Part 2

Monte Carlo and Monaco are only three and four miles from Mentone, a lovely walk along the coast. Monaco is the old town, built on a peninsular rock raised some hundreds of feet above the sea, where Prince Grimaldi has his palace, and a curious little kingdom it is; he can see it all from his bed-room window. He lives in state, and has an army of eight. The sergeant was busy drilling his last recruit when we were there. There are only two streets in this little town, and they are very narrow. There is not room to build another house, but they have built on the table land adjoining, and this is what is called Monte Carlo, one of the most beautiful spots in the world. I can never forget the two days we were here, because they were _faultless days_, the sky was blue and so was the Mediterranean, as blue as ever I had seen it painted. A gentle slope of high table land with the Maratime Alps for a back ground. Portions of the approaches or lower parts of the mountains are covered with sombre-looking olive groves, while the lower ground, sloping down to the sea, is laid out as ornamental gardens–rare specimens of shrubbery of distant lands, semi-tropical plants, such as palm and aloes, evergreen shady bowers, fountains and cascades. The walks and borders are so clean and perfect that you could not find a scrap of paper or a loose pebble. The name of Monte Carlo, in my mind, was associated with sharpers, cut throats, and other pests such as we see in England associated with the turf, where you would require to look after the safety of your pocket, but in this respect we were quite mistaken, every thing is quiet and orderly there–there is a gendarme at every point. The Grand Casino is a magnificent building, situated in the Gardens. Strangers or visitors are only admitted, _i.e._, no inhabitants of the town or neighbourhood. All the visitor has to do is to enter his or her name in a book, and state the hotel where he or she is staying. Everywhere is free, no fees are expected. There is a fine reading-room, plentifully supplied with newspapers and periodicals from all nations. There is a large crush room or promenade, where you may enjoy the weed. Leading from this is a very gorgeous concert room–a constant orchestra of over 100 musicians are always kept; performances of high-class music are given twice a day. The other–a greater portion of the buildings–is where the tables are, eight in number. The gaming business commences at eleven in the morning and finishes at eleven at night. The tables are presided over by croupiers, who pay and receive the money and spin the wheel of fortune or deal the cards. The players are standing or seated round the table; everybody is quiet, all the noise you hear is the declaring of the winning number and the clinking of the money as it is raked in or shovelled out. The players consist of all classes, young and old of all nations, from gay and licentious to the blue stocking of the dorcas meeting–a large proportion are women–staking from 5 francs to 1000 francs and more. The business is profitable to the proprietors of the tables, keeps Prince Grimaldi a prince, and pays all the taxes in the town.

The principal object of our journey to the “Sunny South” was health, to be best acquired by rest and sea breezes. It was now time to take ship.

I had not an opportunity of shooting any brigands while in Italy, because at Vintemille, they took charge of a very nice six-shooter lent me by my friend, Jupiter. It happened just on the Italian frontier. If you wish to carry a pistol it must be a foot long, and you must carry it in a _belt around the waist_. My companion was wrath to see these friendly Italians rudely destroying some choice plants and roots he had so carefully collected at Mentone, saying, “not possibul, coller ha,” being afraid of having cholera thus imported into Italy.

From Genoa we took berths by the Florio Rubittino steamer “Asia.” Having twelve hours to wait at Leghorn we landed and went to Pisa to see the leaning tower, the cathedral, and baptistry–a quiet, clean old town, its greatness is recorded in ancient history. The only noticeable feature about Leghorn is its fine harbour.

Two more days’ delightful sailing along the coast, passing the small barren island of Elba, where the first Napoleon was banished to for a time. Nearing the bay of Naples, the first land sighted is the island of Ischia, where 2000 people lost their lives in 1883 by an earthquake. It was evening when we sighted Vesuvius, about twenty-five miles away, a red glare of fire issuing from its summit. As we entered the bay, Naples looked as if it was illuminated, the rows of gas lights so regular in line above each other; the night was fine and clear, and the scene enchanting. We were too late that night to be cleared by the Customs, so slept on board. Early in the morning we were awakened by the cries of human voices belonging to the Neapolitan boatmen waiting for their prey. Before breakfast we went on deck to have a morning view of the bay of Naples. It was fine, the sun was up. The bay looks like an inland sea of twenty miles in width. The islands of Capri and Ischia stand at the opening of the bay, and so close up the view to the open sea. The bold outline of the mountains, the towns and villages can be seen here and there on some elevated spot, the atmosphere being so fine, and the sea glistening placid and clear. To the south of the bay stands Vesuvius, steaming and smoking, throwing up its vapours to the sky, by night a bright red glare; at the crown of the bay stands the far-famed Naples, with its many-tinted houses piled one above another up the hill that skirts the bay, crowned by the colossal castle of Elmo. The curve of the bay is broken in the centre by a small mole, on which stands the ruined-looking castle Dell Ova and the Palace Royal, and further north, on the rising ground stands modern Naples, laid out with fine hotels, villas, and gardens.

We left the steamer here to take another when we wished to proceed further South. Here, as in all the Mediterranean ports, we were anchored in the bay; hundreds of boats were clustered around our steamer, and a ragged, noisy lot they were. We landed, were searched and counter searched before we were clear, and able to drive to our hotel. Naples is a place we have heard much of, writers have painted it in words and artists in oil–they say, “see Naples and then die.” If you happened to be a nervous man or troubled with heart disease, you would soon die. I have been in Scotland Road Market on Saturday night, I have been on London Bridge, the greatest thoroughfare in the world, but in the Toledo, the Strada del Mola, and the Strada del Piliera, you will hear noises far greater in volume and variety than in London. I think it must be the language that helps them on, every word appears to end with a ee, oo, ii; they whistle, they shout, rush and jostle you about, and as the streets are narrow you have to look after yourself or be run over. The sense of smell will have a feast, with a few new specimens which permeate the air on every side; outdoor cooking arrangements, vegetables, and other mystic messes simmering and spluttering in fat or oil. Their sanitary arrangements are worse than in Paris, and their sense of decency is less shameless.

Naples like Genoa, in the old portion of the town, is so closely huddled together, and the streets are so steep and narrow, that no vehicles can pass up. They are generally so littered up with baskets and hampers that foot passengers have a difficulty in threading their way. The shoemaker brings his bench outside, and plys his trade in the open street; the tailor with his clumsy-looking sewing machine, and his dirty-looking apprentice, are likewise busy on the parapet. The houses are eight or nine stories high with balconies, and _washing_ on each storey. On a bright day the streets look dark because no sun can penetrate them, and the sky is hidden by the various projecting obstructions. If you look into a shop window, some miserable-looking fellow will ask you to go in and purchase. If you do so he will ask for commission from the buyer, you may be sure he will try and do his best with the seller. If you go into a shop and price a certain article, they fix a price they never expect to get; you say it is too dear, they immediately ask, _How much will you give?_ and if needs be will take one-half or one-third what was first asked. There is no very marked difference between a Neapolitan and an Englishman. They appear to be of the same family as our English gipsy, dusky, with dark hair and eyes. Their dress, hat, and coat are much the same as our fashion, but still there is a difference; perhaps the pockets are fixed horizontally instead of perpendicular, or the buttons are different; their boots are more namby-pamby, in contrast with those the writer wore–there must be something. We were marked at once as Englishmen. The cabman would get his eye upon us, chase us about, back his horse across our path, and try and cajole us into his car; once in, he would be sure to try and take you to some place four times the distance you wished to go.

The Italians are true lovers of art, and sometimes carry it to a ridiculous degree. It bespeaks a man’s taste if he has the goddess of dancing or music painted on his house, but to see the same figures on a stone cart, or bouquets of flowers on a manure cart, we certainly think too, too æsthetic.

One of the many things that struck me in the streets of Naples were the vehicles, and more especially the harness. The horses draw from the breast, and therefore wear no collar; the harness, which is very ornamental in shape, is covered with brass, tassels, &c. They don’t groom their horses and mules, but clean their brass very carefully. They yoke a horse and donkey together, a donkey and an ox, a donkey and mule, or three donkeys and a mule. One day I observed a horse, an ox, and a donkey drawing a cart of stones, all with bells clanging.

In some few things they are in advance of us, for instance, we don’t have a cow driven to our door, and see our quart of _milk drawn_, as we did in the Via Roma, the Regent Street of Naples. You may have goat’s milk if you like that better.

The outskirts of Naples are pretty undulating, you can never for long lose sight of the bay or Vesuvius. By a drive of three or four miles to the west, along the bay, you get a fairly good view of Naples, embracing Pompeii and Herculaneum nestling insecurely at the foot of Vesuvius, but not equal to the one as you enter the bay.

We were told the churches were not so gorgeous and rich as those of Genoa, Pisa, or Rome, so we did not visit them. The only public building of great interest is the Museum of Ancient Sculpture and Paintings; it is large and well appointed, and contains more than any other public building in Italy. I never was an enthusiast of sculpture until now, but it was quite plain to see that the magnificent ideas arose from the old heathen worship. The gods as heroes of strength; the Farnese Hercules slaying the bull; the Gladiators achieving wonderful feats of their scientific skill; Bacchus at his feasts; Adonis wooing Venus; Venus in her various graceful attitudes; Bacchus in his youthful revelry; Silenus, the fat jolly old man; the Dancing Graces, the Apollos, the Jupiters, the colossal figures of horses and lions, hundreds of Roman senators, statues in white marble draped in black or coloured marble; statues buried for a thousand years, some sadly mutilated and placed in position; ancient inscriptions, Mosaic work of wonderful effect, galleries of pictures of immense canvas, huge libraries, rooms full of papyri, coins, antique jewellery, bronzes, crystals, and cameos. We spent some time in inspecting these, but we should have had a week, or even a month.

POMPEII.

THE base of Mount Vesuvius is about four miles from Naples. In going to Pompeii you skirt the coast, having the burning mountain on the left. Pompeii lies four miles further on the margin of the bay, so that if another great eruption was to take place, with an east wind, Naples might stand in the same danger as Pompeii; still they build houses and villages and grow grapes up the mountain side. One village has been destroyed no less than eight times. We did not go to see the crater, the day we had to spare was not bright and clear, and the fatigue more than two invalids cared to undertake. But we went to Pompeii. Within a few minutes from leaving the railway station you reach a kind of hotel and lodge, buy permission tickets, and take a guide. You enter by an arched gateway, something like the ancient gates of Chester. The streets are about as broad and steep as Watergate. Pompeii is about equal in area to the ancient City of Chester. As you enter the gates you can see the deep ruts of the two chariot wheels worn fully six inches into the solid blocks of stone pavement. Their streets, which are straight and narrow, strike each other at right angles, with a narrow parapet on each side. The houses are of one storey, externally very plain–no projections or balconies, but a simple doorway. You have to cross the threshold of the houses to peer into the mode of life of these Pompeians, who were suddenly swept out of existence on the 29th November, A.D. 79. Bulwer Lytton has written a work on the supposed customs and habits of these people. It would take a book to describe your reflections on this “City of the Dead.” It has not the appearance of a city destroyed by fire; all that has disappeared are the roofs, the doors, the people, and the furniture. The walls and plaster for the most part are perfect, the fountains and statues are there, the Mosaic floors are bright and clean, and the fresco painting as bright as when it was done. It seems strange that none of the present habitations of the Italians resemble those of the ancients, so vastly different to the tall stuccoed houses of Naples–one storey houses with an entrance hall, and an open courtyard with large and small chambers entering from a piazza that skirted the buildings. Some of the richer houses have an inner courtyard with a garden in the centre, and different offices leading from it; while others have engraved on stone the name of the owner. The Forum, or principal open square, seems to have suffered most; broken pillars and Corinthian columns are scattered about the halls of justice and the judge’s vacant seat; the dungeon where two prisoners, fettered, were discovered a few years ago in a state of petrifaction–they had been left to their fate on that fearful night. There are many public buildings around the Forum, and the Latin tablets referring to the business carried on in them; the steps that time and bustle and business had worn; the Pagan temples with their tables of sacrifice, are still to be seen. Then there are the theatres–the day theatre open to the sky, and the night theatre covered. The tickets of admission were rather peculiar, for instance, the musicians’ had a lyre, those for the upper galleries a pigeon, and free tickets a skull–all were carved ivory tokens. At the outskirts of the town is the amphitheatre, which held 30,000 people, where senators used to harangue their constituents and gladiators fought their deadly fights, where prisoners were brought from their cells to fight with and to be torn to pieces by hungry wild beasts. They have the street of Fortune and the street of Merchants. You see the wine shop displaying its sign, an earthenware jar, and inside you see the same seats, the same wine jars, empty and desolate. The habitués are not there discussing the topics of the day or revelling with the fulness of the wine cup; they are gone eighteen centuries ago. There is the apothecary’s shop with its sign–the twisted serpent, and bakeries with deep brick ovens. In some respects fashions have not altered much, in a baker’s oven were found black charred loaves with the baker’s name stamped on them, the same squat shape as you see carried about the streets of Naples to-day, and known in England as cottage loaves; from the same oven they shew you a young sucking pig, petrified to stone, that was there cooking for some one’s supper, in their hurry and confusion they left this dainty morsel behind. When a workman was one day using a pick he struck something hollow, it was found when examined to be in shape like a human body. Several of these hollow shells were afterwards exhumed, for safety and preservation they were filled with liquid plaster of paris. The fine ashes and the moisture of the body together formed this human shell a man in the act of running, with a key in one hand and some money in another. There is a beautifully formed girl of seventeen, her face turned a little on one side, with sweet innocent features clearly defined, with her hair dressed with girlish coquetry; a boy of twelve has fallen on his face, and there he lay. There was the body of a dog found with a collar round its neck in the vestibule of a house; the poor dog must have died hard, it has rolled over in its agony, and lies on its back with its mouth open, its limbs violently contorted, and the whole frame twisted and wrenched in a manner to denote severe pain. There was a girl found, with a golden clasp brooch bearing the name of Julia Diamede, said to be the daughter of one of the rich men of the city, whose house gives an idea of his wealth from its costly fittings discovered. These wonderful relics are shewn you in a small museum erected in Pompeii. You see the baths with the niches and seats for undressing, with nails to hang up their clothes; you are shewn the so-called Turkish bath, but what was really the ancient Roman bath, with its small stone seats upon which to sit while waiting for the hot air to induce perspiration.

There is abundance of proof that the people of Pompeii were steeped in degradation and vice, for the frescos and inscriptions were such that they have been moved from the view of women and children.

In the Museum Nationale, Naples, they have a Pompeii section; it contains almost everything you would find in a broker’s shop–pots, pans, fish hooks, money chests, candelabras, buckets, handsome cloak clasps (same as lately worn, and now produced in Birmingham by the gross), cooking stoves, braziers, charred walnuts, barley, olives with the drop of oil caused by the heat to stand out, a _glass bottle of oil_, eggs, onions, dates, pears, tortoises, corks, portion of a woman’s dress finely woven like merino, hinges, locks, taps, a circulating hot-water boiler with brass tap, a cooking apparatus similar to the French Bain Marie pan of the present day, leaden pipes, scales and weights, the metal pen supposed to have been a modern English invention, the safety pin, which is now so largely made in Birmingham for use in the nursery; a banker’s paper, receipts for money, a mass of copy in papyrus, legends, treaties, forceps, lances, probes, speculum and different doctor’s instruments, medicine phials, dice, and hundreds of articles supposed to be newly invented, and sold nowadays as novelties. The cameos and intaglios are of such rich and exquisite work that our modern lapidaries cannot equal them.

ROME.

AS you roll into the big railway station, and hear the sonorous voice of the railway porter pronounce _Roma_, there is an inward feeling of reverence and pride that you have reached Rome–“The Eternal City.” It was late in the evening when we arrived, and so we took up our quarters at the Hotel Continental, a large and modern hotel, situated on a high part of the town–one of the seven hills–and where malaria is not likely to find its way.

There is a Mr. Forbes resident in Rome, who conducts and lectures to parties on the spot, at points of interest; he takes a week to do the city.

As we had only two or three days to stay we had a guide of our own. When I bought a pair of easy boots for walking, my companion enquired what commission he would get; this gave him great offence, he said he was a gentleman, a rich man–proud men are these Romans. In driving through the streets of Rome, there appears to be nothing of a very remarkable character. You require to know its brilliant history, and the deeds of its patriots and rulers You may lazily climb up the hill leading to the Forum, but if you are interrupted and told that on this spot Cæsar was murdered, or on that spot his friend Anthony delivered his oration, you are impressed. You require to live a few days in Rome to get through the preface of the story of its eventful history. This history should be divided into three eras–Ancient Rome, the time of its supreme greatness; Old Rome, or the middle ages and the supremacy of the Popes; and New Rome, since the entry of Garibaldi. I intend to say little about this wonderful place; I am unable to do so, as it is too classical, I will only give just a rough and crude idea of what attracted my attention.

There is not a great deal of Ancient Rome left––the old buildings appear to have been knocked down, levelled up, and new and mean streets built over the top. In the dark ages they seem to have had no regard to the grandeur of Ancient Rome, they buried up the massive columns and statuary, and built up the present New Rome over them, so that many of the places laid bare are ten or twelve feet below the present street level, especially in the neighbourhood of the Forum of Trajan and the Pantheon, and whenever they are re-building in this part of the city they come across some old relic or other. We visited the Roman Forum, the Triumphal Arch of Titus, the Arch of Constantine, the remains of the great Colosseum that once seated 90,000 Romans, and the Temple of Castor and Pollux. We crossed the Tiber by Adrian’s Bridge, built A.D. 136, to the Castle of St. Angelo, now so called, but really the Tomb of Trajan. The Tiber is a muddy, sleepy-looking river, with about the same volume of water as the Dee, at Chester, or scarcely as much.

The Pantheon, once a Pagan temple but now a church, is the only ancient building left in a state fit for use; its walls are of brick twenty feet thick, with an opening in centre of dome, as the only means of lighting the interior. It contains the tomb of the late King Victor Emmanuel, and other memorials, including one to Canova, the sculptor, and is used also as a chapel. All the other remains are in a dismantled, ruined state, every thing that was costly has disappeared.

The Colosseum for centuries was used as a stone quarry. When foundation and other stones were wanted for a new church they were there ready for the builder; and in like manner the columns and slabs of marble that had been brought from Greece and many parts of the earth, for the public buildings, are now in St. Peter’s, St. Paul’s, St. John’s, and the other churches in Rome. I cannot attempt to describe St. Peter’s, except that it is considered the largest, grandest, and most costly building in the world–taking twenty million francs to pay for it–and will hold 45,000 people. It took 300 years to complete, and although finished 300 years ago, it looks as bright and clean as if it had been perpetually under a glass shade and sponged down every morning. Every proportion about it is gigantic–there is nothing small or paltry that would assist you in realising its immensity. You see a figure inside the church, it looks life size, but go up to it and you will find it twenty or thirty feet high.