IN THE CAMPO SANTO AT PERUGIA
The young moon hangs amid a steely sky; the land, empty and darkening, rolls like a billowing sea towards the Western orange glow; and high behind us the tall hill lifts Perugia’s ragged silhouette.
Down the steep road they came—grave bourgeois; bands of brown-faced youths, chewing thin cigars; aged peasant-women, with faded, wrinkled eyes; chattering country-girls, gaudy handkerchiefs around their hair; toddling children; uncouth men from the mountains, sullenly wrapped in fur-trimmed cloaks, while, posted in rows on either side, the crippled beggars offer their dusty hats, and whine for charity in the Virgin’s name.
Before the red gate of the Campo Santo the crowd surges; within, every alley is black with the press of people. It is the day of the dead. To visit the dead all the town is come.
... The pale specks of a myriad, tiny lamps; the glow of garlands against the crowding slabs of snow-white marble, that mark the children’s graves; the glitter of every small, spruce mortuary chapel; and the glad scent of freshly-scattered flowers....
Death loses its squalor; and becomes something demure, sociable, almost gay....
NAPLES IN NOVEMBER
Up the squalid, ill-paved street, lumber the great landaus—an interminable, toiling stream, carrying home from the corso the morose, sallow-faced ladies of the Neapolitan nobility, and crushing on either side the hedge of gaping hobbledehoys that line the niggardly pavement.
From Posilipo
Heaped beneath us all Naples, white and motionless in the silent blaze of the midday sun; circling the bay, still and smooth and blue as the sky above, a misty line of white villages; dark, velvety shadows draping the hills; on the horizon, rising abruptly, Capri’s notched silhouette—tout semble suer la beauté—la bonne et franche beauté criarde des pays chauds européens.