles and
defaced inscriptions give substance to the tales of treasure which the
fishers say lies hidden in them to this hour. The dullest of mankind
would be smitten with some touch of fancy on this spot, much more the
quick-witted Neapolitans, whose rich imagination has run riot among
the relics of a splendid past.
The impression of this lonely cliff is characteristic of all the
headland. I send away my guide, who can do nothing more for me, and
perch myself upon a scrap of ancient wall, whence I can look past the
green island of Nisida, full in the warm light of the westering sun,
over the wide bay to where the black peak of Ischia, towering into the
clear sky, begins to shine as if some goddess had brushed it with
liquid gold.
There is a cavern in the cliff at no great distance which the
fishermen call "La Grotta dei Tuoni" (The Cave of Thunders); I
scarcely know why, unless it be because the sea bellows so loudly when
it is driven by the storm wind round the vaults and hollows of the
rock. The cave is accessible only by boat; and, like many another
cleft in the soft tufa of this headland, it is believed to hide
immeasurable riches, left there since the days when every cliff bore
its white Roman villa, and all the shady caverns were the cool arbours
of their pleasure grounds. From the creek of Marechiano, which cleaves
the Posilipo in half, up to the very spot on which I sit, there is no
break in the succession of the ruins. Ancient cisterns lie upon the
beaches, the green tide washes over shattered colonnades, the boatmen
peering down through the translucent water as they sink their nets
see the light waver round the foundations of old palaces, and the
seaweeds stir fantastically on the walls. It is little wonder if no
one of them can rid himself of the belief in spirits wandering yet
about the wreck of so much splendour, or shake off the fear
"Lest the dead should, from their sleep
Bursting o'er the starlit deep,
Lead a rapid masque of death
O'er the waters of his path."
As for this cave of the thunders, the story goes that one day certain
Englishmen presented themselves before a boatman who was lounging on
the quay of Santa Lucia at Naples and demanded whether he would take
them on his skiff into the grotto.
Pepino had seen the cavern many times, and did not fear it. "Why not?"
he said, and the bargain was struck. As they rowed across the crescent
bay of the Chiaia, past the Palazzo di Donna Anna, and under the
hillside where the whispering pines grow down the high cliff faces,
and golden lemons glow in the shade of marble terraces, the Englishmen
were very silent; and Pepino, who loved chatter, began to feel
oppressed. He did not quite like the zeal with which they sat studying
a huge volume; for he knew that great books were of more use to
magicians than to honest people, who were quite content with little
ones, or better still with none at all. So he looked askance at the
English students as he guided his boat to the mouth of the grotto of
the thunders, and ran in out of the sunshine to the cool green shades
and wavering lights among which the old treasure of the Romans lies
concealed.
[Illustration: FISHING STAGE, SANTA LUCIA, NAPLES.]
The Englishmen rose up, and one of them, taking the book in both
hands, began to read aloud. Who can tell what were the words? They
were strange and very potent; for as they rolled and echoed round the
sea-cave it seemed as if the vaulted roof rose higher, and Pepino,
glancing this way and that in terror, saw that the level of the water
was sinking. Shelf by shelf the sea sank down the rock, leaving
dripping walls of which no living man had ever seen the shape before;
and Pepino, keeping the boat steady with his oars, shook with fear as
he saw the top of a marble staircase rear itself erect and shiny out
of the depths of the ocean. Still the English student rolled out the
sonorous words, which rang triumphantly through the cave, and still
the water sank stair by stair, till suddenly it paused--the readers
voice had stopped, and slowly, steadily the sea began to rise again.
The spell was broken. A page was missing from the book! The Englishman
in despair clutched at the pages as if he would tear them piecemeal.
Instantly the crash of thunder rang through the cave, the sea surged
back to its old level, the marble staircase leading to the treasure
was engulfed, and the boatman, screaming on the name of the Madonna,
was whirled out of the cavern into the light of day again.
Close below me is a little reef or island of yellow pozzolano stone,
jutting out from the Punta di Coroglio, which is the name of the most
westerly cliff of the Posilipo, that through which the tunnel runs.
Under the island there is a tiny creek with a beach of yellow sand;
the spot is so silent that I can hear the ripple plashing on the
beach. That rock is a famous one. It is the "Scoglio di Virgilio," the
Rock of Virgil, by all tradition a favourite haunt of the great poet,
and the spot in which he practised his enchantments.
Petrarch said he did not believe in those enchantments. But then King
Robert questioned him about them at a moment when both were riding
with a gallant party, and the joy of life was surging high enough to
make men doubt all achievements but those of battle or of love. Had
Petrarch sat alone watching the sunset bathe the Scoglio di Virgilio
with gold, he might have judged the matter differently. At any rate
twenty generations of Neapolitans since his day have accepted the
beliefs of thirty more who went before them, and set down Virgil as a
magician. Why must we be wiser than fifty generations of mankind?
To be a wizard is not to be wicked! Virgil's fair fame is in no
danger. There was no malignity in any of the spells wrought out on
that little headland. Each of them conferred a benefit on the city
which the poet loved. One by one the woes of Naples were assuaged by
the beneficent enchanter; its flies, its serpents, the fatal tendency
of butcher's meat to go bad, exposure to volcanic fires, all were held
in check by the power of the enchanter.
A stranger visiting Naples ten centuries ago would have found it
studded with the ingenious inventions of the wizard. Perhaps the
device for bridling the audacity of Vesuvius might be the first to
strike him. It was nothing less than a horse of bronze bestridden by
an archer, whose notched arrow was ever on the string, its point
directed at the summit of the mountain. This menace sufficed to hold
the unruly demons of the fire in check, and might do so to this hour
were it not that one day a countryman coming into Naples from the
Campagna, and looking at the statue for the hundredth time felt bored
by seeing the archer had not fired off his arrow yet, and so did it
for him. The shaft sped through the air, striking the rim of the
crater, which straightway boiled over and spouted fire, and from that
day to this no man has found the means of placing another arrow on the
string. It is a thousand pities. San Gennaro has taken up the duty
now, and stands pointing imperiously with outstretched hand bidding
the volcano halt. He had some success too. In 1707, when the fires of
the volcano turned night into day, and its smoke converted day into
night, San Gennaro was carried in procession as far as the Porta
Capuana, and had no sooner come in sight of the mountain than the
thunders ceased, the smoke was scattered, the stars appeared, and
Naples was at peace. But as a rule the holiness of the saint impresses
the demons less than the menace of the arrow, and the mountain goes on
burning.
As for the bronze fly which the good poet made and set high on one of
the city gates, where it banished every other insect from the town, it
certainly is not in Naples now. Many people must have wished it were.
The story runs that the young Marcellus was intercepted by Virgil one
day as he was going fowling, and desired to decide whether he would
rather have a bird which would catch all other birds, or a fly which
would drive away all flies. Nobody who knows Naples can doubt the
answer. Marcellus, it is true, thought fit to consult the Emperor
Augustus before replying; but that fact only adds to the weight of his
decision. He decided on the fly, and many a man listening in the
midnight to the deadly humming outside his mosquito curtains will
lament the loss of Virgil's fly.
It is an Englishman, one John of Salisbury, who collects these pretty
tales for us; and he has another which, as it supplies a reason for an
historical fact which must have puzzled many people in the history of
Naples, is the better worth recording, and may indeed have the luck to
please both clever and stupid people in one moment.
The puzzling fact is to discover how on earth it happened that the
city which in Middle Ages bore a somewhat evil reputation for
surrendering itself light-heartedly at the first summons of any
conqueror, yet held such a different repute in earlier days, having
remained faithful to the Greek Empire in Constantinople when Amalfi
had fallen and Salerno received a stranger garrison, which resisted
heroically every attack of Lombard or of Norman, and saw army after
army retire baffled from before its walls. Whither had all that
stout-heartedness fled in the days when French, Spanish, and German
conquerors found no more resistance in the Siren city than in a
beautiful woman to whom one man's love is as much as any other's? How
came that old glory to sink into shame, to accept slavery and to
forget faith? The answer is that in the old days the city was kept by
a spell of the enchanter Virgil.
Virgil, it seems, musing on this point of rock throughout long
moonlight nights, had constructed a palladium. It consisted of a model
of the city, inclosed in a glass bottle, and as long as this fragile
article remained intact the hosts of besiegers encamped in vain
beneath the walls. The Emperor Henry the Sixth was the first who
managed to break in. The city fathers rushed to their palladium to
discover why for the first time it had failed to protect them. The
reason was but too plain. There was a small crack in the glass!
Through that crack all the virtue went out of the palladium, and until
the great upstirring of heroic hearts which the world owes to France
at the close of the eighteenth century, Naples was never credited
again with any marked disposition to resist attack or to strike
courageously for freedom. I am not sure whether those who know best
the inner heart of Naples would claim that the great deeds wrought
since then are to be attributed to any new palladium; but, for my
part, if spells are to be spoken of, I prefer to hold that the long
age of sloth and slavery is that which needs the explanation of black
magic, and that neither the loyal Naples of old days nor the free
Naples of the present time owes any debt to other sources than its own
high spirit and its natural stout heart, which slept for centuries,
but are now awake again.
The setting sun has dropped so far towards the sea that the tide
begins to wash in grey and gold around the yellow cliffs. The bay is
covered with dark shades falling from the sky in masses, and a little
wind rising from the west ruffles the water constantly. Only the ridge
of Ischia yet holds the light, and there it seems as if a river of
soft gold flowed along the mountain-top, vivid and pure, turning all
the peak of Epomeo to a liquid reflection, impalpable as the sky
itself. But the glow fades even as I watch it; and the approach of
chilly evening warns me not to loiter on the lonely hillside. I wander
down across the hollow, passing near the broken theatre, and so strike
a path which climbs up the further hill between high walls and hedges,
where it is already almost dark, bringing me out at length on the main
road which crosses the headland, just where a row of booths is set to
catch the soldi of those Neapolitans who have strayed out here in
search of evening freshness. There is a clear, sharp air upon this
high ground; and the young moon climbing up the sky sends a faint,
silvery light upon the sea. The road winds on as beautifully as a man
need wish. On the left hand rises the hill, on the right the ground
drops in sharp, swift slopes, cleft with deep ravines where the cliff
is sometimes sheer and sometimes passable for men. All these hollows
are filled with vegetation of surpassing beauty--here a belt of dark
green pines, there a grove of oranges thatched over to protect them
from the sun. Golden lemons gleam out of the rich foliage, hanging
thick and numberless upon the trees. The bare stems of fig trees are
bursting out into their first yellow leaf; and the hedges of red roses
and abutilon fill every nook with masses of bright colour unknown
except in lands where spring comes with gentle touch and warm, sweet
days of sunny weather. Far down amid the depths of this luxuriance of
fruit and flowers the sea washes round some creek or curved white
beach, and there built out with terraces and balconies of pure white
stone are villas which repeat the splendour of those Roman homes over
whose ruins they are built and whose altars lie still in the
innumerable caverns which pierce the base of the old legendary
headland.
In the silvery dusk of this spring evening the beauty of these ravines
brimming over with fruits and flowers is quite magical. I pause beside
a low wall, over which a man may lean breast high, and gaze down
through the shadows spreading fast among the trellised paths below.
The fading light has robbed the lemons of their colour; but the
crimson roses are flaming still against a heavy background of dark
firs, and beyond them the path winds out upon a little beach, where
the tide breaks at the foot of yellow cliffs, and a boat is rocking at
her moorings. Beyond the outline of the wooded cliff the grey sea lies
darkening like a steely mirror; and lifting my eyes I can see the spit
of rock on which stands the enchanted Castle of the Egg, black and
grim as ever, and higher still Vesuvius towering amid the pale sky and
the stars, its slowly coiling pillar of dark smoke suffused with a
rosy glow, the reflection of the raging furnace hidden in its cone.
Already one or two lamps are flashing on the shore. The day is nearly
gone, and the beautiful Southern night is come.
Many people had wandered up from Naples to enjoy the taste of
approaching summer on this height, where surely the scent of roses is
more poignant than elsewhere and the outlook over land and sea is of
incomparable beauty. As I walked on slowly down the road my ears
caught the tremulous shrill melody of a mandolin, and a man's voice
near at hand trolled forth the pretty air of "La vera sorrentina." I
stopped to listen. The voice was sweet enough, and some passion was in
the singer.
"Ma la sgrata sorrentina
Non ha maje di me pieta!"
The music came from a little roadside restaurant, half open to the
sky, where a few people sat at tables overlooking the sea. I strolled
in, and sat sipping my vino di Posilipo while the mandolin thrummed
till the singer grew tired, took his fees, and went off to some other
cafe. The wine is not what it was in Capaccio's days. "Semper
Pausilypi vigeat poculum!" cries the jolly topographer, "and may
Jupiter himself lead the toasts!" By all means, if he will; but I fear
the son of Saturn will not be tempted from Olympus by the contents of
the purple beaker set before me at the price of three soldi. "It is
pure, it is fragrant, it is delicious," Capaccio goes on, waxing more
eloquent with every glass. "In the fiercest heat it is grateful to the
stomach, it goeth down easily, it promoteth moisture, it molesteth
neither the liver nor the reins, nor doth it even obfuscate the head!
Its virtue is not of those that pass away; for whether of this year,
last year, or of God knows when, it hath still the scent of flowers,
and lyeth sweetly on the tongue." I think Capaccio must have had a
vineyard here, and sold his wines by auction. Far beneath me I could
hear the washing of the sea, and the moon climbing up the sky
scattered a gleam of silver here and there upon the water. Naples
stretched darkly round the curving shore, while high upon the ridge
the Castle of St. Elmo stood out black and solid against the night
sky, with the low priory in front, sword and cowl dominating the city,
as ever through her history, whether for good or ill.
In dusk or sunshine no man who looks upon this view will need to ask
why Virgil loved it, and desired to be buried near the spot whence he
had been used to watch it. Not far away upon my left, above the grotto
which leads to Pozzuoli, is the tomb traditionally known as his. There
are many who believe and some who doubt; but there is a mediaeval tale
about the matter which is well worth telling. It was commonly reported
in the days of Hohenstaufen and Anjou that the bones of Virgil were
buried in a castle surrounded by the sea. There is no other fortress
to which this could apply than the Castle of the Egg.
In the reign of Roger, King of Sicily, a certain scholar--they are
always English, in these legends!--who had wandered far in quest of
learning, came into the royal presence with a petition. The King, who
found him wise and grave, and took pleasure in his conversation, was
willing to grant his wish, whatever it might be; whereon the
Englishman replied that he would not abuse the royal favour, nor beg
for any mere ephemeral pleasure, but would ask a thing which in the
eyes of men must seem but small, namely, that he might have the bones
of Virgil, wheresoever he might find them in the realm of Sicily. It
was even then long since forgotten in what spot precisely the body of
the great poet had been laid; and it seemed to the King little likely
that a stranger from the north should be able to discover what had
remained hidden from the Neapolitans. So he gave consent, and the
Englishman set forth for Naples, armed with letters to the Duke,
giving him full power to search wherever he would. The citizens
themselves had no fear of his success in a quest where they had often
failed, and so made no effort to restrain him. The scholar searched
and dug, guiding his operations by the power of magic. At last he
broke into the centre of a mountain, where not one cleft betrayed the
existence of any cavity or tomb. There lay the body of the mighty
poet, unchanged and calm as if he slept. Full eleven centuries he had
lain silently in a rest unbroken by the long-resounding tread of
barbarous armies from the north, flooding and desolating the fair
empire which must have seemed to him likely to outlast the world. I
wish that some one of those who broke into the sepulchre, and shed the
light of day once more upon those features which had slept so long in
darkness, had told us with what feelings he looked upon them and saw
the very lips that had spoken to Augustus, and the cheek which Horace
kissed. I think the men who found themselves in the sudden presence of
so much greatness must have stood there with a certain tremor, as
those others did who not long afterwards disturbed the bones of Arthur
and of Guenevere at Glastonbury, daring to lift and touch the long
fair tresses which brought Lancelot to shame.
These men who found the tomb of Virgil would have done well if they
had sealed it up again and lost the secret, so that the bones might
lie unto this hour on the spot where the spirit is so well remembered.
But the English scholar had the King's warrant, and claimed at least
the books on which the wizard's head was propped. Those the Duke of
Naples gave him, but the bones he refused, and had them taken for
greater safety to Castel dell'Uovo, where they lay behind an iron
grating and were shown to anyone who desired to see them. But if they
were at any time disturbed, the air would darken suddenly, high gusts
of storm would roar around the battlements of the castle, and the sea
beating heavily about the rocks would rage as if demanding vengeance
for the insult.
Such is the tale told by Gervasius of Tilbury, who has been dead
almost half as long as Virgil. It may be true or untrue. I am not fond
of climbing up into the judgment seat, or attempting to recognise
white-robed truth in the midst of the throng of less worthy, though
more amusing, characters which throng Italian legend. Least of all on
such a night as this, when the soft wind blowing over the sea from the
enchanted Castle of the Egg fills the air with whispering suggestions
of old dead things and calls back many a tale of inimitable tragedy
wrought out upon the shore of the gulf which lies before me--a furnace
in all ages of hot passions and sensuous delights such as leave deep
marks upon the memory of man. That most wilful quality is not unlike
the echo in the hollow of some overhanging rock. It will repeat the
sounds that please it, but no others, while even those it will
distort, adding something wild or unearthly to every one, however
ordinary. So the memory of the people selects capriciously those
circumstances which it cherishes; and even while it hands them on
from generation to generation it is ever adding fact to fact with the
cunning of him who writes a fairy tale, casting glamour round the
sordid details, struggling towards the beautiful or terrible--even not
seldom towards the scandalous.
A little lower on the slope of the hill, well in sight from the point
at which I sit, there is a vast and ruined building on the very margin
of the sea. In the dusk light I can clearly see its two huge wings
thrust out into the water, and the broken outline of its roof breaking
the pale sky. The tide washes round its foundations. The whole mass
lies black and silent, except at one point where a restaurant has
intruded itself into the shell of a once splendid hall, and lights
flicker round the empty windows which were built for the pleasure of a
court. Three hundred years ago this palace was begun for the wife of a
Spanish viceroy, Donna Anna Carafa. It was never finished, and has
been put to a number of degrading uses, being at one time a quarantine
station, at another a stable for the horses of the tramway, while a
few fishermen have always housed their wives and children in its old
ruined chambers, undeterred by the tales which associate the ruin with
the spirit of the Queen Giovanna.
Queen Giovanna is so great a personage in Naples that it is worth
while to consider her particularly. There are few spots within thirty
miles of Naples where one does not hear of her too amorous life and
her tragic death. I doubt if there are half a dozen guides or
vetturini in all the city who, if asked the name of this great
building, will not answer that it is "Il Palazzo della Regina
Giovanna," and on being further questioned will not tell a doleful
story of how she was strangled in one of the deserted chambers. The
stranger, ignorant of Naples, will perhaps set down this fact, pleased
to discover a trace of history yet lingering in the recollection of
the people, and will cherish it carefully until he is told the same
tale at Castel Capuano, on the other side of the city, with the
addition of certain particulars which, by our narrow northern way of
thinking, are damaging to Queen Giovanna's character. For instance, it
is said of her that she was in those early days so convinced a
democrat as to choose her lovers freely from among the sovereign
people. They were doubtless gratified by her choice; but the pleasure
faded when they discovered in due course of time that each favourite
in turn, after the fickle Queen grew tired of him, was expected or
compelled to leap from the top of a high tower, thus carrying all his
knowledge of the secret scandals of a court by a short cut into the
next world. A cruel Queen, it is true; but how prudent! Any one of us
might leave a marvellous sweet memory of himself in the world, if only
he could stop the mouths of--But that has nothing to do with Queen
Giovanna.
This sweet memory, however, this fruit of prudence, is precisely what
the Queen has attained in Naples and in all the surrounding country. I
have questioned many peasants who spoke to me about her, and received
the invariable answer that she was a good Queen, a very good Queen--in
fact, of the best. Now history, listening to this declaration, sighs
and shakes her head despairingly. There were two queens named
Giovanna--leaving out several others who, for various reasons, do not
come into the reckoning. The first was certainly a better woman than
the second, but she is credibly believed to have begun her reign when
quite a girl by murdering her first husband, after which she departed
in various ways from the ideal of Sunday-schools. The second was an
atrocious woman, concerning whose ways of life it is better to say as
little as possible. The first was strangled, though not in Naples, or
its neighbourhood, but at the Castle of Muro, far down in Apulia. The
second had innumerable lovers, and was, perhaps, one of the worst
women ever born.
The Queen Giovanna of tradition seems to be a blend of these two
sovereigns, laden with the infirmities of both, and loved the more for
the burden of the scandals which she bears. It is a charming trait,
this disposition of poor humanity to glorify dead sinners! Conscious
of their own imperfections, mindful of the condescension of a queen
who steps down to the moral level of her people, the Neapolitans
welcome her with outstretched hands, and love her for her
peccadilloes. Legend confers a pleasanter immortality than history,
earned less painfully, bestowed more charitably, and quite as durable.
CHAPTER IV
THE RIVIERA DI CHIAIA
AND SOME STRANGE THINGS WHICH OCCURRED THERE
In bright sunshine I came down the last slopes of the Posilipo,
wending towards the Riviera di Chiaia. The bay sparkled with
innumerable colours; the hills lay in morning shadow; Vesuvius was
dark and sullen, and the twin peaks of Capri rested on the horizon
like the softest cloud. The sun fell very sweetly among the oranges in
the villa gardens, lighting up their dark and glossy leaves with
quick-changing gleams which moved and went as lightly as if reflected
from the restless waters of the bay. Out on the sea there was a swarm
of fishing boats, each provided with a rod of monstrous length; while
as I reached the level of the sea, and entered on the winding road
that goes to Naples, I found myself skirting a long, narrow beach, of
which the reeking odours proclaimed it to be a landing-place of
fishers. There, under the shadow of the towering cliff, boats were
hauled up, nets were drying, fish frails were piled in heaps, and
close to a small stone pier which jutted out into the water a couple
of fishing-wives were scolding each other much in the same way as two
dames of Brixham or of Newlyn, while a small urchin prone upon the
sand, watched the encounter of wits with eager curiosity to know
whether more was to come of it or not.
[Illustration: STRADA DI CHIAIA, NAPLES.]
More did not come of it. The strife sank into silence, and as I paced
along the margin of the little beach, glancing now at the wide curve
of the bay, now at the dark fortress of the enchanted Castle of the
Egg upon its further horn, I found myself in a strange medley of
ancient thoughts and modern ones, the old world wrestling with the
new, tales of the kings of Aragon mingling with the cries of cabmen
and the whirring noises of the tramways.
This little beach by which I stand is all that is now left of the
Marina di Chiaia, which once ran round the bay up to the rocks and
caverns of the Chiatamone, where the Egg Castle juts out into the sea.
It was all a sandy foreshore, with boats hauled up and nets set out to
dry, just as one may see them on this scrap which still remains. It
was renowned as a place of ineffable odours. Indeed, an ancient
writer, seeking a simile for a certain very evil smell, could think of
none more striking than "that which one smells on the Marina di Chiaia
in the evening." It is to be gathered that the women were in large
measure responsible for this--as for most other things that go wrong
in Naples. "Tutt'e' peccate murtali so' femmene," says the
proverb--All the mortal sins are feminine; and if those, why not the
smells also? But it is not to be supposed that the women of the Chiaia
were the less attractive. Far from that. We have the word of the poet
del Tufo that they were so gracious and charming that even a dead man
would not remain insensible to the desire of loving them. What can
have become of these houris? I did much desire to see them, but I
searched in vain. I found none but heavy, wide-mouthed women, owning
no charm but dirt, and no attractions save a raucous tongue. Perhaps
the disappearance of the smells involved the loss of the beauty also.
If so, another grudge is to be cherished against the sanitary
reformers, who so often in the history of mankind have proved that
they know not what they do.
But I was about to speak of King Alfonso of Aragon, a monarch whose
story can be forgotten by no one who has given himself the pleasure of
reading the superb work in which Guicciardini has told the story of
his times, a tale of greatness and of woe immeasurable, having in
itself every element of tragedy, with a human interest which throbs
even painfully from page to page. Macaulay, by giving currency to a
stupid tale about a galley slave who chose the hulks rather than the
history, has contrived to rob many of us of a pleasure far greater
than can be derived from the antitheses in which he himself delights;
and has spread abroad the impression that this prince among
historians, this dignified and simple writer, this unsurpassed judge
of men whom he himself in a wiser moment compared to Tacitus, was
dull! It is but one more injustice done by Macaulay's hasty fancy,
serving well to prove what mischief may be wrought by a man who cannot
deny himself the pleasure of a quirk until he has reflected what
injury it may do to another's reputation.
Alfonso of Aragon was King of Naples when the French, led by their
King Charles the Eighth, were advancing through Italy to the attack of
Naples. The old title of the House of Anjou which reigned in Naples
for near two centuries, was in the French judgment not extinct; and
Charles, called into Italy by Ludovic the Moor, Duke of Milan, and one
of the greatest scoundrels of all ages, was pressing on through the
peninsula faster and with more success than either his friends wished
or his enemies had feared. One by one the obstacles which were to have
detained him in northern Italy crumbled at his approach. Florence was
betrayed by Piero di Medici; the Neapolitan armies in the Romagna were
driven back; the winter was mild, offering no obstacle to campaigning;
the Pope was overawed; and at length Alfonso, seeing the enemy
victorious everywhere, and now almost at his gates, fell into a
strange state of nerves. The first warrior of his age broke down like
a panic-stricken girl. The strong, proud King fell a prey to fear. He
could not sleep, for the night was full of haunting terrors, and out
of the dark there came to visit him the spectres of men whom he had
slain by treachery, each one seeming to rejoice at the vengeance of
which Heaven had made the French King the instrument.
Yet Alfonso had large and well-trained armies at his command, and the
passes of the kingdom were easily defended. The French were no nearer
than at Rome; and anyone who has travelled between the Eternal City
and Naples must see how easily even in our own days a hostile army
could be held among the mountains. Had there been a resolute defence,
many a month might yet have passed before a single Frenchman reached
the Siren city. But Alfonso could give no orders; and his terrors were
completed by a vision which appeared to one of his courtiers in a
dream repeated on three successive nights. It was the spirit of the
old King Ferdinand which appeared to the affrighted Jacopo, grave and
dignified as when all trembled before him in his life, and commanded,
first in gentle words and afterwards with terrifying threats, that he
should go forthwith to King Alfonso, telling him that it was vain to
hope to stem the French invasion; that fate had declared their house
was to be troubled with infinite calamities, and at length to be
stamped out in punishment for the many deeds of enormous cruelty which
the two had committed, but above all for that one wrought, at the
persuasion of Alfonso, in the Church of San Lionardo in the Chiaia
when he was returning home from Pozzuoli.
The spirit gave no details of this crime. There was no need. The mere
reference to it completed Alfonso's overthrow. Whatever the secret may
have been, it scored the King's heart with recollections which he
could not face when conjured up in this strange and awful manner.
There was no longer any resource for him. His life was broken once for
all, and hastily abdicating his kingdom in favour of his son
Ferdinand, whose clean youth was unstained by any crimes, he carried
his remorse and all his sinful memories to a monastery in Sicily,
where he died, perhaps in peace.
No man who reads this tale can refrain from wondering where was this
Church of San Lionardo on the Chiaia, and what it was that King
Alfonso did there. The first question is easier than the last to
answer, yet there are some materials for satisfying curiosity in
regard to both.
[Illustration: NAPLES--PORTA MERCANTILE]
It is useless to seek for the Church of San Lionardo now. It was swept
away when the fine roadway was made which skirts the whole sea-front
from the Piazza di Vittoria to the Torretta. But in old days it must
have been a rarely picturesque addition to the beauty of the bay. It
stood upon a little island rock, jutting out into the sea about the
middle of the curve, near the spot where the aquarium now stands. It
was connected with the land by a low causeway, not unlike that by
which the Castle of the Egg is now approached; and it was a place
of peculiar interest and sanctity, apart from its conspicuous and
beautiful position, because from the days of its first foundation it
had claimed a special power of protection over those who were
tormented by the fear of shipwreck or captivity, both common cases in
the lives of the dwellers on a shore haunted by pirates and often
vexed by storms. The foundation was due to the piety of a Castilian
gentleman, Lionardo d'Oria, who, being in peril of wreck so long ago
as the year 1028, vowed a church in honour of his patron saint upon
the spot, wherever it might be, at which he came safely to land. The
waves drove him ashore upon this beach, midway between Virgil's Tomb
and the enchanted Castle of the Egg; and here his church stood for
seven hundred years and more upon its rocky islet--a refuge and a
shrine for all such as went in peril by land or sea.
Naturally enough, the thoughts of Neapolitans turned easily in days of
trouble to the saint whose special care it was to extricate them. Many
a fugitive slipped out of Naples in the dark and sped furtively along
the sandy beach to the island church, whence, as he knew perfectly, he
could embark on board a fishing-boat with far better hope of getting
clear away than if he attempted to escape from Naples. Thus at all
moments of disturbance in the city the chance was good that important
persons were in hiding in the Church of San Lionardo waiting the
favourable moment of escape. King Alfonso must have known this
perfectly. One may even surmise that his journey to Pozzuoli was
undertaken with the object of tempting out rebellious barons and their
followers from the city, where they might be difficult to find, into
this solitary spot, where he could scarcely miss them. If so, he
doubtless gloated over the first sight of the island church as he came
riding down from the Posilipo and out upon the beach towards it,
knowing that the trap was closed and the game his own.
Alfonso was a man who never knew mercy. Who the fugitives were whom he
found hidden in the church, or in what manner they met their death,
is, so far as I know, recorded nowhere. But this we know, that it was
no ordinary death, no mere strangling or beheading of rebellious
subjects that the King sanctioned and perhaps watched in this lonely
church which was built as a refuge for troubled men. Of such deeds
there were so many scored up to the account of both kings that the
spirit of the elder could hardly have reproached his son with any one
of them. What was done in the Church of San Lionardo was something
passing the common cruelty of even Spaniards in those ages, and it is
perhaps a merciful thing that oblivion has descended on the details.
I shall return again to King Alfonso and his family, for the city is
full of memories of them, and in the vaults of the Castel Nuovo there
are things once animate which throw a terrible light upon the
practices of the House of Aragon. But for the time this may be enough
of horrors; and I turn with pleasure to the long sea-front against
which the tide is breaking fresh and pleasantly, surging white and
foaming over the black rocks which skirt the foot of the sea-wall. The
wind comes freshly out of the east. Capri is growing into a wonderful
clearness. Even the little town upon the saddle of the island begins
to glow white and sparkling, and the limestone precipices show their
clefts and shadows in the increasing light. The soft wind blows in
little sunny gusts, which shake the blossoms of wistaria on the
house-fronts, mingling the salt and fishy odours of the beach with the
scent of flowers in the villa gardens. There is scarce a sign of cloud
in the warm sky, and all the crescent bay between me and the city
takes colours which are perpetually changing into deeper tints of
liquid blue and rare soft green, with flashes here and there of brown,
and exquisite reflections which are but half seen before they yield to
others no less beautiful. The long white sea-wall gleams like the
setting of a gem, and the warm air trembles slightly in the distance,
so that the Castle of the Egg looks as if it were indeed enchanted,
and might be near the doom predicted for it when its frail foundations
shall be broken.
I had meant to spend an hour this morning in the Church of Sannazzaro,
on the slope of the hill, at no great distance from this spot. He who
does not see churches betimes in Naples may chance to miss them
altogether, and will waste much temper during the hot afternoon in
hammering on barred doors with vain effort to rouse sleepy sacristans.
Heaven knows I am not indifferent to church architecture, and had the
morning been less beautiful I should certainly have described
learnedly enough, the building preserving the memory of the quaint and
artificial poet whom Bembo, as frigid and unnatural as himself,
declared to be next to Virgil in fame, as he was also next in
sepulture. I often wonder whether Bembo really meant anything at all
by this judgment, except an elegant turn of verse. If he did--But I am
straying away from the lights and shadows of this magic morning, which
are far more delightful than the arcadian rhapsodies of Sannazzaro and
of Bembo. Let me put them both aside. Or stay, one observation of the
former comes into mind. He said the Mergellina was "Un pezzo di cielo
caduto in terra"--a scrap of heaven fallen down on earth. He had blood
in him, then, this worshipper of nymphs and classicism; let us go and
see his Mergellina. It will not take us far from the sea-front, to
which it once lay open, in the days when there were no grand hotels
nor ugly boarding-houses blocking out the sweet colours and the clean
air of the sea.
As I turn inland, my eye is caught by a tablet on a house-front to the
left, which has a melancholy interest for all Englishmen:--
"IN QUESTA CASA NACQUE FRANCESCO CARACCIOLI
AMMIRAGLIO
IL 18 GUIGNO 1752
STRANGOLATO AL 29 GUIGNO 1799"
"Strangolato"--ay, hung at Nelson's yardarm, while his flagship lay
off Naples, and sunk afterwards in the sea, whence his naked body was
washed up on shore. It is a tragic tale; but to use it as an
imputation on Nelson's honour is unjust. Caraccioli was a rebel, and
paid the penalty of unsuccessful revolution. He was brave and
unfortunate, he resisted manfully an evil government; but he was not
unfairly slain.
In a few yards further the whole charming length of Sannazzaro's bit
of heaven lies spread out before me. A wide, straight street, a
paradise of yellow stucco, stained and peeling off, a wilderness of
sordid shops and dirty children running wild, a solitary tramcar
spinning on its way to Naples, a creaking cart with vegetables, a
huckster bawling fish--I have not patience to catalogue the delights
of the Mergellina of to-day, but turn my back on them and flee to the
sea-front again, where I can look out on what is still unspoiled,
because man has no dominion over it.
[Illustration: BOATS AT THE MERGELLINA--NAPLES]
A short stroll towards the city within reach of the lapping waves
restored my temper, and I remembered that as I fled from the
Mergellina I saw over my shoulder a halting-place for tramcars, well
known to all who visit Naples by the name of the "Torretta."
I hardly know how many of those visitors have asked themselves what
this Torretta was, to which they have so often paid their fares of
twenty-five centimes, or have connected it in memory with the other
towers of which they hear upon the further side of Naples. But since
Naples is a seaborn city, and a wealthy city by the shore of ocean
attracts pirates as naturally as flies flock to honey, it may be as
well to explain why the Torretta was built.
The tale goes back as far as the days of Don Fernando Afan de Rivera,
Duca d'Alcala, who did Naples the honour of condescending to govern it
as Viceroy to His Most Catholic Majesty of Spain from the year 1629 to
1631. He was an old and gouty viceroy, but not lacking in energy or
courage. Those were times in which infinite numbers of Turkish pirates
hovered round the coasts of Italy; and week by week the warning cannon
roared out from Ischia, and the heavy toll of the alarm bells rolled
along the shore from Campanella and Castellammare to the harbours
beneath Vesuvius, waking all the fishermen to watchfulness and rousing
the guards within the city walls.
"All'arme! all'arme! la Campana sona
Li Turche so' arrivati a la marina!"
The terror-stricken refrain is still on the lips of the peasants in
the coasts which were harried by Dragut and Ucchiali.
One night a band of these bold corsairs struck suddenly in the
darkness, and landed on the western end of the Chiaia, well outside
the limits of the city. There were among their numbers certain
renegades of Naples, and using the local knowledge of these
scoundrels, they had conceived the design of capturing the Marchesa
del Vasto, whose palace stood in this somewhat unprotected region, and
whom they intended to surprise in her sleep. So rich a prisoner would
have brought them a vast ransom; but the scheme turned out
disappointing. The Marchesa had gone to take the waters, over the
hills at Agnano, whither greedy Turks could not pursue her. Nothing
remained but to bag as many people of inferior consequence as time
permitted; and the renegades, turning to their advantage the alarm
which was already spreading among the inhabitants, rushed about
knocking at every door and imploring the people in anguished tones to
come out at once and save themselves from the Turks, who were landing
at that moment. Some poor frightened souls were simple enough to
accept this invitation, and were made prisoners for their pains the
moment they crossed the threshold. Others, more wisely, suspecting the
trick, made rude replies, and barred their doors and shutters, knowing
that at dawn, if not before, help must surely come from the
neighbouring city.
[Illustration: NAPLES--GRADONI DI CHIAIA.]
They were not mistaken in their faith. Naples was astir, and the
guards were mustering by torchlight in the streets. The Duca d'Alcala
was at the Palazzo Stigliano, near the Porta di Chiaia. Old and gouty
as he was, he had set himself at the head of his men, the city gate
was flung open, and in the grey light of morning the Turks saw a
considerable force advancing on them. They did not stay to fight, but
pushed off their ships, carrying with them twenty-four prisoners,
whom next day they signified that they were willing to ransom.
Accordingly parleys were held upon the Island of Nisida; the Viceroy
himself paid part of the sum demanded, while the rest was contributed
by the Society for the Redemption of Captives, a useful public
institution whose income was heavily drawn upon in those days.
Probably neither one nor the other was entirely pleased at having to
pay out a large sum for the redemption of people living almost under
the walls of the city. It was to guard against such mishaps in future
that the Torretta was built, and garrisoned as strongly as its size
permitted.
What old tales these seem, and how changed is all the aspect of this
bay! San Lionardo gone as completely as the shadow of a drifting
cloud! The Torretta degraded to a halting-place of tramcars! The
Mergellina stripped of all that made the poet Sannazzaro love it! Only
on the sea-front the same beauty of heavenly blue still shimmers on
the waters, breaking into bubbles of pure gold where the soft tide
washes up amid the rocks. The fishing boats slip to and fro under
their large three-cornered sails. There is more wind out there upon
the bay; it strikes in sharp puffs on the bellying canvas, and the
light craft heel towards the land. One of them has put in beside the
stairs not far from where I am loitering. The bottom of his boat is
alive with silvery fish; and on the cool stones of the landing-place,
just awash with clear green water, stand the barelegged fishermen,
stooping over the still living fish, cleansing their burnished scales
from the soil of the dirty skiff, laughing and chattering like
children, as they are. Suddenly one of them snatches at a little
object which the others had not noticed, and holds it up to me in
gleeful expectation of a few soldi. "Cavallo di mare!" A tiny
sea-horse, already stiff and rigid, a clammy and uncomfortable
curiosity. My good man, if I desire to look at sea-horses I have but
to cross the road to the aquarium, where I can watch them in the grace
and wonder of their life and shall not be asked to cumber myself with
their dead bodies. Salvatore shrugs his shoulders. If I am mad enough
to miss this chance, it is my own affair; the Madonna will scarce send
me another. In the midst of the diatribe I stroll across to the
aquarium.
Rarely, if ever, have I passed by this storehouse of great marvels
without regretting it, for indeed it has no equal in the world. Tanks
of fish are kept in many cities; the only aquarium is at Naples. There
alone can one stand and watch the actual stress and movement of the
life which passes in the sea, that animal life of myriad shapes and
colours which is so like the plants and which while rooted to a rock,
and spreading long translucent tendrils like a frond of seaweed, will
yet curl and uncurl, swaying this way and that in search of food, or
in the effort to escape some enemy it fears. For the depths of the sea
are full of enemies, and every sense of those which dwell beneath it
is alert. There one may see the tube-dwelling worms, thrust out from
the mouth of their tall cylinders like a feathery tuft of tendrils, a
revolving fan, which spins and spins until some sea-horse floating up
erect and graceful comes too close, and instantly the fan closes, the
tendrils disappear and lie hidden till the danger has gone by. Far
along the rock clefts, high and low throughout the pools, there is a
perpetual watchfulness and motion, a constant stir and trembling; and
the provision which the lowest animal possesses for the protection of
its life is in quick and momentary use, laying open such a revelation
of the infinite resources of nature as itself makes this cool chamber
one of the most interesting places in the world.
But if a man go there for beauty only, in what profusion he will find
it! The green depths of the tanks are all aglow with soft rich colour.
The sea beneath the cliffs at Vico is not more blue on the softest day
in spring than the fish which glide by among these shadows; nor are
the lights seen from Castellammare when the sun drops down behind
Ischia and the rosy flushes spread along the coast, more exquisite
than the soft pink scales which glance through the arches of the
rocks. Turquoise and pearl, emerald and jacinth, the gleams caught
from the hidden sun above reflect the hues of every gem. The strange,
dense vegetation, the quick flash of moving gold and purple, reveal a
world of marvellous rich beauty; and if it be indeed the case that
those bold divers of past days who dared to plunge out of the bright
sun into the dusk and dimness of the ocean depths saw there the orange
sponges, the waving forests of crimson weed, and all the myriad
colours of the moving fishes glinting through them, it is no wonder
that they came back into the world of men spreading tales of countless
jewels, and unnumbered treasures, which lie buried in the caves and
grottoes of the sea.
Naples is alive with stories of this sort; and not Naples only, but
all Sicily and southern Italy share the tales of the great diver,
Nicolo Pesce, who is sometimes a Sicilian and sometimes a dweller on
the mainland, but is claimed by Naples with good reason, as I shall
show presently. The mere sight of things so like those which Nicolo
must have seen calls up all the rare stories told of him; and I go up
into the Villa Garden, which skirts the long sea-front, and having
found a seat beneath a shady palm tree, whence I can watch the blue
sea lying motionless around the dark battlements of Castel dell'Uovo,
while the wind makes light noises in the feathery boughs above me, I
fall to thinking of the diver who, at the bidding of the king,
searched the caverns underneath the castle, which no man has ever
found but he, and came back with his arms full of jewels. Any child in
Naples knows that heaps of gems are lying in those caverns still.
Who was Nicolo Pesce? Ah! what is the use of asking such questions
about a myth? He was once, like all of us, a thing which crept about
the earth--it matters little when, _nei tempi antichi_! But now he is
a butterfly fluttering in the world of romance, a theme for poets, and
cherished in the heart of children. If you must know more about his
actual existence, catch a child and give him a few soldi to escort you
to the foot of the Vico Mezzocannone, away on the further side of the
city, where the lanes drop steeply to the harbour. There, built into
the front of a house, you will see an ancient stone, on which is
carved the figure of a shaggy man grasping a knife in his right hand,
while his left is clenched in the air. That is Nicolo Pesce, so called
because he was at home in the water as a fish is; and the knife is
that which he used to cut himself out from the bellies of the fish
when he had done the long swift journeys which he was wont to make in
the manner of which no other man had experience but Jonah.
You may get much more than this from the child, though confidence is
hard to gain, and soldi will not always buy it. One day the King bade
Nicolo find out what the bottom of the sea is like. The diver plunged,
and when he came up gasping he said he had seen gardens of coral and
large spaces of ribbed sand strewn with precious stones, and piled
here and there with heaps of treasure, mouldering weapons, the ribs of
sunken ships and the whitening skeletons of drowned mariners. I well
believe it! Ave Maria, Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, be gracious to
poor sailors in their peril!
But another time the King bade Nicolo dive down and find out how
Sicily floated on the sea, and the man brought up a fearful tale. For
he said that groping to and fro in the dim abysses he saw that Sicily
had rested on three pillars, whereof one had fallen, one was split and
like to fall, and one only stood erect and sound! The years have gone
by in many hundreds since that plunge; but no man knows whether the
shattered pillar is erect.
Now the King desired to be sure that Nicolo did actually reach the
bottom of the sea, and accordingly took him to the summit of a rock
where the water was deepest, and there, surrounded by his courtiers,
hurled a gold cup far out from the shore. The goblet flashed and sank,
and the King bade Nicolo dive and bring it back.
The diver plunged, and the King waited, watching long before the
surface of the sea was broken. At last Nicolo rose, brandishing the
cup as he swam, and when he had reached shore and won his breath again
he cried, "Oh, King, if I had known what I should see, neither this
cup nor half your kingdom would have tempted me to dive." "What did
you see?" the King demanded, and the diver answered that he found on
the floor of the ocean four impenetrable things. First the great rush
of a river which streams out of the bowels of the earth, sweeping all
things away before the might of its resistless current; and next a
labyrinth of rocks, whose crags overhung the winding ways between
them. Then he was beaten hither and thither by the flux and reflux of
the waters out of the lowest parts of ocean; and lastly, he dared not
pass the monsters which stretched out long tentacles as if to clutch
him and draw him into the caverns of the rocks. So he groped and
wandered in mortal fear, till at last he saw the gleam of gold upon a
shelf of rock and grasped the cup and came up into the world again.
Now the King pondered long upon this story, and then taking the cup
flung it into the sea once more, and bade Nicolo dive again. The
fellow begged hard that he might not go, but the King was ruthless,
and the waters closed over the diver. The day waned, the night came
on, and still the King waited on the crag beside the sea. But Nicolo
Pesce the diver was never seen again.
Many a child has thrilled over this story as told in Schiller's
verse,--"Wer wagt es, Rittersman oder Knapp...." You ask--What is the
truth of these old stories? I answer that they have neither truth nor
falsity, and that is enough for most of us in this dull world, of
which so much has to be purged away before the beauty can appear. The
flower-laden boughs in this Villa garden go on rustling in the sunny
wind; the Judas trees are gay with purple blossoms, and from the long,
straight avenue, where white marble statues gleam in the cool shades,
the cries and laughter of the children ring out merrily. Tell a child
these tales and he will doubt nothing, reason over nothing, but accept
the beauty and talk of it with quickened breath and glowing cheeks.
That is the wisdom of the babes. Let us be content to copy it.
CHAPTER V
THE ENCHANTED CASTLE OF THE EGG
AND THE SUCCESSION OF THE KINGS WHO HELD IT
In Naples one is never very far from history, and when I arose from my
pleasant seat beneath the palm tree, plodding on down the long and
beautiful avenue of the Villa garden I came out at no great distance
on the sunny Piazza della Vittoria--a name which, I suspect, connects
itself in the fancy of many visitors with some of the wild triumphs of
Garibaldi. But the piazza has an older history than that. It
commemorates the sea battle of Lepanto, in which Don John of Austria,
the youthful son of the great Emperor Charles the Fifth and of Barbara
Blomberg, washerwoman of Ratisbon, led the united fleets of Venice,
Spain, and Rome into the Gulf of Lepanto as the Turks were coming out
and administered a drubbing under which the throne of the Caliph
rocked and tottered, all so long ago as the year 1576. Naples had the
best of reasons, as I have said already, for rejoicing over any event
which reduced the sea power of the Turks, and I do not doubt that the
child of Kaiser and of washerwoman had an intoxicating triumph on this
spot which has so long forgotten him.
At this point I hesitate, as the ass did between two bundles, a
dilemma often thrust on one in Naples. For if I turn towards my left
and mount the hill, I reach the Piazza dei Martiri and the pleasant
strangers' quarter. But since my aim is not to describe things known
easily to all who visit Naples, but rather to talk at large of what
the guide-books do not mention, I take the other way and move out on
the sea-front again, just where the Via Partenope, a new road, runs
towards the ancient castle at the point.
As I approach the centre of this ancient city, scene of so many bitter
conflicts, it becomes the more needful to select those epochs which
are most worthy to be remembered, to let all the ghosts of great names
flutter by except a few, and those the few whose memories rise
oftenest. The choice is easy. All the deepest tragedy of Naples closes
round the fall of the House of Hohenstaufen and the fall of that of
Aragon. I must explain briefly how these houses held the throne of
Naples and of Sicily.
The Normans founded that kingdom in the year 1130. They won it by
conquest from Lombards and from Saracens; and they placed their
capital at Palermo, where their rule on the whole was just and
splendid, and their throne gained lustre from Arab art and Arab
learning, so that those were happy days for Italy and Sicily, held by
strong sovereigns who kept in check all dangers from without. But even
in the good times the seed of trouble was sprouting fast; for the
first Normans, superstitious in their piety, and anxious to obtain a
legal title to the lands their swords had won, accepted the feudal
lordship of the Pope; and thus originated the papal claim to alter the
succession of the realm at will.
The male line of the Normans failed. Constance, the heiress of the
house, carried the throne to the Emperor Henry VI., son of the great
Barbarossa, and as resolved as he to turn into realities the shadowy
claims of the Emperors to the overlordship of all Italy. But the Popes
already claimed the universal spiritual dominion, as the Emperors
claimed the temporal; and since in the rough-thinking minds of men
there was but little comprehension of the theoretical distinction
between the dominions of spirit and of matter, it happened often that
even in the understanding of Pope and Kaiser themselves the difference
was lost, and the two claims worked out to rivalry and the clash of
interests which wrought much bloodshed.
There was not room in Italy for two universal rulers, both holding of
God, even though one ruled spiritual things and the other temporal.
The theory was clear, but who could interpret the practice on all
occasions? Every Pope was greedy for temporalities; and no Kaiser,
unless wholly occupied in taming rebellious barons beyond the Alps,
could refrain from meddling with spiritual affairs. Thus arose two
parties throughout Italy, and all the land was cleft with the feuds of
Guelf and Ghibelline, the former holding to the Pope, the latter
dreaming, as Dante did, of the days when the Emperor should descend
from the Alps again brandishing the sword of judgment, and purge away
the foulness from the lovely cities which stood oppressed and
mourning. Day and night, in the fancy of the great Florentine, Rome
lay weeping, widowed and alone, calling constantly, "Cesare mio, why
hast thou deserted me?"
More often than not the Emperors did not come, and the Pope grew ever
stronger. But when the successor of St. Peter saw his great rival
established by natural inheritance in the territory which was not
only the fairest of all Italy, but also the one over which he claimed
feudal rights, it was certain that there could be no peace; and the
conflict might have broken out at once had not the Emperor died and
his widow granted the Church great power over her young son, whom the
Pope might naturally hope to mould into what he would.
But the lad grew up strong and self-reliant, a noble and a splendid
monarch, worthy of the fame which clings to this day about the name of
the Emperor Frederick the Second. Alone of all the line of Western
Emperors this one lived by choice in Italy. He loved the blue sea and
the purple mountains which guard the land of Sicily. His heart was in
the white coast towns of Apulia and the ranges of long low hills which
look towards the Adriatic over the flat plains of Foggia, where the
hawks wheel screaming in the clear air and the great mountain shrine
of Monte Gargano towers blue and dim above the heel of Italy. He loved
the Arab art and learning. He was no mean poet--a troubadour,
moreover; and withal a just and upright ruler, with aims far greater
than those of the age in which he lived, a monarch born for the
happiness of nations, had only the Pope been able to bate a little of
his pride and tolerate the rival at his gates.
But those were days in which the Popes would endure no compromise; and
from the hour in which he entered man's estate to that in which he
laid down his weary life in an Apulian castle, Frederick was in
continual warfare with the Church. Had he lived, who knows how that
struggle might have ended, or by what devices the prince who was
Emperor as well as King, and had the prestige of the Holy Roman
Empire at his back, might have met the dangers gathering round his
kingdom? For the Pope was negotiating with other princes, offering
them the inheritance of Naples if they would but turn the Hohenstaufen
out; and at length, after an English prince had refused the
enterprise, Charles of Anjou took it up, brother of St. Louis, and a
man accounted the first warrior of his age. By this time the kingdom
of the Two Sicilies had passed to Manfred, the favourite child of
Frederick the Second, though born of an unlawful union. There was a
child in Germany of lawful blood, one Conradin; but he was still
playing with his mother, and of no age to stem the troubles of the
kingdom. Moreover, he was reported dead, and Manfred seized the throne
with the goodwill of the people, who loved him well, and keep his
memory unto this day; for he was handsome and gallant, "Bello e
biondo" the Apulians call him still, a king whom a man might follow
and a woman love, and, but for the Pope and his restless enmity,
Manfred also, like his father, might have made the happiness of a
whole people.
But Charles of Anjou descended suddenly and met Manfred in battle
outside Benevento. It was the 26th of February, in the year 1266.
Manfred, watching the battle from a hillock, saw his troops waver; and
suspecting treachery, which was indeed abroad that day, he rushed into
the thickest of the fight, and was slain by an unknown hand as he
strove to rally his Apulians.
That day there fell before the French spears not only a noble king,
but the peace and happiness of southern Italy. Charles of Anjou was a
grim and ruthless tyrant, whose conceptions of mercy and justice were
those of a hawk hovering above a hen-coop. He denied burial to the
body of his enemy, and caused it to be flung naked on the banks of
the river, where every soldier as he passed cast a stone at it. He
seized Manfred's luckless queen, Helena, and kept her prisoner with
her children until death released them. He overthrew good laws and set
up bad ones. He sought to stamp out loyalty to the old kings by exile
and the sword. In Sicily he wrought unutterable woe, such as in the
end turned the blood of every islander to fire and his heart to stone,
and produced a massacre from which no Frenchman escaped. All the world
knows that great act of retribution by the name of the Sicilian
Vespers.
But in the meantime Conradin had grown up to tall boyhood, and his
heart was already brave enough to rage when he saw his kingdom in the
hands of a cruel conqueror, and his own subjects slain and banished
because they loved his house. His mother wept, but the boy did what
any brave boy of kingly blood would do. I will tell the tale of that
great tragedy later, when I reach the square outside the Carmine where
the last scene was played out, and the boy-king lost the game, but
carried all the honours with him from the world, leaving eternal
infamy for a heritage to the foe who slew him.
So Charles of Anjou possessed the kingdom. But it brought no happiness
to him or to his race. His own days were tortured by the loss of
Sicily, and every one of those who followed him reigned uneasily. Even
his grandson Robert, called "The Wise," is suspected of having won the
throne by murder. Robert's granddaughter, Queen Giovanna, whose sweet
memory we found on the slopes of the Posilipo, was privy to the murder
of her husband, and was herself smothered with a pillow. The other
Joanna, who followed her, was the most profligate woman of her age,
and in her ended, meanly and sordidly, the line of Anjou sovereigns.
[Illustration: NAPLES]
Then came the House of Aragon, which had reigned in Sicily ever since
the Vespers, and now expelled the last scion of Anjou and established
a kingdom which seemed likely to be stable. But the claims of the
royal house of France were only dormant; and before the end of the
century they started up again, eager and adventurous, in the heart of
the young King, Charles the Eighth. It was the wily Duke of Milan,
Ludovic Sforza, named the Moor, who incited this young man to lead the
French chivalry through the passes of the Alps. He was the warder of
Italy, and he betrayed her. It would be hard to name any one act of
man since God divided light from darkness which has let loose upon the
world such tremendous consequences of woe.
It is not my duty here to describe those consequences, nor to tell how
the French invasion resulted very shortly in riveting on Naples the
long Spanish slavery, which in the middle of the last century became a
monarchy again, and in 1860 was torn from the hold of the Bourbons,
and made free at last, by the grace of God and the valour of true
heroes, each one of whom dared all for Italy.
"Blessed is he of all men, being in one
As father to her and son,
Blessed of all men living, that he found
Her weak limbs bared and bound,
And in his arms and in his bosom bore,
And as a garment wore
Her weight of want, and as a royal dress
Put on her weariness.
"Praise him, O storm and summer, shore and wave,
O skies, and every grave;
O weeping hopes, O memories beyond tears,
O many and murmuring years."
I will quote no more, even of these immortal verses. Since it was
given to an English singer to voice the rapture with which all good
men hailed the salvation of Italy, it is but just that every visitor
should read the "Song of Italy" himself. I would that everyone among
them had it by heart and could catch some thrill from the noble
passion of the verses.
This has been a long discourse. But if certain things happened a great
while ago, is it my fault? Or again, am I to blame for the strange
neglect of Italian history in schools? The lesson is done now, and the
sun is still bright and hot on the Via Partenope. Even the enchanted
Castle of the Egg, black and grim as it usually looks, has caught the
glow, and is steeped and drowned in warm light. A quiver of haze hangs
over the sea, tremulous and burning. The wind has dropped, and a
midday silence has descended upon Naples. It is the hour when
sacristans bar the church doors and seek the solace of slumber, when
the vetturini congregate on the shady side of the piazza and cease to
crack their whips at the sight of strangers. On the castle bridge a
sentry paces to and fro. There are one or two restaurants below him in
the shadow, neither good nor bad, but good enough; and I order my
colazione in one which looks towards the sheer cliff of the
Pizzofalcone, and from which towards my right I can look out upon the
harbour, can catch a glimpse of the Castel Nuovo, the old royal
dwelling of the Houses of Anjou and Aragon, and see beyond it the old
city bathed in sunshine sloping to the curving sea.
The Pizzofalcone is the Falcon's Beak. If it were not too hot to think
much about anything, I might perhaps detect the resemblance. But at
this hour, in this city, and in face of this sun, one does not think;
one sits and lets half realised ideas drift past as they will. The
Pizzofalcone looks to me much like any other cliff, rather dangerously
near the castle, which could easily be dominated from the height by
even the smallest modern guns. There was once a villa of the Roman
Lucullus on that height. Statesman and epicure, he had another on this
island; or perhaps the two formed part of a single domain, which must
have been rarely lovely in those days when waving pine trees filled
the hollows of the cliff and the sea broke white and creamy on the
strand of Santa Lucia. It was not this handsome quay stretching on
beyond the castle which set the Neapolitans singing--
"Oh, dolce Napoli,
Oh, suol beato."
For the truth is that modern works of engineering have not yet proved
as prolific in poetry as the abuses they replace, and the Neapolitans
have not written about their sea-wall any song one half so sweet as
that which was inspired by the pretty, solitary creek outside the city
bounds, bad as it is understood to have been in morals. There were,
and are still, caverns all along the cliffs of Santa Lucia which were
sad places in the old day, full of riotous and evil people who
resorted thither for the worst of ends. For this reason Don Pietro di
Toledo, when he was Viceroy, ruined some and closed others, by which
act he at once improved the morals of Naples and enriched its
folklore, for nothing stimulated the imagination of the people so much
as the idea that their caverns were lying empty and silent. They
believe now that some are the haunt of witches, while others are
filled with treasure. One or two are worth seeing still if a guide can
be found to show them.
But I sat down here to talk of tragedies connected with this castle.
Some people may think it would be better to do so within and not
without the walls, and they are welcome to their opinion; but I have
tried both courses and think not. The interior of the castle is badly
modernised. The custodian is stupid and knows nothing. The old chapel
is a kitchen, and when I went to see the spot where the spirit of
Queen Helena wrote the word "revenge" upon the altar I found it full
of soldier cooks washing potatoes for the garrison. The prisons are
either forgotten or not shown. Inside the walls there is nothing but
disillusion and regret.
Queen Helena was the young wife of Manfred, who, as I said above, was
slain at Benevento, defending his kingdom against the butcher, Charles
of Anjou. The poor girl was at Lucera with her children, when they
brought her news that her husband, kingdom, and home were all lost;
and her first natural impulse was to flee to the protection of her
father, the Greek Emperor in Constantinople. So she took to horse, and
rode down out of the hill country through the coast plains of Apulia,
where but a few weeks earlier she had hunted and feasted with her
lord, and so came to the port of Trani, where she had touched land and
met the King in all the splendour of his retinue when she came from
the east a happy bride. One can fancy with what fearfulness this
little band of fugitives rode towards the sea, carrying with them the
children of the slain King, and how often they must have turned their
heads to watch lest they might see the spearpoints of Anjou flashing
among the defiles of the mountains. At Trani surely they would find
servants loyal enough to speed them on board ship before they cast
themselves at the feet of the conqueror; and as she rode beneath the
gateway of the white-walled town and saw the green Adriatic stretching
far towards the shores of Greece, the Queen's heart must have leapt
amidst its sorrow at the thought that she had brought her dead lord's
boys in sight of safety and of freedom.
Alas, poor Queen! The whole land was turning like a flower to the sun!
The Castellan of Trani spoke her fair. A month before he would have
given all he had to gain her favour, and now--he did but beg her rest
until a ship could be got ready, and instantly sent off tidings to the
French. Ere morning mother and children were riding once more across
the plain, their horses' heads turned from the sea, and their bridles
guided by French hands. Neither the sorrow of the Queen nor the youth
of the children touched the heart of Charles. He would have none of
the blood of Manfred left in freedom, and Queen and children died
after many years in prison.
Queen Helena was shut up in this castle for some years. Men say it was
at Nocera that she died, but it must have been here that her noble
spirit fretted most sorely against fate, bruising itself like a poor
lark flapping against its prison bars. For in the corridors of this
old castle her spirit used to walk on the eve of Ascension every year,
pacing slowly from her cell to the chapel of the castle, where she
wrote upon the altar the word "revenge" with finger dipped in blood.
Nothing could erase those letters till the night of the Sicilian
Vespers, when the French were hunted and slain in every street and
alley of Palermo. After that dread act of vengeance wrought in her own
capital city, the spirit of Queen Helena was never seen again.
It is in sight of these grey walls, which stood here before Naples
was a kingdom, certainly in the year 1140, that every pageant and
almost every tragedy in the long story of the city has passed by. In
those days when dukes ruled Naples, and the age of Greek dominion was
but just over, the castle was called "Castello del Salvatore," the
Castle of the Saviour, with the addition of the words "near Naples,"
for the old walled city which made such valorous defences lay beyond
the ridge. Sometimes, again, it is spoken of as "Castello Marino," a
name which sufficiently explains itself; but nowhere is its present
designation used in ancient documents until the year 1352, when it
appears in the rules of the Order of the Holy Spirit, founded by Louis
of Anjou, and appears, moreover, not only as "the Castle of the Egg,"
but as "the Castle of the Enchanted Egg," thus showing that the legend
concerning the magical foundation of the fortress had gained strength
enough to displace one, if not two, ancient titles, and attach itself
inseparably to the spot.
There is in this fact something very singular; and one would willingly
ask the dead centuries why they left us the heritage of this
mysterious name. Of itself, the ancient castle must remain in all
men's minds as the chief interest in Naples, the most marked object on
its beautiful shore, and the central point of its romantic story. But
beyond the beauty and the interest, one is piqued with curiosity; and
the sense of mystery clinging to the castle lends it a charm to which
no one can remain insensible. There are few points near Naples,
whether on hillside or in valley, from which one does not see the
enchanted castle low down by the water's edge, swept by cloud and
sunshine, or wet with spray, when the storm wind drives along the
shore, a witness of past ages, the one thing in Naples which has not
changed, except only the blue sea and the contours of the
everlasting hills.
[Illustration: NAPLES--CASTLE OF ST. ELMO]
No castle builder of the days when artillery had come into use would
have set this fortress on the shore beneath the Pizzofalcone, whence
it could be so easily bombarded. It is rather curious to sit under
these old walls, and turn one's eyes in succession to the three
castles of the city. This is much the oldest, and the least
defensible. Then came Castel Nuovo, a little higher in the town;
Charles of Anjou founded it; and lastly St. Elmo, high upon the
hillside, in a perfect situation, of all others best suited to be the
_arx_, or citadel. Why, one wonders, did not the first builders use
it, and let the city grow around it? or at least, why did they not
place their keep and fortress on the Pizzofalcone? an eminence well
suited for defence. Surely those first Greek settlers who came across
the hills from Cumae could not have overlooked the merits of this site!
Perhaps, as some scholars hold, Neapolis, "the new city," could not be
built upon the Pizzofalcone because Palaeopolis, "the old city," was
already there. I cannot tell. There are no answers to these questions,
which recur again and again as one wanders round these coasts, none
the less absorbing because one must speculate on them in vain.
But in Naples one must not spend time in chasing shadows. I have still
to speak about the French bombardment of the enchanted castle; but
first I will take up the tale of the fall of the House of Aragon where
I left it in my last chapter, when King Alfonso, terrified and broken
by nameless fear, leapt down shuddering from his throne, and fled from
royalty and kingdom, to die a penitent monk in a monastery in Sicily.
It was a well-nigh hopeless task for his son Ferdinand to maintain
the sceptre thus hastily thrust into his hands. The French were
already over the borders of his kingdom. They had stormed and sacked
the Castle of Monte di San Giovanni, putting the garrison to the
sword. "This," says Guicciardini with scornful bitterness, "was the
sum of the opposition and trouble which the King of France met with in
the conquest of a realm so noble and so splendid; in the defence of
which there was shown neither skill, nor courage, nor good counsel, no
desire for honour, no strength, no loyalty." The Neapolitans were
strongly posted at San Germano, the River Garigliano flowing like a
moat in front, and their flanks guarded by lofty mountains; but they
fled without a blow, before they even saw the French, leaving their
guns behind, and falling back on Capua.
At Capua, that ancient city of delights, which turned the strong
Carthaginian invaders into feeble voluptuaries, cowardice was fitly
followed up by treachery. The troops were under command of Gianjacopo
Triulzi, a captain of repute, "accustomed to make profession of
honour," observes Guicciardini, in his dry, contemptuous way. This
honourable captain seized the moment when his young master had been
called back to Naples by disorders in the city, to deliver over his
whole command to the French. Ferdinand hurried back; but arrived too
late. He returned with a few followers to Naples. The whole city was
in an uproar, the mob was already sacking the stables of the Castel
Nuovo. There was no more hope of stemming the tide. The young king,
brave, just, and personally popular, was overwhelmed by the misdeeds
of his house. The very guards of his palace were inclined to seize his
person; but he distracted their attention by admitting them to sack
the castle, and while they were quarrelling over their booty, he left
the castle by the secret postern towards the sea, and embarked on a
light galley bound for Ischia. There as he stood in the stern, and
through the black smoke of the burning ships, destroyed by his orders,
saw home and kingdom lost by the sins and dishonour of other men, he
repeated over and over, as long as he could still see Naples, those
words in which the psalmist tells us that except the Lord keep the
city, the watchman waketh but in vain.
But the Castle of the Egg still held out for him, and the French,
having seized a little tower on the height of Pizzofalcone, bombarded
the fortress from that eminence. King Charles the Eighth himself was
there watching the practice of his gunners, when two light galleys ran
across from Ischia, touching shore at the old mole, and from one of
them landed Don Federigo of Aragon, uncle of the King, who had dwelt
at the French Court, and knew both Charles and his barons. They took
him up to the height, and when the French King saw him coming, says
Passaro, that most gossipy of chroniclers, "he leapt down from his
horse and bowed down to the ground, and embraced Don Federigo with the
greatest pleasure, and took him by the hand and led him apart to a
spot beneath an olive tree, where they began to talk together, but of
what they said I know nothing, though many supposed that King Charles
was trying to treat with King Ferdinand, offering him great lordships
in France, but he would not, and Don Federigo left him and went back
to his ships."
A strange interview, surely, between King and Prince, while the French
gunners stood waiting with their matches burning, and the standard of
Aragon still flew over the enchanted castle. It fell ere long, and
the whole kingdom was in the hands of Charles. It is true he had not
the wit to keep it. But anyone who wants to know that story must seek
it in Guicciardini, and may live to thank me for referring him to one
of the greatest and most interesting writers whom the world can show.
CHAPTER VI
THE BARBARITIES OF FERDINAND OF ARAGON
WITH CERTAIN OTHER SUBJECTS WHICH PRESENT THEMSELVES IN STROLLING
ROUND THE CITY
It is not possible to stroll along the sea-front much further than the
Castle of the Enchanted Egg, because the inclosures of the arsenal
occupy the foreshore. Thus the only course open is to turn inland,
and, retracing one's steps a little, to pass up beneath the shadow of
the great cliff of the Pizzofalcone into the Strada Santa Lucia, which
has always borne the fame of exhibiting at a glance more of the highly
coloured, if uncleanly, life of the poorer Neapolitans than any other
district of the city. I suspect its proximity to the hotels had
something to do with this high reputation, for crowded as the winding
roadway is at times with fishermen and peasant women, there is, I
maintain, incomparably more of uncivilised and ancient Naples to be
seen in the Strada de' Tribunali, or around Castel Capuano, than is
now presented to the eyes of the astonished visitor in Santa Lucia.
However, the wide pavement on the side of that highway which opens
towards the sea--for the famous creek is filled up now--is at all
times a standing-place for booths, chiefly for the sale of the "frutti
del mare," edible or not; and there one may see both young girls and
ancient hags proffering their wares with clamorous pertinacity, making
use of a vocabulary which is piquant, if not sweet, and soaring up
into howls such as only a Neapolitan throat can execute.
The charm of Santa Lucia is largely of the past. Naples is suffering a
change; and at this point one realises for the first time that the old
city of dirt and laughter is being swept and garnished. The "piano di
risanamento," that much-needed scheme of resanitation which was
conceived in Naples after the dread outbreak of cholera had scourged
the narrow alleys in a way to make the most careless people
think--that great conception of broad streets to be driven through the
crowded quarters, letting the sweet and healing sea air course to and
fro between the houses, has brought health and may bring cleanliness,
but it seems to be expelling gaiety and picturesqueness with the
mephitic vapours which have wrought such woe. Naples may be an idle
city still, but it is not so idle. It is disorderly and not too safe,
yet is more reputable than it was. The rake is contemplating better
things, and by-and-by may actually achieve them--an anticipation over
which good men must rejoice. But visitors who come to play may lament
the increase of seriousness and the vanishing faith that life begins
and ends with laughter.
A traveller approaching Naples from this side must needs be struck by
the narrowness of the close alleys which pierce the houses of Santa
Lucia. Standing in the middle of any one of these vicoli, a man might
almost touch both house-fronts, while the walls tower up so high on
either hand that only a mere strip of sky is visible, and that with
effort. No breeze but one which blew directly on the mouth of these
alleys could reach the windows of the dense population which inhabits
them. Disease stalks unimpeded, beyond the power of science to
restrain. The reason for building these lines of houses so close
together was, of course, to secure shade, that priceless blessing
throughout the burning dog days in southern Italy. No man can have
strolled about Italian towns even in fine spring weather without
feeling grateful for the shadows which fall on him from some
overhanging house-front. Under shelter from the sun the very smells
seem less; and in August scarce any price in health may appear too
high to pay for a patch of shade which lasts throughout the day.
The curved roadway of Santa Lucia mounts the hill on which the kings
of Anjou, having resolved to take up their residence in Naples rather
than in Palermo, which was the former capital of the Two Sicilies,
built their new castle--Castel Nuovo--still a fortress, though
untenable in modern war. This eminence lay outside the city then.
Centuries later the town had not absorbed it, and the castle on the
knoll remained surrounded by vineyards and the palaces of those
princes of the blood who were entitled to dwell in the immediate
neighbourhood of the King. Eastwards lay the city, much as one may see
it now, filling the hollow of the coast and stretching some way up a
hill.
The royal palace, which stands now upon the right, hiding the front of
the Castel Nuovo, is of course a modern building. It has no beauty,
and I have naught to say concerning it. The handsome piazza laid out
before the palace is a pleasant place to stroll in, especially on warm
evenings when the lights are glittering and there is music at
Gambrinus' Cafe at the corner. But it has no special interest, and I
go on therefore round the corner of the piazza past the halting-place
of tramcars, past the little garden of the palace and the colonnade of
the San Carlo Theatre, till I reach the Piazza del Municipio, where a
gateway in the long wall admits to the castle precinct. Admission is
free. The sentry at the gate merely nods when I declare my business to
be curiosity and nothing more, and leaves me to stroll unchecked up
the ascending causeway till I enter the quadrangle of the castle,
where a squad of soldiers are drilling awkwardly.
It is strange that many visitors to Naples omit this castle from the
sights they see. It is well to spend hours and days in the museum and
aquarium, or in wandering from church to church, spoilt as is almost
every one among those sacred buildings by the corrupt taste of the
eighteenth century, which daubed over noble gothic arches with
unmeaning Barocco ornament, and left Naples degraded among Italian
cities by the loss of almost all that was once done nobly within her
walls in stone or marble. But here is the very fount and centre of the
sovereignty of Naples, the home of all its kings since Manfred, the
Palace of Anjou and Aragon. In these walls their secrets were
deposited, and some to this day remain open to the curious. Here was
the chief theatre of their pomp, and here, on the knoll above the
shore among the olive groves and orchards that fringed the city walls,
unnumbered tragedies occurred.
The castle has two courtyards. The portal leading from the outer to
the inner is dignified by what is probably the finest piece of
building now left in Naples, the triumphal arch erected by Alfonso of
Aragon--first of the two kings who bore that name--to celebrate his
conquest of the city and the downfall of the last adherents of the
old House of Anjou. "Pious, merciful, unconquered": such were the
terms in which his character was described upon the arch beneath which
he rode in and out in triumph. Mercy was an attribute uncommon in his
family; of that all men can judge unto this day. Piety is estimated
differently from age to age. In monarchs, at least of mediaeval times,
it was a virtue of outward observance, and in this Alfonso did perhaps
excel. As for the third merit which he claimed, it is not on record
that anyone tried to conquer him, except the barons of the kingdom,
who were suppressed with a ruthless cruelty which forecast the tyranny
of his son and grandson, who wrought the deed of terror in the Church
of San Lionardo on the Chiaia.
The archway is chiefly the work of Pietro di Martino of Milan, though
it is said that Giuliano da Majano also laboured on it, if not others
also. It possesses a noble pair of bronze doors of even greater
interest than the archway; for not only is their workmanship extremely
fine, but also the figures possess the interest of portraiture. The
scenes depicted are the triumphs of King Ferdinand, second of the five
monarchs of Aragon, over his revolting barons. There is Ferdinand upon
his war-horse talking to the Duke of Taranto, his thin, cruel face
recognisable at a glance by the high nose which he derived from his
father, King Alfonso, builder of the arch. In the medallions of the
door the same sharp face appears; while his son, afterwards Alfonso
the Second, bears a shorter, thicker face, which is suggestive, though
very falsely, of more kindness.
Let us go into the castle and see what remains there to explain the
reputation of inhuman cruelty which history has conferred on these
kings. A small boy armed with keys is already hovering about
expectant; and though it is his purpose to show only the Chapel of
Santa Barbara, the slightest hint of a desire to see the subterranean
chamber will cause him to lead you through the sacristy, where he will
produce a couple of candle ends, and throw open a small doorway hidden
in the wall. A winding stair of perhaps twenty steps conducts to a
little chamber, faintly lighted by a deep-set window. At first the
room seems empty, but as one's eyes adjust themselves to the dim light
four coffins become visible, each lying on a shelf, two open and two
closed.
Surely, one thinks, this must be a place of private sepulture for the
Royal Family or for their servants, and the stair giving access from
the chapel was built for the convenience of mourners who wished to
stand beside their dead. But the boy, with a chuckle of amusement,
lifts the lid of one of the closed coffins. Within lies the mummy of a
man, fearfully distorted by his agony, his cramped hands clutched
desperately, as if fighting with all his strength against those who
held him down. His mouth is contorted, his whole body heaving with a
last struggle for life and breath. The man was strangled, there can be
no doubt of it; and there he lies to this hour, fully clothed in the
garments which he wore when he came down that little winding stair,
hose, buttons, and doublet still intact.
Each of the other coffins contains the body of a man slain in his
clothes, the head separated, and lying by the shoulders.
Who were these men, and how has it happened that they lie here all
together? What made mummies of them, and with what object were their
bodies preserved? The answer must be sought in history. The _Diario
Ferrarese_, printed by Muratori, tells us that "it was the constant
habit of King Ferdinand and King Alfonso, when their enemies, whether
barons or people, had fallen into their hands, to cut off their heads
and keep them salted in chambers underneath their palace." Not content
with having dismissed the spirits of their foes to another world,
these kingly Aragons must needs have, close by the scene of their
continual sports and labours, so many secret pleasure chambers into
which they could withdraw at leisure moments and gaze in rapture on
the very features of the enemy whose turbulence was stilled and whose
wits would never be turned against his king again. Doubtless these
visits renewed the joy of killing!
So in this chamber where King Alfonso or his father stood and gloated,
one may stand to-day and look down on the same bodies still unmoved--a
strange step back into the Middle Ages, and a more revealing glimpse
than any other known to me of what Naples was in old days, when its
kings--yes, even the best of them!--were tigers, and the seeds were
sown of that contempt for life which is to this hour a chief
difficulty of those who govern Naples. Who were these men? Surely, one
thinks, their rank and importance must be measured by the care with
which the King bestowed their bodies in such close neighbourhood to
the royal chapel and to his own apartments!
Probably we shall not miss the truth by very much if we conclude them
to be some among those barons of the kingdom who, incensed by the
harsh government of Ferdinand, and furious beyond all measure with his
more hateful son, gave rein to their old affection for the House of
Anjou, and conspired with the Pope to confer the realm on a prince of
that royal house. It seems strange that even under the afflictions of
the Aragon sovereignty men should have looked back on the days of
Anjou with affection. But the fact is that Alfonso, Duke of Calabria,
whose power as the eldest son of the aged King grew stronger daily,
was such a ruler as must needs rouse regrets for other days even in a
patient generation, much more in one so proud and turbulent as the
Neapolitans. Harshness and cruelty they understood; but Alfonso did
what no nation will endure. He took the women, even of the noblest
houses, at his will. Of this came unquenchable hatred, and in the end
the ruin of his house.
The conspiracy was a terrible one. Half the great officers of the
kingdom were involved in it, and King Ferdinand knew not where to look
for loyalty. The Prince of Salerno, Lord High Admiral of the realm,
and the Prince of Bisignano were among the leaders--members both of
that great family of San Severino, whose palace is known to every
visitor as the Church of the Gesu Nuovo. The Grand Constable, the
Grand Seneschal, the King's Secretary--there was no end to the men of
note and consequence who joined in the appeal to the Pope to dethrone
the tyrants of the House of Aragon, and give the kingdom to Rene of
Lorraine, last descendant of the ancient kings.
Ferdinand was a prince whose sagacity is extolled by all men. He was
wise as is the serpent. His statesmanship was of the type made widely
known twenty years later by Caesar Borgia, and in this emergency he
practised the same arts as enabled that accomplished dissimulator to
strangle his four chief enemies at once. The two occasions deserve
close study from those who would understand the statecraft of the
fifteenth century. Each was indeed a masterpiece of that art which
Machiavelli calls "virtu," and it is difficult to decide where to
award the palm.
Ferdinand negotiated. It was indeed his only course, for time must be
gained at any cost. This was in the regular routine of kings in
difficulty. De Comines, in a memorable passage, explains how useful it
is to send ambassadors to meet one's enemies; they see so much even
while they are treating. Ferdinand negotiated with such skill, such
open frankness and goodwill, showed such a broad and merciful spirit,
and was so ready to forgive, that the conspirators, who had waited in
vain for their new king, accepted the accord and returned sullenly to
their castles, doubting and fearing sorely.
"Let no man think that present kindnesses lead to the forgetting of
past injuries," says Machiavelli, laying bare the roots of human
nature in his incisive way. To do them justice, the barons supposed no
such thing. The Prince of Salerno was missing one fine morning. On the
gateway of his palace was a card, on which were inscribed the mystic
words--"Passero vecchio non entra in caggiola" (An old sparrow does
not go into the cage). He is said to have got out of the city
disguised as a muleteer. Other sparrows were less prudent or more
unfortunate. The cage doors were wide open, and the King and Duke sat
piping so prettily that any bird might have thought it safe to flutter
in. Towards the Count of Sarno Ferdinand showed particular affection.
His son Marco Coppola was betrothed to the daughter of the Duke of
Amalfi, the King's nephew. The wedding was at hand. It must be held in
the Royal Palace, in Castel Nuovo, if only to mark the royal favour.
There were great festivities. The pomp of the Court was boundless. But
the wedding garments which the King was preparing were not of this
world. Midway in the feastings and the music, when all men were
confident and careless, the stroke fell. How, one wonders, did
Ferdinand and Alfonso look at that moment when, sitting at the head of
the tables, gazing down upon their guests, bridegroom and bride and
relatives trusting in the royal honour, they gave the signal and
called in the soldiers who turned that feast to terror? How did the
guests look when the guard went round arresting every man of mark or
consequence within the hall? Surely since Belshazzar was King in
Babylon no feast has been broken up more awfully!
The craft and treachery of this great stroke fixed once for all the
reputation of Ferdinand and Alfonso. The nice taste of Renaissance
Italy revolted, giving voice to loud condemnation. King and Prince,
surprised at the outcry, paused, and held back the secret executioner.
It would be safer to have a show of justice; so a court was nominated,
the prisoners were tried, and when they had been despatched from the
world in this unexceptionable manner, one by one the other dukes and
barons were caught and led into the secret pleasure chambers, whence
they never more emerged. The Prince of Bisignano, the Duke of Melfi,
the Duke of Nardo, counts and knights innumerable disappeared. Their
children and their wives were treated in like manner. Few escaped; but
for many a day Neapolitans told the tale how Bandella Gaetano,
Princess of Bisignano, a woman of high courage and resource, fled with
her young children to the Church of San Lionardo in the Chiaia; and
there, profiting by the old fame of the saint as the guardian of
fugitives, bribed a boatman to take her on to Terracina, and so sought
refuge with the Colonnas. Ferdinand would have given much to stamp
out the brood; and had he been able to turn the pages of the book of
fate he would have given even more.
What happened to the prisoners was never known. For some time the
fiction was kept up that they were alive, and food was even sent daily
to their cells, set down perhaps beside the salted bodies in mockery.
But the executioner was seen wearing a gold chain which had belonged
to the Prince of Bisignano; and ere long it was known that every one
was dead.
There is no doubt that in these awful days the Church of San Lionardo
was filled with fugitives. It was there that Alfonso wrought that
nameless deed of terror which dwelt so heavily upon his conscience as
to destroy his nerves and send him fleeing from the kingdom. We have
seen what things his conscience would endure; perhaps it is as well we
remain in ignorance of what it would not. But if we argue from the
known to the unknown we may form a surmise of the nature of that act
which is enough to banish sleep, and may well make us grateful that
the walls of that old sanctuary which concealed so terrible a secret
stand no longer on the smiling shore which is the chosen parade of
Neapolitan society of our own day.
There are two chapels in the castle, one opening from the other; but
both lost whatever beauty they once had by the deplorable passion for
Barocco, which wrought such evil in Naples. Two great beauties still
remain, though not inside the chapels. One is the doorway, a lovely
work of Giuliano da Majano, mercifully left untouched, I know not by
what happy chance; the other is a winding staircase behind the choir,
consisting of a hundred and fifty-eight steps, each formed of a
single block of travertine, and so arranged that their inward edges
form a perfect cylinder. There is no end to the scenes of history and
tragedy which are recalled by these old walls and chambers, in which
the hottest passions of life in Naples have spent themselves so often,
even from the first coming of Charles of Anjou down to the creation of
the Parthenopean Republic, when Nelson received the surrender of the
Revolutionists, driven to despair by the arrival of his fleet. But
these are tales which visitors must find out for themselves. If they
will not go to Castel Nuovo on the inducement which I have given them,
neither will they if I should write a volume.
[Illustration: NAPLES--OLD TOWN]
When I emerge from the old palace fortress I hesitate, being, in
truth, half inclined to turn directly to the Carmine, the strongest
point of interest in Naples. But a man will fail to comprehend the
relation of the Carmine to ancient Naples if he goes to it by the
broad street along the quays which lay outside the mediaeval city. It
is better to plunge into the maze of narrow ways which still, unto
this hour, retain the general aspect of the city wherein Boccaccio
rambled, picking up in I know not what haunt of roysterers those sad
tales which beguile one yet in the pages of the _Decameron_. Who has
not read of the nocturnal adventures of Andreuccio, who came from Pisa
to Naples to buy horses with twenty gold florins in his pocket? Who
would not wish to see the very lanes through which he wandered naked
in the night? Who has not felt the charm of that naive irresponsibility
which pervades the tales of Naples in old days? Does it still exist?
Are the narrow lanes athrob even now on summer nights with the
thrumming of the lute, with the patter of girls' feet, made musical
by wafts of song blown down from lofty windows?
"Flower of the rose,
If I've been merry, what matter who knows?"
Well, let us go and see; and first we will turn up the Toledo, now
rechristened "Via Roma," that long straight street which the Viceroy
Don Pietro di Toledo made without the city wall, and which is still
the chief artery of life and fashion.
The narrow vista, made picturesque by hanging balconies and green
shutters, is bathed in sunshine--not the fierce glare which even in
early summer brings out the awnings used to convert the footways into
shaded corridors, but the pleasant golden glow of an April Eastertide,
carrying with it the reek of violets and early roses. It is no wonder
that the street is odorous of flowers; for at any corner a few soldi
will buy them by the handful, fresh and dewy, redolent of summer,
though indeed summer never flees far from this sunny coast, and even
in midwinter she will slip back for a while, bringing golden days. It
is on the stroke of noon, noon of Holy Thursday, and in another hour
the roadway will be closed to vehicles. For on this day, by custom old
enough to be respectable, the Neapolitans go on foot to visit the
sepulchres of Christ in the churches, combining this exercise of
devotion with the more worldly solaces of friendship and social
intercourse. There was a time when princesses came down and mingled
with the throng, the royal ladies of the House of Bourbon going to and
fro on foot; while the rustling of their long dresses of black silk
gave the ceremony its picturesque title of "Lu Struscio." There being
no princesses in Naples now, the old ceremony has lost some of its
attractions for the nobly born; but it is still honoured, and already
the carriages are growin
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