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Charles Dickens - Pictures from Italy
the ice and snow of the North Pole, than in the sun and bloom of Naples.
Capri - once made odious by the deified beast Tiberius - Ischia, Procida, and the thousand distant
beauties of the Bay, lie in the blue sea yonder, changing in the mist and sunshine twenty times a-day:
now close at hand, now far off, now unseen. The fairest country in the world, is spread about us.
Whether we turn towards the Miseno shore of the splendid watery amphitheatre, and go by the Grotto of
Posilipo to the Grotto del Cane and away to Baiae: or take the other way, towards Vesuvius and Sorrento,
it is one succession of delights. In the last-named direction, where, over doors and archways, there are
countless little images of San Gennaro, with his Canute's hand stretched out, to check the fury of the
Burning Mountain, we are carried pleasantly, by a railroad on the beautiful Sea Beach, past the town of
Torre del Greco, built upon the ashes of the former town destroyed by an eruption of Vesuvius, within a
hundred years; and past the flat-roofed houses, granaries, and macaroni manufactories; to Castel-a-Mare,
with its ruined castle, now inhabited by fishermen, standing in the sea upon a heap of rocks. Here, the
railroad terminates; but, hence we may ride on, by an unbroken succession of enchanting bays, and
beautiful scenery, sloping from the highest summit of Saint Angelo, the highest neighbouring mountain,
down to the water's edge - among vineyards, olive-trees, gardens of oranges and lemons, orchards,
heaped-up rocks, green gorges in the hills - and by the bases of snow-covered heights, and through small
towns with handsome, dark-haired women at the doors - and pass delicious summer villas - to Sorrento,
where the Poet Tasso drew his inspiration from the beauty surrounding him. Returning, we may climb
the heights above Castel-a-Mare, and looking down among the boughs and leaves, see the crisp water
glistening in the sun; and clusters of white houses in distant Naples, dwindling, in the great extent of
prospect, down to dice. The coming back to the city, by the beach again, at sunset: with the glowing sea
on one side, and the darkening mountain, with its smoke and flame, upon the other: is a sublime
conclusion to the glory of the day.
That church by the Porta Capuana - near the old fisher-market in the dirtiest quarter of dirty Naples,
where the revolt of Masaniello began - is memorable for having been the scene of one of his earliest
proclamations to the people, and is particularly remarkable for nothing else, unless it be its waxen and
bejewelled Saint in a glass case, with two odd hands; or the enormous number of beggars who are
constantly rapping their chins there, like a battery of castanets. The cathedral with the beautiful door,
and the columns of African and Egyptian granite that once ornamented the temple of Apollo, contains the
famous sacred blood of San Gennaro or Januarius: which is preserved in two phials in a silver tabernacle,
and miraculously liquefies three times a-year, to the great admiration of the people. At the same
moment, the stone (distant some miles) where the Saint suffered martyrdom, becomes faintly red. It is
said that the officiating priests turn faintly red also, sometimes, when these miracles occur.
The old, old men who live in hovels at the entrance of these ancient catacombs, and who, in their age and
infirmity, seem waiting here, to be buried themselves, are members of a curious body, called the Royal
Hospital, who are the official attendants at funerals. Two of these old spectres totter away, with lighted
tapers, to show the caverns of death - as unconcerned as if they were immortal. They were used as
burying-places for three hundred years; and, in one part, is a large pit full of skulls and bones, said to be
the sad remains of a great mortality occasioned by a plague. In the rest there is nothing but dust. They
consist, chiefly, of great wide corridors and labyrinths, hewn out of the rock. At the end of some of these
long passages, are unexpected glimpses of the daylight, shining down from above. It looks as ghastly
and as strange; among the torches, and the dust, and the dark vaults: as if it, too, were dead and buried.
The present burial-place lies out yonder, on a hill between the city and Vesuvius. The old Campo Santo
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