Naples, Past and Present

by Arthur H. Norway

Tener lo Campo! ed ora ha Giotto il grido."

In Brigantaggio it is just the same, and Scarpi's just celebrity is obscured by the greater fame of Fra Diavolo.

Scarpi was torn two ways; cupidity reminded him that the golden statue was easily obtained, piety interposed that it would be a shocking crime. Nothing worse was set down against him than the usual tricks on travellers, slitting their ears, and dismissing them upon occasion to a better world. It was a pity to spoil so fair a record. But Fra Diavolo, boy as he was when he joined Scarpi's band, possessed the great advantage of a single heart. Cupidity was not thwarted by any opposing force of piety, and craft came to make the weak arm strong.

He dressed himself like a novice, and going up boldly to the gate of the convent proclaimed himself a penitent, and sought admission to the Order. I doubt not he had an innocent face. The mother superior welcomed him, and straightway shut him up in solitude for the usual three days' communing with heavenly powers, which was to prepare him for the spiritual life to which he aspired. The boy naturally wished to make this intercourse as direct as possible, and making his way unobserved into the chapel he seized the golden Madonna and hid her under some straw in a cart belonging to a peasant whom some lawful occasion had brought up to the convent. Having done this, he presented himself before the Mother Superior, telling her reflection had convinced him he was not fitted for a heavenly life—which was indeed no more than the truth—and so departed with her approval.

The poor peasant driving down among the olive woods somewhat later, all unconscious of the riches in his creaking cart, was probably at a loss to understand why Scarpi's faithful followers should stop him, and insist on rummaging in the straw. His emotions when he saw what they fished out would be a fit subject for a dramatic monologue. Horror at the sacrilege must have struggled with regret that he had not himself thought of fumbling in the straw. Had he done so, would he not have driven off the other way, and melted down the Madonna in his own cottage? To be made the tool by which sinners acquire wealth is surely bitter, and often in after life the poor man must have cursed the fate which did not whisper in his ear what it was he carried in the cart.

But Scarpi's bandits carried off the statue, and Fra Diavolo gained great honour with them. This early fame he never lost. And the common people, holding that priests and devils are, however opposite in all their qualities, the only classes of mankind who are uniformly cunning and successful in all they undertake, combined the titles into one cognomen, no whit too glorious for the chieftain, who in his untutored youth had proved greater than all the restraints which hamper greedy men, and had laid hands on the Madonna.

So Fra Diavolo became a mighty leader, and woeful are the tales which travellers told of him. Yet I should be unjust if I did not mention that his most brutal outrages were sometimes capable of being dignified by the name of politics, if not of loyalty to an exiled king. For Ferdinand of Bourbon when he fled from his throne of Naples at the end of the last century, skulking from revolutionary outblasts and the coming of the French, was not so far untrue to the traditions of his race as to despise the help of any agents, however rascally. It might have seemed incongruous if we had found the inheritor of the name of the constable Bourbon who led Frundsberg's Lanzknechts down on Rome in 1527, and cast the treasures of ages as a prey to the scum of Europe, if we had found this monarch saying to himself "Non tali auxilio," and indulging in the luxury of scruples. But Ferdinand despised no man who would help him; and so Fra Diavolo, the murderer and bandit, became a secret agent of the exiled king, working hand in hand with that even more atrocious scoundrel Mammone, whose habit it was to dine with a newly severed human head upon the table, and whose cold-blooded assassinations were more in number than any man could count. So these murderous devils cut off French couriers on the mountain roads, attacked small parties in overwhelming numbers, and performed other gallant deeds in the service of their king, who was not ungrateful, but rewarded them after his kind and theirs.

I can find but little in the streets of Castellammare which invites me to linger in them. There are mineral baths just outside the town, but Providence gave me no occasion for visiting them, and I dislike the apparatus of ill-health. I went past the baths, therefore, and strolled on through the crowded, evil-smelling streets till I came out again at the foot of the hill leading to the woods of Quisisana, and went up once more beneath the green arches of the budding leaves, till I saw from time to time a snatch of sea above the houses and the wide sunlit plain revealed itself stretching far and distant round the base of the great volcano.

As I went through the little village of which I spoke before, I noticed hanging on a wire which crosses the road a doll made in the likeness of an old grey-haired woman, adorned with a tuft of feathers growing somewhat bare. As it swung to and fro in the light wind it had the aspect of a child's plaything which had fallen there by chance; but I had seen a similar doll hanging from a balcony in Castellammare, and knew the thing to be no toy.

Such dolls are seen commonly hanging in the air at this season in the Sorrento peninsula. The old woman is Quaresima, or Lent, and she is provided with as many hen's feathers as there are weeks in that period of fasting. Every Sunday one feather is plucked out; and when the last is gone Quaresima is torn down with rejoicing. On the first Sunday of her exaltation a playful diversion is carried on at the cost of poor Quaresima. A boy or girl, chosen by lot, is blindfolded and armed with a long stick, with which he strikes in the air, groping after the swinging figure. At last he finds it, and a sharp blow breaks a concealed bottle, letting out a red fluid—the blood of Lent; the ceremony is diversified by a good deal of horseplay.