Oh, the poor horses of Naples! They have haunted me ever since I saw them. There is not, I should think, any place in the civilized world where dumb beasts are treated with such wanton brutality as in this glorious Naples. Some of the horses are mere skeletons—bags of bones—and their starved bodies all one mass of gaping wounds and hideous sores. The Neapolitan flyman always keeps a wound or a sore place open on his horse’s body. It is into this wound that he thrusts a sharp-pointed stick when he wants to urge the poor beast to further effort or increased speed. I have seen a poor little pony, one mass of sores and dead lame, dragging a calesso containing fourteen people, and being goaded into a gallop the whole length of a journey of ten miles.
I have referred to the subject of the Naples horses elsewhere, but it cannot be referred to too often. I am, in common with many other writers who have seen the awful cruelty of Naples, hopeful that some day public opinion will grow so strong on the subject that even the Neapolitans will be shamed into something like ordinary humanity to their dumb slaves.
Let me briefly, while our own wretched animals drag us wearily along the road to Vesuvius (it takes four hours to get to the base of the cone from Naples), tell you something of the Naples beasts of burthen.
The calesso which I mentioned above is a long, narrow cart with three benches or seats in it, and two poles sticking out behind, on which a board is placed which seats more people. These calessi belong mostly to the villagers and the costermongers. The sides are painted sometimes with pictures of the Virgin, sometimes with ballet ladies, and sometimes with apocryphal figures. But however much they differ on the outside they are always the same inside—that is, they are always full. The proprietor of a calesso drives half the village to town and back again for nothing if they are his friends; for a small fee if they are not. All the morning you see these loaded calessi coming into Naples, and all the afternoon you meet them going out again. Sometimes, instead of the usual lame, raw, starved pony, a donkey draws the terrible load; occasionally a horse in the last stage of break up and break down is harnessed to the shafts. The heavier waggons are drawn by teams. Sometimes four horses, sometimes a horse and a donkey, are harnessed together. Sometimes a horse, a donkey, and a cow limp along side by side. Upon one occasion near Pozzuoli I met a horse, a cow, a mule, and a donkey drawing a load, but the most frequent ‘pair’ is a horse and a cow.
Up in a secluded corner near the tomb of Virgil, just at the entrance to the old grotto of Posilipo, I came one day on a dirty, broken-down looking stable. On the door I saw written up ‘Society for the Protection of Animals.’ After seeing the animals, I was not surprised that the society took such a back seat. After all, what can it do in a country where everybody tells you it is wicked to think of animals—animals have no souls! Well, it may be so. I am far from sure about it, but animals have hearts, and in this respect they have the advantage of the people who torture them so cruelly in return for their willing, life-long drudgery.
We arrived at the foot of the cone at last. The last part of the journey had been a zigzag climb over miles of lava and black mud and shapeless rocks, the cooled down ‘vomit of Vesuvius.’
At the foot of the cone is a funicular railway which has been rendered familiar by the advertisements on most of the Continental railway-stations.
The price of a seat in one of the cars is £1. We step in, and are hauled up to the top.
It is something like going up the side of a house on a switchback, and the process is so alarming that many people still prefer the old-fashioned method of ascension, and either climb up laboriously or are carried up in chairs by the guides and porters.
I had an uncomfortable feeling that the rope might break as I made the ascent, and I was intensely relieved when we reached the mountain station and stood once more on terra firma.