The region to which we lifted our eyes is one of veritable poet-worship. How incredible to think that on this hillside Lucullus has lived and Horace strolled and Virgil mused over his deathless verse! Look again, and under a clump of gnarled old trees one sees the latter’s venerated tomb. Over these waters came the pious Æneas with his Trojan galleys to question the Cumæan Sibyl; and since the age of fable what fleets of Carthage have passed around Cape Miseno, what barks of savage pirates, what brazen triremes of Rome, what armadas of Spain and navies of all the world! It staggers the mind to attempt to recall the scenes of war and pillage that have been enacted under the frowning brows of these storied hills during the last three thousand years.
The wonderful sail was all too brief, and almost before I was aware the goal was at hand, and I stepped ashore at the ristoranti approved of Luigi and entered upon the promised joys. It was all as he had predicted; with possibly the exception of a few details he had discreetly neglected to warn me against. That it required four determined efforts and a threat of police to get the proper change when I came to settle the bill is really no jarring memory at all. It is the usual experience with the “forgetful” Neapolitan restaurant keeper. And what are foreigners for, anyway? And was it not worth something extra to have dined face to face with this glittering Bay, with the panorama of Naples on one hand and a sunset over Cape Miseno on the other? So with many bows and mutual civilities I parted with the zealous boniface and rejoined the waiting felucca. A light shove, and the shadows of the terrace fell behind us and we were out again on the Bay. Such are the alluring stages, among others, that may bring one eventually to an evening’s moonlight sail at Naples.
Just now the bells rang eight. Luigi grows sentimental. Again he declines my cigars, stretches at his ease and produces another quilled specimen of government monopoly such as, when at home, he lights at the end of a smouldering rope dangling in a tobacco shop of the Mercato. In the gathering gloom one sees little now of the trellised paths of Posilipo, the white marble villas with their balconies and terraces, or the brilliant clustering roses gay against the glossy green of groves of lemons and oranges. In the darkness of the firs each cavern and grotto of this legend-haunted headland disappears and one can barely make out the wave-washed Rock of Virgil, at the farthest extremity, where, the Neapolitans will tell you, the poet was wont to practice his enchantments. The ruddy sky pales over the mouth of Avernus and the Elysian Fields, and Apollo abandons us to Diana and the broad flecking of the lights of Parthenope. We swing a wide circle in the offing. Between us and the distant rim of water-front lamps hundreds of light craft are idly floating. Romantic, pleasure-loving Naples has dined and taken to the water, to cheer its heart with laughter and song. Like glowworms the lights of the little boats lift and sway with the movement of the waves; while seaward, the drifting torches of fishermen flare in search of frutti di mare.
Like an aged beauty Naples is at her best by night, when the ravages of time are concealed. Lights glitter brightly along the shore line from Posilipo to Sorrento and all over the hillsides, and even beyond Sant’ Elmo and the low white priory of San Martino the palace-crowned heights of Capodimonte, where the paper-chases of early spring afford so much diversion to the young gallants of the court. Popular restaurants up the hillsides are marked by groups of colored lights. A thick spangle of lamps proclaims the progress of some neighborhood festa. The moon is full; the sky brilliant with enormous stars. In the distance the curling smoke of Vesuvius glows with a sultry red or fades fitfully into gloomy tones, as suits that imperious will which threescore of eruptions have rendered absolute. But, as all the world knows, this aged beauty of a city that “lights up” so well by night is far from “plain” by day. Then appears the charm and distinction of the original way she has of parting her hair, as it were, with the great dividing rocky ridge that runs downward from Capodimonte to Sant’ Elmo and then on to Pizzofalcone, “Rock of the Falcon.” She even secures a coquettish touch in the projecting point, like an antique necklace pendant, at the centre of her double-crescented shore, where juts a low reef and at its end rests the ancient, blackened Castello dell’Ovo,—on a magically supported egg, they say,—the accredited theatre of so many extravagant adventures. And by day she looks down in indolent content through the half-closed eyes of ten thousand windows and surveys a glorious sea of milky blue, brimming tawny curving beaches crowned with white villas in luxuriant groves and vineyards, expanding in turquoise about soft headlands and dim precipices, and bearing, on its smooth, restful bosom in the far, faint offing, magical islands of pink and pearl that seem no more than tinted clouds.
A shoal of skiffs hangs under the black hull of a belated liner, whose rails are crowded with new arrivals delighted at so picturesque and enthusiastic a reception, and whose silver falls merrily into the inverted umbrellas of the boys and girls who are singing and dancing in the little boats by the light of flaming torches. Very shortly these visitors will learn that the interest they excite in Neapolitans is to be measured very strictly in terms of ready cash. Secretly, they will be despised. There is no smile-hid rapacity comparable with that encountered here. The incoming steamer has not yet warped into her berth before the Neapolitan has begun his campaign for money. Beggars crawl out on the pier flaunting their hideous deformities and wailing for soldi, and insulting cabmen lie in ambush at the gates. At no other port does a foreigner disembark with so much embarrassment. He goes ashore feeling like a lamb marked for the shearing, and lives to fulfill the expectation with humiliating dispatch. It has to be admitted, on the other hand, that the customs-officers occasionally catch strange flashes of transmarine interests that must puzzle them not a little. As an instance, the first person to land from the steamer I was on was a young American athlete in desperate quest of the latest daily paper, and bent, as we presumed, upon securing instant word of some matter of great and immediate importance. He succeeded; but what was our astonishment to behold him a minute later leap and shout for joy and announce to every one about him that Princeton had again won the Yale baseball series and remained the college champions!
Naples, to-night, is vibrant with song; faithful to her ancient myth of the nymph Parthenope, whose sweet singing long lured men to destruction until Ulysses withstood it and the chagrined goddess cast herself into the sea and perished and her body floated to these shores. Parthenope’s children here do not destroy people by their singing now, but rather delight and revitalize them. Mandolins and guitars are throbbing softly on every hand and the old familiar songs of Naples fill the air. “Traviata,” “Trovatore,” and the “Cavalleria” reign prime favorites. To be sure, there is no escaping the linked sweetness of the wailing “Sa-an-ta-a Lu-u-ci-a,” nor that notion of perpetual and hilarious youth conveyed in the ubiquitous “Funiculì-Funiculà.” In martial staccato, as of old, Margarita, the love-lorn seamstress, is jestingly warned against Salvatore,—“Mar-ga-rì, ’e perzo a Salvatore!”—and the skittish “Frangese” recites for the millionth time the discouraging experience of the giddy young peddler who undertook to barter his “pretty pins from Paris” in exchange for kisses that would only bring “a farthing for five” in Paradise. More than one singer is deploring the heartless coquetry of “La Bella Sorrentina,” while as many more appeal amorously to the charming Maria with promises of “beds of roseleaves,”—
“Ah! Maria Marì!
Quanta suonna che perdo pe te!”
We take an æsthetic interest in the Pagliaccian ravings of Canio, and grieve for the “little frozen hands” of “La Bohème”; while, by way of contrast, all the peace and serenity of moonlight comes to us in the chaste, stately measures of the pensive “Luna Nova.” Serenades seem twice serenades when breathed in the soft, lissome dialect of Naples. There is no tiring of the impassioned refrain of “Sole Mio”:—
“Ma n’ atu sole