Around the clock in Europe

by Charles Fish Howell

Bathing ever her white feet

In the tideless summer seas.”

We distinguish Torre Annunciata, abreast of our speeding boat, by the evil redolence of its swarming fish markets and the boisterous shouting of its many children at mora; and, in striking contrast, one thinks of grim Pompeii, farther inland,—“la città morta,”—hushed and prostrate in moonlit desolation. At the neighboring Torre del Greco we can fancy the coral fishers, who may not yet have left for the season’s diving off Sicily, to be smoking black cheroots along the wharves and planning lively times when they market their coral and Barbary ponies in November. Certainly there is little to suggest the peace that Shelley found here. Few shores are more dramatic than those of this Vesuvian Campagna Felice. Resina hangs gloomily over the entrance to the entombed Herculaneum, and Portici lights up but half-heartedly, abashed that all her royal Bourbon palaces should now be housing only schoolboys. About both villages and for miles inland any one may see the wrath of Vesuvius in dismal evidence in twisted lava rock of weird and sinister shapes. But there is a fullness of life on these shores to-night, increasing as our boat advances; individual houses multiply into villages, and villages overlap into a solid mass that is Naples’s East End. We pick our way among the clustering boats, and around long piers with little lighthouses at their ends, and presently Luigi abandons his cheroot, stands up by the mast and shouts shrill and mysterious hails, and shortly up we come to our landing at a flight of dripping stone steps at the tatterdemalion Villa del Popolo, sea-gate to the noisiest, dirtiest, most crowded (and so most characteristic) section of all Naples. A passing of silver from me, from Luigi a twisted smile and a regretful “buon riposo,”—the last, I fear, that I shall ever hear from him,—and I take leave of my amiable companion for the sputtering lights and exciting diversions of the swarming Carmine Gate and Mercato. From the tide-washed Castello dell’ Ovo to the prison heights of Sant’ Elmo and the charming cloisters of San Martino, and from the huts of the Mergellina fishermen to far beyond where I am standing on the eastern front of the city, all Naples is sparkling with lights and humming with an intense and multi-phased tumult.

Lucifer falling from Paradise must have experienced some such contrast as those who exchange the serene evening beauty of the Bay of Naples for the odors, uproar, and confusion of the Mercato. But does not the saying run, “See Naples and die”? And to miss visiting so characteristic a district by night is almost to fail to see “Naples” at all; though it may, perhaps, appear at first glance to assure the “and die.” The quay of Santa Lucia is the only other section that even attempts to rival this in preserving unimpaired the “best” traditions of Neapolitan uproar and picturesque squalor. And it must be remembered that one’s interest in this city is like that felt for a pretty, bright, and amiable child who is, at the same time, a very ragged and dirty one. Life, as it is found in the Mercato, is exuberance in extenso; the most complete conception possible of a “much ado about nothing.” It is an irrelevant tumult in which matter-of-fact inconsequences are expressed with an incredibly disproportionate use of shoulders, fingers, and lungs. An inquiry as to the time of day is attended with a violence of gesticulation adequate to convey the emotions of Othello slaying Desdemona; an observation on the weather involves a pounding of the table and a wild flourish of arms like the expiring agony of an octopus. Even work itself seems half play in its accompaniment of romantic posturing, eloquent and profuse gestures, and continual over-bubbling of merriment, quarrels, and song. All this is of the very essence of the Mercato—hopelessly tattered and unkempt, artlessly unconscious of its picturesque rags, and altogether so frankly frowzy and disheveled as to become, upon the whole, positively charming. No one equals the Neapolitan in expressing the full force of the Scotch proverb, “Little gear the less care.”

In appearance the Mercato is a rabbit-warren of tortuous chasms lined with dowdy structures in every advanced stage of decrepitude. Even its lumbering churches of Spanish baroque rather add to than detract from this effect. No money is squandered on upkeep. The cost of initial construction is here like an author’s definitive edition,—final. Little, cramped balconies, innocent of paint, blink under the flapping of reed-made shades, shop signs are illegible from dirt and discoloration, and the weathered house-fronts shed scales of plaster as snakes do skins. The very skies are overcast with clouds of other people’s laundry. Dead walls flame with lurid theatre posters, unless warned off by the “post-no-bills” sign—the familiar “è vietata l’ affissione.” Cheap theatres are completely covered with life-size paintings illustrating scenes from the play for the week. Lottery signs abound. Certain window placards, by their very insistence, eventually become familiar and homelike; as, for instance, the “first floor to let,” the omnipresent “si loca, appartamento grande, 1^o primo,” for which one comes in time to look as for a face from home. Religion contributes a garish and tawdry decorative feature in the little gaudy shrines on street corners and house-fronts, where, in a sort of shadow box covered with glass, candles sputter before painted saints. The government monopolies, salt and tobacco, the Siamese Twins of Italy, are inseparable with their ever-lasting “Sale e Tabacchi” signs and dwell together everywhere on a common and friendly footing, like the owls, snakes, and prairie dogs in Kansas.

Curiosity fairly plunges a man into so promising a field, and Adventure stalks at his elbow. He finds the narrow, squalid streets brimming with a restless, noisy, nervous swarm. Picturesque qualities are brought out in the play of feeble street lamps and the dejected, half-hearted lights of dingy, cavernous shops and eating-places. A comme il faut costume for men appears to be limited to trousers and shirt, with the latter worn open to the belt. The women affect toilettes of a general dirty disarray which their laudable interest in the life around frequently leads them absent-mindedly to arrange in the quasi-retirement of the doorways, the front sill itself being reserved for the popular diversion of combing the hair of their spawn of half-naked children. To traverse an alley and avoid stepping on some rollicking youngster in puris naturalibus is vigorous exercise of the value of a calisthenic drill. Still, it is possible to escape the babies, but scarcely the fakirs and beggars. The fakir has odds and ends of everything to sell and teases for patronage for love of all the saints; one even awaits the Oriental announcement, “In the name of the Prophet, figs!” The beggars, of course, are worse; crawling across your path and dragging themselves after you to display their physical damages, often self-inflicted, in quest of a soldo of sympathy. Express compassion in other than monetary terms and you get it back instanter, along with a dazing assortment of vitriolic maledictions. As the visitor’s patience gives way under the strain, it presently becomes a very pretty question as to whose language is the most horrific, his own or the beggar’s.

Women dodge through the streets carrying great bundles on their heads, and pause from time to time for friendly greetings with frowzy acquaintances tilting out of the upper windows where the laundry hangs. It is from these mysterious upper windows that the housewife in the morning lowers a pail and a bit of money wrapped in a piece of newspaper, and bargains with the leather-lunged padulano when he comes loafing along beside his panniered donkey, crying his wares in that “carrying voice” we all admire in our opera singers. Those are the hours of trying domestic exaction, when the woman who does not care for water in the milk watches the production of the raw material with the cow standing at the doorway, or from the frolicsome goat that nimbly ascends every flight of stairs to the very portal of the combined kitchen and sleeping-room. But just now neighbors are shouting conversations in those same upper windows, or calling down to the women and girls who go shuffling along on the lava pavement below in wooden sabots that look like bath-slippers—if, indeed, one has imagination enough to think of bath-slippers in this vicinity.

Restless activity prevails. The most unnatural things are the statues, chiefly because they do not move. One catches glimpses of them now and then in the niches of the motley-marbled churches,—churches of memories grave and gay, of Boccaccio’s first glimpse of Fiammetta, or the slaying of the young fisherman-tribune, Masaniello, whom Salvator Rosa delighted to paint. There is buying and selling, eating and drinking. There are fruit stands and lemonade stalls and macaroni stores and dejected little shops with festoons of vegetables pendent from the smoky ceilings over whose home-painted counters weary women await custom with babies in their arms. A brisk demand prevails for the famous cheese-flavored biscuit called “pizza,” set with little powdered fish, and those who desire can have a slice of devilfish-tentacle for a soldo, which the purchaser dips in the kettle of hot water and devours on the spot. Should this latter fare disagree with any one, there will be access on the morrow to the miracle-working “La Bruna”—the picture of the Virgin in the church of St. Mary of the Carmine—which every child in Naples knows was painted by St. Luke; and if that should fail, there is still the liquefying blood of St. Januarius in the inner shrine of the cathedral.

Happily, the senses are more than four; and when seeing, smelling, tasting, and feeling fail from over-exertion in the Mercato, still hearing remains, so that one may study the Sicilian-like prattle of the Neapolitan in all its ramifications from a whisper to a shriek. The character of the man is expressed along with it; and thus one observes that while a Piedmontese may be steady and industrious, a Venetian gossipy and artistic, a Tuscan reserved and frugal, and a Roman proud and lordly, the Neapolitan is merry, loquacious, generous, quarrelsome, superstitious, and, too frequently, vicious. Thus the Mafia flourishes with him, and the Camorra, an unbegrudged possession, is wholly his own. His vendetta may, perhaps, be mildly defended on the ground that it is, at least, only a personal affair, and certainly less foolish and reprehensible than the perennial jealousy of an entire people, as, for example, the ancient feud between Florence and Siena, where an inherited antagonism is still devoutly cherished and the old battle of Montaperti refought with fury every morning. The Neapolitan had rather spend that time on the lottery, dream his lucky numbers, look them up in his dream-book, and go to the Saturday afternoon drawings with a fresh and stimulating interest in life.

It is a nice question whether the Mercato loves singing best, or eating—when it can get it. At night one inclines to the latter view. There is a prodigious hubbub around all the open-air cooking-stoves and in every smoky trattoria and family eating-place. One would scarcely hazard an opinion as to the number of bowls of macaroni, quantities of polenta, and whole nations of snails and frogs that are being devoured between appreciative gestures and puffs of cigarettes, and washed down unctiously with minestra soup and watery wines. But as all these good people have probably breakfasted solely on dry bread and black coffee, no one would think of begrudging them the delight they are taking in dining so gayly and at so modest an outlay. If stricter economy becomes necessary later, they will patronize the charity “kitchens,” where soup, vegetables, meat, and wine are supplied at cost, or perhaps some friend will give them a voucher and they will be able to get it all for nothing.