From that night I went only to puppet shows. Even a grand opera at San Carlo could not tempt me away from them. I saw dramas and comedies and farcical comedies played by dolls, and I saw everywhere packed audiences roaring with delight at their antics, or weeping in sympathy with their sorrows.
Funerals at Naples are among the curious spectacles of the town. Being of a cheerful disposition, I always run after a funeral. The body is carried on a bier by four masked men, and a procession of masked men follows. These masked men are the Brethren of the Misericordia. Rich funerals have a grand open hearse in which the coffin is placed, and two priests, with lighted candles, sit inside at the head of the coffin. The coffin is always smothered in flowers.
The practice of exposing the dead to the public view still obtains in Naples. Recently, in one of the small streets, a baker lost his only daughter, a very beautiful girl of sixteen. I saw her after she was dead, because the baker had cleared all the bread from his shop-window and put his pretty dead daughter there instead. And for a whole day she lay there, surrounded with beautiful white camellias and lovely flowers, until it was time for her to be placed on the bier and carried off to the Campo Santo.
The lottery playing in Naples is the curse of the town. Almost every second shop is a lottery shop, and all ranks gamble from week to week. The system is not to buy a ticket, but to back certain numbers to come out. The numbers run from one to ninety, and five are drawn every week. You can play the single number, the ambo, and the terno—that is, two numbers or three, and four and five if you like. If you play the ambo you name two numbers to come out, and if you are right you are paid by the Government three hundred times your stake. That stake can be what you like, from a penny to a pound. If you back a terno you get proportionately more; if you name all five you get sixty thousand times your stake.
With this game brought within the reach of all classes, you can readily imagine that the lottery shops are besieged all day long. Every peasant, every servant, every beggar plays at the lottery. The vice is national; it is in the blood; it is part of the Neapolitan character. There are a hundred superstitions among the people concerning the lottery. If you meet a white horse you play such and such a number: if you meet a funeral, if you hear a donkey bray, if you see a man with red whiskers—whatever happens, the Neapolitan takes it as an augury of a certain number, and he plays it accordingly.
Some of the priests have great success in foretelling successful numbers. One of the monks who walk about soliciting alms once had a great reputation. To anyone who gave him charity he whispered a number. He was so successful that at last he could not move out without being surrounded by crowds, who demanded a number to play. He lost his temper, and refused to tell anybody. The crowd thereupon seized him, and he was carried away and shut up in a cellar in a house, where he was beaten with a stick to make him tell the number. Still he refused, and they swore they would keep him prisoner until he consented; but the poor priest fell ill, and then, getting alarmed lest he should die, his assailants took him out and put him in the street, where he was picked up by the police. He was taken to the hospital, where he died, but before he breathed his last he gave ‘numbers’ to the sick in his ward. They told others, and the entire hospital—patients, doctors, and nurses—played the poor monk’s numbers, an ambo, and those numbers came out of the wheel. The Naples lottery lost an enormous sum, but it gained again next week, when every living soul put every shilling they had got in the world on the poor monk’s terno, which, fortunately for the Government, didn’t come out as the ambo had done.
There is one remarkable feature about the Naples Museum, which is, that each of the old gentlemen who act as custodians of a room quietly whispers into your ear that he should like to do business with you. One dear old boy actually found out my hotel, and arrived in the evening and asked to see me, having with him a book about the museum which he was sure I should like to buy, as it was very rare and very curious. When I had bought it I discovered that it was the 1888 edition of a work published in Ludgate Hill, London.
The English are the special prey of the touts in the Museum—in fact, they seem to be special prey everywhere. Everybody in Naples knows enough English to waylay them with. Even the objectionable ‘guides’ who stand outside the Café de l’Europe at night, and in the expressive language of the country are called ‘ruffiani,’ ply their highly objectionable calling in the Anglo-Saxon tongue. And a little barefooted Neapolitan imp who sells matches outside the San Carlo Theatre shouts morning, noon, and night, in a shrill treble, ‘Here yare, sare—vant some matches!’ In addition to this a peripatetic trade in Holywell Street literature and art is openly plied by men in the streets, who expatiate upon the character of their wares in fluent English, and follow the British or American tourist for a quarter of a mile in their endeavour to persuade him to become a purchaser.
After all, England is not such a great place in everybody’s eyes as it is in our own. I travelled with an Italian priest from Naples to Pompeii, and we told each other stories in French—not French stories, bien entendu. He had just come from Sicily, where he had been tutor in a great Duke’s family, and when he wanted to teach the Duke’s son some English history, the Duke said: ‘Nonsense! let him learn the history of Sicily first; what is the use of his troubling about the small countries like England?’ I met a Neapolitan, too, not long ago—a Neapolitan Count from Otranto—who asked me many questions concerning England. I told him it was a great country. ‘Is it as great a country as Greece?’ he said. ‘Oh, much greater!’ I replied; ‘the two are not to be compared.’ The Count shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it!’ he exclaimed; ‘I see many Greek ships at Otranto, but very seldom an English one.’