| PAGE | |
| CHAPTER I | |
| The Approach to Naples by the Sea | [1] |
| CHAPTER II | |
| The Ancient Marvels of the Phlegræan 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 Stabiæ | [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 Trinità della Cava, Salerno, and the Ruined Majesty of Pæstum | [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 Baiæ | [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, Phœnician 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 planctæ, 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 Æneas 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 mediæval 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.