The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain


Fourth--Some twelve or fifteen canonized Popes and martyrs.

Fifth--Jesus Christ the Saviour--(but always as an infant in arms.)

I may be wrong in this--my judgment errs often, just as is the case with
other men's--but it is my judgment, be it good or bad.

Just here I will mention something that seems curious to me. There are
no "Christ's Churches" in Rome, and no "Churches of the Holy Ghost," that
I can discover. There are some four hundred churches, but about a fourth
of them seem to be named for the Madonna and St. Peter. There are so
many named for Mary that they have to be distinguished by all sorts of
affixes, if I understand the matter rightly. Then we have churches of
St. Louis; St. Augustine; St. Agnes; St. Calixtus; St. Lorenzo in Lucina;
St. Lorenzo in Damaso; St. Cecilia; St. Athanasius; St. Philip Neri; St.
Catherine, St. Dominico, and a multitude of lesser saints whose names are
not familiar in the world--and away down, clear out of the list of the
churches, comes a couple of hospitals: one of them is named for the
Saviour and the other for the Holy Ghost!

Day after day and night after night we have wandered among the crumbling
wonders of Rome; day after day and night after night we have fed upon the
dust and decay of five-and-twenty centuries--have brooded over them by
day and dreampt of them by night till sometimes we seemed moldering away
ourselves, and growing defaced and cornerless, and liable at any moment
to fall a prey to some antiquary and be patched in the legs, and
"restored" with an unseemly nose, and labeled wrong and dated wrong, and
set up in the Vatican for poets to drivel about and vandals to scribble
their names on forever and forevermore.

But the surest way to stop writing about Rome is to stop. I wished to
write a real "guide-book" chapter on this fascinating city, but I could
not do it, because I have felt all the time like a boy in a candy-shop
--there was every thing to choose from, and yet no choice. I have drifted
along hopelessly for a hundred pages of manuscript without knowing where
to commence. I will not commence at all. Our passports have been
examined. We will go to Naples.




CHAPTER XXIX.

The ship is lying here in the harbor of Naples--quarantined. She has
been here several days and will remain several more. We that came by
rail from Rome have escaped this misfortune. Of course no one is allowed
to go on board the ship, or come ashore from her. She is a prison, now.
The passengers probably spend the long, blazing days looking out from
under the awnings at Vesuvius and the beautiful city--and in swearing.
Think of ten days of this sort of pastime!--We go out every day in a boat
and request them to come ashore. It soothes them. We lie ten steps from
the ship and tell them how splendid the city is; and how much better the
hotel fare is here than any where else in Europe; and how cool it is; and
what frozen continents of ice cream there are; and what a time we are
having cavorting about the country and sailing to the islands in the Bay.
This tranquilizes them.

ASCENT OF VESUVIUS.

I shall remember our trip to Vesuvius for many a day--partly because of
its sight-seeing experiences, but chiefly on account of the fatigue of
the journey. Two or three of us had been resting ourselves among the
tranquil and beautiful scenery of the island of Ischia, eighteen miles
out in the harbor, for two days; we called it "resting," but I do not
remember now what the resting consisted of, for when we got back to
Naples we had not slept for forty-eight hours. We were just about to go
to bed early in the evening, and catch up on some of the sleep we had
lost, when we heard of this Vesuvius expedition. There was to be eight
of us in the party, and we were to leave Naples at midnight. We laid in
some provisions for the trip, engaged carriages to take us to
Annunciation, and then moved about the city, to keep awake, till twelve.
We got away punctually, and in the course of an hour and a half arrived
at the town of Annunciation. Annunciation is the very last place under
the sun. In other towns in Italy the people lie around quietly and wait
for you to ask them a question or do some overt act that can be charged
for--but in Annunciation they have lost even that fragment of delicacy;
they seize a lady's shawl from a chair and hand it to her and charge a
penny; they open a carriage door, and charge for it--shut it when you get
out, and charge for it; they help you to take off a duster--two cents;
brush your clothes and make them worse than they were before--two cents;
smile upon you--two cents; bow, with a lick-spittle smirk, hat in hand
--two cents; they volunteer all information, such as that the mules will
arrive presently--two cents--warm day, sir--two cents--take you four
hours to make the ascent--two cents. And so they go. They crowd you
--infest you--swarm about you, and sweat and smell offensively, and look
sneaking and mean, and obsequious. There is no office too degrading for
them to perform, for money. I have had no opportunity to find out any
thing about the upper classes by my own observation, but from what I hear
said about them I judge that what they lack in one or two of the bad
traits the canaille have, they make up in one or two others that are
worse. How the people beg!--many of them very well dressed, too.

I said I knew nothing against the upper classes by personal observation.
I must recall it! I had forgotten. What I saw their bravest and their
fairest do last night, the lowest multitude that could be scraped up out
of the purlieus of Christendom would blush to do, I think. They
assembled by hundreds, and even thousands, in the great Theatre of San
Carlo, to do--what? Why, simply, to make fun of an old woman--to deride,
to hiss, to jeer at an actress they once worshipped, but whose beauty is
faded now and whose voice has lost its former richness. Every body spoke
of the rare sport there was to be. They said the theatre would be
crammed, because Frezzolini was going to sing. It was said she could not
sing well, now, but then the people liked to see her, anyhow. And so we
went. And every time the woman sang they hissed and laughed--the whole
magnificent house--and as soon as she left the stage they called her on
again with applause. Once or twice she was encored five and six times in
succession, and received with hisses when she appeared, and discharged
with hisses and laughter when she had finished--then instantly encored
and insulted again! And how the high-born knaves enjoyed it!
White-kidded gentlemen and ladies laughed till the tears came, and
clapped their hands in very ecstacy when that unhappy old woman would
come meekly out for the sixth time, with uncomplaining patience, to meet
a storm of hisses! It was the cruelest exhibition--the most wanton, the
most unfeeling. The singer would have conquered an audience of American
rowdies by her brave, unflinching tranquillity (for she answered encore
after encore, and smiled and bowed pleasantly, and sang the best she
possibly could, and went bowing off, through all the jeers and hisses,
without ever losing countenance or temper:) and surely in any other land
than Italy her sex and her helplessness must have been an ample
protection to her--she could have needed no other. Think what a
multitude of small souls were crowded into that theatre last night. If
the manager could have filled his theatre with Neapolitan souls alone,
without the bodies, he could not have cleared less than ninety millions
of dollars. What traits of character must a man have to enable him to
help three thousand miscreants to hiss, and jeer, and laugh at one
friendless old woman, and shamefully humiliate her? He must have all
the vile, mean traits there are. My observation persuades me (I do not
like to venture beyond my own personal observation,) that the upper
classes of Naples possess those traits of character. Otherwise they may
be very good people; I can not say.


ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

In this city of Naples, they believe in and support one of the
wretchedest of all the religious impostures one can find in Italy--the
miraculous liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius. Twice a year the
priests assemble all the people at the Cathedral, and get out this vial
of clotted blood and let them see it slowly dissolve and become liquid
--and every day for eight days, this dismal farce is repeated, while the
priests go among the crowd and collect money for the exhibition. The
first day, the blood liquefies in forty-seven minutes--the church is
crammed, then, and time must be allowed the collectors to get around:
after that it liquefies a little quicker and a little quicker, every day,
as the houses grow smaller, till on the eighth day, with only a few
dozens present to see the miracle, it liquefies in four minutes.

And here, also, they used to have a grand procession, of priests,
citizens, soldiers, sailors, and the high dignitaries of the City
Government, once a year, to shave the head of a made-up Madonna--a
stuffed and painted image, like a milliner's dummy--whose hair
miraculously grew and restored itself every twelve months. They still
kept up this shaving procession as late as four or five years ago. It
was a source of great profit to the church that possessed the remarkable
effigy, and the ceremony of the public barbering of her was always
carried out with the greatest possible eclat and display--the more the
better, because the more excitement there was about it the larger the
crowds it drew and the heavier the revenues it produced--but at last a
day came when the Pope and his servants were unpopular in Naples, and the
City Government stopped the Madonna's annual show.

There we have two specimens of these Neapolitans--two of the silliest
possible frauds, which half the population religiously and faithfully
believed, and the other half either believed also or else said nothing
about, and thus lent themselves to the support of the imposture. I am
very well satisfied to think the whole population believed in those poor,
cheap miracles--a people who want two cents every time they bow to you,
and who abuse a woman, are capable of it, I think.


ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

These Neapolitans always ask four times as much money as they intend to
take, but if you give them what they first demand, they feel ashamed of
themselves for aiming so low, and immediately ask more. When money is to
be paid and received, there is always some vehement jawing and
gesticulating about it. One can not buy and pay for two cents' worth of
clams without trouble and a quarrel. One "course," in a two-horse
carriage, costs a franc--that is law--but the hackman always demands
more, on some pretence or other, and if he gets it he makes a new demand.
It is said that a stranger took a one-horse carriage for a course
--tariff, half a franc. He gave the man five francs, by way of experiment.
He demanded more, and received another franc. Again he demanded more,
and got a franc--demanded more, and it was refused. He grew vehement
--was again refused, and became noisy. The stranger said, "Well, give me
the seven francs again, and I will see what I can do"--and when he got
them, he handed the hackman half a franc, and he immediately asked for
two cents to buy a drink with. It may be thought that I am prejudiced.

Perhaps I am. I would be ashamed of myself if I were not.


ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

Well, as I was saying, we got our mules and horses, after an hour and a
half of bargaining with the population of Annunciation, and started
sleepily up the mountain, with a vagrant at each mule's tail who
pretended to be driving the brute along, but was really holding on and
getting himself dragged up instead. I made slow headway at first, but I
began to get dissatisfied at the idea of paying my minion five francs to
hold my mule back by the tail and keep him from going up the hill, and so
I discharged him. I got along faster then.

We had one magnificent picture of Naples from a high point on the
mountain side. We saw nothing but the gas lamps, of course--two-thirds
of a circle, skirting the great Bay--a necklace of diamonds glinting up
through the darkness from the remote distance--less brilliant than the
stars overhead, but more softly, richly beautiful--and over all the great
city the lights crossed and recrossed each other in many and many a
sparkling line and curve. And back of the town, far around and abroad
over the miles of level campagna, were scattered rows, and circles, and
clusters of lights, all glowing like so many gems, and marking where a
score of villages were sleeping. About this time, the fellow who was
hanging on to the tail of the horse in front of me and practicing all
sorts of unnecessary cruelty upon the animal, got kicked some fourteen
rods, and this incident, together with the fairy spectacle of the lights
far in the distance, made me serenely happy, and I was glad I started to
Vesuvius.


ASCENT OF MOUNT VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

This subject will be excellent matter for a chapter, and tomorrow or next
day I will write it.




CHAPTER XXX.

ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

"See Naples and die." Well, I do not know that one would necessarily die
after merely seeing it, but to attempt to live there might turn out a
little differently. To see Naples as we saw it in the early dawn from
far up on the side of Vesuvius, is to see a picture of wonderful beauty.
At that distance its dingy buildings looked white--and so, rank on rank
of balconies, windows and roofs, they piled themselves up from the blue
ocean till the colossal castle of St. Elmo topped the grand white pyramid
and gave the picture symmetry, emphasis and completeness. And when its
lilies turned to roses--when it blushed under the sun's first kiss--it
was beautiful beyond all description. One might well say, then, "See
Naples and die." The frame of the picture was charming, itself. In
front, the smooth sea--a vast mosaic of many colors; the lofty islands
swimming in a dreamy haze in the distance; at our end of the city the
stately double peak of Vesuvius, and its strong black ribs and seams of
lava stretching down to the limitless level campagna--a green carpet that
enchants the eye and leads it on and on, past clusters of trees, and
isolated houses, and snowy villages, until it shreds out in a fringe of
mist and general vagueness far away. It is from the Hermitage, there on
the side of Vesuvius, that one should "see Naples and die."

But do not go within the walls and look at it in detail. That takes away
some of the romance of the thing. The people are filthy in their habits,
and this makes filthy streets and breeds disagreeable sights and smells.
There never was a community so prejudiced against the cholera as these
Neapolitans are. But they have good reason to be. The cholera generally
vanquishes a Neapolitan when it seizes him, because, you understand,
before the doctor can dig through the dirt and get at the disease the man
dies. The upper classes take a sea-bath every day, and are pretty
decent.

The streets are generally about wide enough for one wagon, and how they
do swarm with people! It is Broadway repeated in every street, in every
court, in every alley! Such masses, such throngs, such multitudes of
hurrying, bustling, struggling humanity! We never saw the like of it,
hardly even in New York, I think. There are seldom any sidewalks, and
when there are, they are not often wide enough to pass a man on without
caroming on him. So everybody walks in the street--and where the street
is wide enough, carriages are forever dashing along. Why a thousand
people are not run over and crippled every day is a mystery that no man
can solve. But if there is an eighth wonder in the world, it must be the
dwelling-houses of Naples. I honestly believe a good majority of them
are a hundred feet high! And the solid brick walls are seven feet
through. You go up nine flights of stairs before you get to the "first"
floor. No, not nine, but there or thereabouts. There is a little
bird-cage of an iron railing in front of every window clear away up, up,
up, among the eternal clouds, where the roof is, and there is always
somebody looking out of every window--people of ordinary size looking
out from the first floor, people a shade smaller from the second, people
that look a little smaller yet from the third--and from thence upward
they grow smaller and smaller by a regularly graduated diminution, till
the folks in the topmost windows seem more like birds in an uncommonly
tall martin-box than any thing else. The perspective of one of these
narrow cracks of streets, with its rows of tall houses stretching away
till they come together in the distance like railway tracks; its
clothes-lines crossing over at all altitudes and waving their bannered
raggedness over the swarms of people below; and the white-dressed women
perched in balcony railings all the way from the pavement up to the
heavens--a perspective like that is really worth going into Neapolitan
details to see.


ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

Naples, with its immediate suburbs, contains six hundred and twenty-five
thousand inhabitants, but I am satisfied it covers no more ground than an
American city of one hundred and fifty thousand. It reaches up into the
air infinitely higher than three American cities, though, and there is
where the secret of it lies. I will observe here, in passing, that the
contrasts between opulence and poverty, and magnificence and misery, are
more frequent and more striking in Naples than in Paris even. One must
go to the Bois de Boulogne to see fashionable dressing, splendid
equipages and stunning liveries, and to the Faubourg St. Antoine to see
vice, misery, hunger, rags, dirt--but in the thoroughfares of Naples
these things are all mixed together. Naked boys of nine years and the
fancy-dressed children of luxury; shreds and tatters, and brilliant
uniforms; jackass-carts and state-carriages; beggars, Princes and
Bishops, jostle each other in every street. At six o'clock every
evening, all Naples turns out to drive on the 'Riviere di Chiaja',
(whatever that may mean;) and for two hours one may stand there and see
the motliest and the worst mixed procession go by that ever eyes beheld.
Princes (there are more Princes than policemen in Naples--the city is
infested with them)--Princes who live up seven flights of stairs and
don't own any principalities, will keep a carriage and go hungry; and
clerks, mechanics, milliners and strumpets will go without their dinners
and squander the money on a hack-ride in the Chiaja; the rag-tag and
rubbish of the city stack themselves up, to the number of twenty or
thirty, on a rickety little go-cart hauled by a donkey not much bigger
than a cat, and they drive in the Chiaja; Dukes and bankers, in sumptuous
carriages and with gorgeous drivers and footmen, turn out, also, and so
the furious procession goes. For two hours rank and wealth, and
obscurity and poverty clatter along side by side in the wild procession,
and then go home serene, happy, covered with glory!

I was looking at a magnificent marble staircase in the King's palace, the
other day, which, it was said, cost five million francs, and I suppose it
did cost half a million, may be. I felt as if it must be a fine thing to
live in a country where there was such comfort and such luxury as this.
And then I stepped out musing, and almost walked over a vagabond who was
eating his dinner on the curbstone--a piece of bread and a bunch of
grapes. When I found that this mustang was clerking in a fruit
establishment (he had the establishment along with him in a basket,) at
two cents a day, and that he had no palace at home where he lived, I lost
some of my enthusiasm concerning the happiness of living in Italy.

This naturally suggests to me a thought about wages here. Lieutenants in
the army get about a dollar a day, and common soldiers a couple of cents.
I only know one clerk--he gets four dollars a month. Printers get six
dollars and a half a month, but I have heard of a foreman who gets
thirteen.

To be growing suddenly and violently rich, as this man is, naturally
makes him a bloated aristocrat. The airs he puts on are insufferable.

And, speaking of wages, reminds me of prices of merchandise. In Paris
you pay twelve dollars a dozen for Jouvin's best kid gloves; gloves of
about as good quality sell here at three or four dollars a dozen. You
pay five and six dollars apiece for fine linen shirts in Paris; here and
in Leghorn you pay two and a half. In Marseilles you pay forty dollars
for a first-class dress coat made by a good tailor, but in Leghorn you
can get a full dress suit for the same money. Here you get handsome
business suits at from ten to twenty dollars, and in Leghorn you can get
an overcoat for fifteen dollars that would cost you seventy in New York.
Fine kid boots are worth eight dollars in Marseilles and four dollars
here. Lyons velvets rank higher in America than those of Genoa. Yet the
bulk of Lyons velvets you buy in the States are made in Genoa and
imported into Lyons, where they receive the Lyons stamp and are then
exported to America. You can buy enough velvet in Genoa for twenty-five
dollars to make a five hundred dollar cloak in New York--so the ladies
tell me. Of course these things bring me back, by a natural and easy
transition, to the

ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

And thus the wonderful Blue Grotto is suggested to me. It is situated on
the Island of Capri, twenty-two miles from Naples. We chartered a little
steamer and went out there. Of course, the police boarded us and put us
through a health examination, and inquired into our politics, before they
would let us land. The airs these little insect Governments put on are
in the last degree ridiculous. They even put a policeman on board of our
boat to keep an eye on us as long as we were in the Capri dominions.
They thought we wanted to steal the grotto, I suppose. It was worth
stealing. The entrance to the cave is four feet high and four feet wide,
and is in the face of a lofty perpendicular cliff--the sea-wall. You
enter in small boats--and a tight squeeze it is, too. You can not go in
at all when the tide is up. Once within, you find yourself in an arched
cavern about one hundred and sixty feet long, one hundred and twenty
wide, and about seventy high. How deep it is no man knows. It goes down
to the bottom of the ocean. The waters of this placid subterranean lake
are the brightest, loveliest blue that can be imagined. They are as
transparent as plate glass, and their coloring would shame the richest
sky that ever bent over Italy. No tint could be more ravishing, no
lustre more superb. Throw a stone into the water, and the myriad of tiny
bubbles that are created flash out a brilliant glare like blue theatrical
fires. Dip an oar, and its blade turns to splendid frosted silver,
tinted with blue. Let a man jump in, and instantly he is cased in an
armor more gorgeous than ever kingly Crusader wore.

Then we went to Ischia, but I had already been to that island and tired
myself to death "resting" a couple of days and studying human villainy,
with the landlord of the Grande Sentinelle for a model. So we went to
Procida, and from thence to Pozzuoli, where St. Paul landed after he
sailed from Samos. I landed at precisely the same spot where St. Paul
landed, and so did Dan and the others. It was a remarkable coincidence.
St. Paul preached to these people seven days before he started to Rome.

Nero's Baths, the ruins of Baiae, the Temple of Serapis; Cumae, where the
Cumaen Sybil interpreted the oracles, the Lake Agnano, with its ancient
submerged city still visible far down in its depths--these and a hundred
other points of interest we examined with critical imbecility, but the
Grotto of the Dog claimed our chief attention, because we had heard and
read so much about it. Every body has written about the Grotto del Cane
and its poisonous vapors, from Pliny down to Smith, and every tourist has
held a dog over its floor by the legs to test the capabilities of the
place. The dog dies in a minute and a half--a chicken instantly. As a
general thing, strangers who crawl in there to sleep do not get up until
they are called. And then they don't either. The stranger that ventures
to sleep there takes a permanent contract. I longed to see this grotto.
I resolved to take a dog and hold him myself; suffocate him a little, and
time him; suffocate him some more and then finish him. We reached the
grotto at about three in the afternoon, and proceeded at once to make the
experiments. But now, an important difficulty presented itself. We had
no dog.