Sometimes you will see such a big load walkin’ off and can’t for your life tell what propels it till bime by you will hear a loud bray from underneath. It sounds quite scareful. The little ridin’ wagons of the poor people are packed too as I never see a hoss car in the U. S. Sometimes you will see more’n two dozen folks, priests, soldiers, men, women and children, and sometimes baskets full of vegetables and babies swingin’ underneath and all drawed by a donkey; it hain’t right and I wanted to talk to ’em about it, but didn’t know as they would hear to me. But our old mair is used fur different.
The Cathedral is quite a noble lookin’ buildin’ and contains tombs of many noted people, Pope Innocent, King Andrew, Charles I. of Anjou, and many, many others. The Piazza del Municipio has a beautiful fountain, and there is one fashionable promenade over two hundred feet wide containing all sorts of trees and shrubs where you can see the Neopolitans dressed in fine array. There is a terrace extending into the sea, temples, winding paths, grottos, etc.
The Piazza del Plebiscito has an equestrian statute that 375 wuz taken in the first place for Napoleon, then changed to General Murat and finally to Charles III. It made me think considerable of the daily papers who use one picture for all social and criminal purposes, and for Queen Victoria and Lydia Pinkham.
Some of the principal streets are straight and handsome, with blocks of lava right out of the bosom of the earth for pavement. It give me queer feelin’s to tread on’t thinkin’ that it come from a place way down in the earth that we didn’t know anything about and thinkin’ what strange things it could tell if stuns could talk. Some of the best streets had sidewalks. It is well lighted by gas.
As you walk along the streets you see rich and poor, beggar and priest, soldier and peasant, every picturesque costoom you can think on and all sorts of faces. But there seems to be a kind of a happy-go-lucky air in ’em all, even to the beggars and the little lazy, ragged children layin’ in the sunshine. The people live much out of doors here, you can see ’em washin’ and dressin’ the children, and doin’ housework, and everything right from the street, and though I don’t spoze the poor suffer so much here on account of the warm climate, yet dirt and rags and filth and vermin didn’t look any better to me here than they did in Jonesville.
In Naples as a rule the lower parts of the houses are shops, restaurants, etc., and the upper stories are used for dwellings. The beautiful terraces of the city and the flat roofs of the houses are covered with shrubs and flowers, and filled with gayly dressed promenaders, givin’ it a gay appearance. And you don’t see in the faces of the crowd any expression of fear for the danger signal that smokes up in the sky, no more than our faces to home show signs of our realizin’ the big danger signals on our own horizon.
I d’no as I ever had hearn of the third city that wuz destroyed when Herculaneam and Pompeii wuz. But Vesuvius did put an end to another city called Stabea at that time, most two thousand years ago, but that is some years back 376 and I d’no as it is strange that the news hadn’t got to Jonesville yet.
Naples has three hundred meetin’-houses, enough you would say to make the citizens do as they ort to. But I don’t spoze they do. I hearn, and it come quite straight, too, that it is a dretful city for folks to act and behave, though it used us real well.
It has a good many theatres and has a large museum where I would be glad to spent more time than I did. Dretful interestin’ to me wuz the rich frescoes and marbles dug up in the buried cities. Just to think on’t how long they stayed down there under the ground, and now come out lookin’ as well as ever whilst the Love or the Ambition that carved the exquisite lines have gone away so fur that we can’t foller ’em; way into some other planet, mebby. Bronze statutes, the finest collection in the world they say, and all sorts of weapons, Etruscian vases, coins, tablets, marbles, ornaments of all kinds enough to make your head feel dizzy to glance at ’em.
Some of the statutes I didn’t want Josiah to see; they wuzn’t dressed decent to appear in company, but then agin I knew he wuz a perfessor and had always read about the Garden of Eden and Eve when she and Adam first took the place and wuz so scanty on’t for clothes, but I didn’t like their looks. Miss Meechim thought they wuz genteel and called it high art, and Josiah, for a wonder, agreed with her; they hardly ever think alike.