Naples is a crowded, uncomfortable city, for within a circumference of scarce sixteen kilometres is huddled a population of considerably more than half a million souls.
Naples’ chief charms are its site, and its magnificently scenic background, not its monuments or its people.
“The lazzaroni,” remarked Montesquieu of the Neapolitan “won’t-works,” “pass their time in the middle of the street.” This observation was made many, many years ago, but it is equally true to-day.
Naples is not the only Italian city where one sees men live without apparent means of existence, but it is here most to be remarked. On the quays and on the promenades you see men and women without work, and apparently without ambition to look for it save to exploit strangers. On the steps of the churches you see men and women without legs, arms or eyes, and infants sans chemises, and they, too, live by the same idle occupation of asking for alms.
Everywhere at Naples, before your hotel, crowded around your carriage or automobile, or paddling around in boats just over your steamer’s side, are hoards of beggars of all sorts and conditions of poverty and probity. The beggar population of Naples is doubtless of no greater proportions than in Genoa, or even Rome, but it is more in evidence and more insistent. There are singing beggars, lame, halt and blind beggars, whining beggars, swimming beggars, diving beggars, flower-selling beggars and just plain beggars. Give to one and you will have to give to all—or stand the consequences, which may be serious or not according to circumstances. Don’t disburse sterilized charity, then, but keep hard-hearted.
Naples’ chief sights for the tourists are its museum, its great domed galleries and their cafés and restaurants, its Castello dell’Ovo and the Castel del Carmine.
The Castello dell’Ovo is out in the sea, at the end of a tiny bridge or breakwater, running from the Pizzofalcone, one of the slopes of the background hills of Naples running down to sea-level.
As a fortress the Castello dell’Ovo is outranked to-day by the least efficient in any land, but one of the Spanish Viceroys, in 1532, Don Pedro of Toledo, thought it a stronghold of prime importance, due entirely to its oval shape, which it preserves unto to-day. It is unique, in form at any rate.
Charles VIII of France, on his memorable Italian journeyings—when he discovered (sic) the Renaissance architecture of Italy and brought it back home with him—dismantled the castle and left it in its now barrack-like condition, shorn of any great distinction save the oval shape of its donjon. One is bound to remark this noble monument as it is from its quay that one embarks on the cranky, little, wobbling steamboat which bears one to Capri. Lucullus, who had some reputation as a good liver, once had a villa here on the very quay which surrounds the Castello.
Opposite the Villa del Popolo (near the Porta del Carmine), the People’s Park as we should call it, is a vast, forbidding, unlovely structure.