Inever lost sight of Mexico, wanting as I did to return to my homeland. There came through Paris a courier from Spain, who said he was on his way to Rome to summon señor Vargas Laguna, who was Minister of Spain there, to serve as Minister of Grace and Justice in our court, since Caballero had cataracts, although he recovered from them, to the Spaniards’ misfortune; Recacho, the father of the Recacho who is a judge in Guadalajara, cured them. And inasmuch as Vargas had been my friend ever since my days in Madrid, I decided to leave for Rome in order to be secularized and return to Spain in his company. Hence I left Paris in 1802, accompanied by a Sardinian man of letters, or as his countrymen would say, a former Spaniard, because that is what Sardinians were; and even today Spanish is the native language throughout their land, except in Caller (Cagliari), where Catalan is spoken and there is always a deputy from Catalonia.
I started out on my three-hundred-league journey with an ounce of gold, twice the sum I had with me when I set out from Madrid for Paris, and just as I had arrived in the latter via coach, so I entered Rome. My reader will want to know how that came about, particularly in view of the fact that I am incapable of chicanery, deception or intrigue. The story of the adventures to which my poverty and my naiveté gave rise would be never-ending. But, especially among the compassionate and devout feminine sex, there was a great deal of charity shown priests, the victims of so much misfortune and persecution during the revolution. They did not accept payment from me in a single inn, and even the coachmen charged me only half as much as the other passengers. In France, apart from stagecoaches, there are many ways of traveling at very little expense. There are a number of lads with little horses, who take people from one place to another for just a few sols (twenty-five sols equal two reals), and particularly on the trip back to their starting point, when they have no passengers. There are also pataches, which are little carriages without suspensions, made of wickerwork; they charge very little and are very fast. Since there are villages, or at least little places in the countryside where victuals are sold, almost one after the other all along the roads, and on either side of these there are groves of trees, one can also journey on foot without fatigue. A large part of France has canals and navigable rivers as well, and there are water coaches, that is to say flat boats with bedrooms and kitchens aboard, at most affordable prices, that keep regular schedules, and since they are towed by horses on the bank alongside, they proceed at the pace of these latter and transport passengers for a distance of fifteen or twenty leagues for four reals.
The Seine divides Paris in half, with an island in midstream on which the Cathedral is located, and what is called the Cité, or old Paris, which was very small, when today its circumference, I am told, measures nine French leagues. Water coaches ply the Seine each day in several directions, and I went to Sens on one of these. From there one journeys overland by coach, for one or two days’ time, to Chalons, and then one again boards a boat to Lyons and to Avignon, the former residence of the Popes for the seventy years that the Holy See was in France, the period that the Italians call the Babylonian Captivity.
I went by boat as far as Lyons, and from there I crossed Provence in the rear of a coach, scorched by the sun, to Marseilles, and a hundred paces outside of Vienne I saw Pilate’s tomb. Since I was, fortunately, in the prime of life still, both men and women were attracted by my physical appearance; the fact that I was from a country as far distant as Mexico gave me a sort of mythological status, which aroused people’s curiosity and attracted their attention; my merry nature, my innocence and my openness made people well-disposed toward me, and on hearing me speak, to which end I did my best to find a place to eat at a round table, everyone immediately made friends with me and no one could be persuaded that a man of my upbringing and education was a man without qualities. They introduced me into the homes of the wellborn, and inasmuch as the French in such circles are fond of good company at table, I began to enjoy theirs.
Being a foreigner in France is thus the best possible recommendation, so long as one is not Italian, their perfidy being notorious. I have not been in any large city where some Italian has not murdered or robbed his very benefactors. All Frenchmen, contrary to what happens in England and in other nations, invariably side with the foreigner in any dispute that arises involving their own compatriots, they willingly open their houses to him, they make it their duty to look after him; to insult him is a grave offense, and he is permitted to do a thousand things that they would not tolerate from a Frenchman. Hence every foreigner speaks well of France. To make a long story short: I supported myself with the alms I received for saying Mass, and not by virtue of my credentials, which the pen pusher León kept in his possession, where they remain still, nor by virtue of those of Dr. Maniau, because Cornide, the executor of his estate, on departing for America, wrote me asking me to send them to his family, and I did so; it was, rather, by virtue of my testimonials or letters dimissory* to Paris. In Marseilles I saw women, at least women of the people, with mantillas as in Spain, which is the only place where they are worn. I also saw a colony of Catalans, then later on another in Gibraltar, and wherever there is anything in the sea to fish, they are found there doing just that. Since Marseilles is a city that was founded by Greeks, I set eyes on some of the latter for the first time, for they come there to trade. They do not wear hose, go about in a jacket or cotton blouse, like our Indians, wear their hair short, and cover their heads with a sort of bonnet or cap with a little tassel. The women wear tunics; they have round faces and big eyes. Both the men and the women have the same complexion as our Indians.
A small vessel was leaving from there for Civitavecchia, a port of the Papal State, chartered by two young merchants, and they allowed me to come aboard for a gold louis, that is to say, for slightly less then four and a half pesos. Although the crossing ordinarily takes three days, there was no wind, and with nothing but what the French call a bonace, a dead calm, we arrived in twelve, after being boarded by Moors who were pirating along the coasts of the Papal State.
We are now in the country of treachery and chicanery, of poison; the country of murder and robbery. In Italy it is necessary to keep all one’s five senses alert, because people there make their livelihood by what they call collonarsi, that is to say, in polite words, by fleecing one another. And there is nothing to equal the delight they show when they have gulled someone. They celebrate it as a feat brought off by sheer cunning. Their language is the one best suited to lying, because it is all politeness and exaggerations. Italy is the homeland of highflown forms of address and superlatives; it is Your Lordship here and Your Excellency there, such titles being used for anyone halfway respectable. If one orders a pair of shoes made, for instance, they deliver them along with the receipt for payment of them; and it is imperative to take the receipt, because even if they receive payment, they come back another day to shamelessly demand it once again, and without scrupling to commit perjury force a person to pay a second time in a court of law.
The two young merchants, who were on their way to Rome, took me with them in a cabriolet. But when it is a matter of carriages, it is necessary to know that when one asks how much the ride has cost, he is told “such and such a sum, and a buona mano.” This latter is not a tip that a person is supposed to give voluntarily, but a sum that, if not handed over, he is hauled into court to pay, and if the price for the trip is not agreed on beforehand, it is arbitrarily raised to a figure that nearly equals the price of the carriage, and there is nothing to do but pay it. When agreeing on a fare, then, it is necessary to ask how much it will be including the buona mano. And it is also best not to enter an inn, even though one just stops in momentarily to get warm, because one is then made to pay for la comodità, the comfort, just as in Spain he is made to pay for the noise and give the servingmaid a tip. In France the only service the latter performs consists of opening the door of the coach when a person is about to leave, and bowing repeatedly.
The carriages in Italy fly, unlike those in Spain, which plod along, and go no farther each day than a man could go on foot, stopping many times as well so as to feed the mules, since as a general rule the coachmans only property is his mules. In any event, when going to Rome or when leaving it, it is imperative to make a thirty-mile run without stopping, or else pay the price, if one stays the night anywhere within those thirty miles, of catching a tertian fever. The entire district is nothing but noxious swamps, though hidden under a cover of greenery. Even in Rome during the summer, monks and those who live in the suburbs have to stay indoors. People do not leave their houses at night till an hour after dark, because of what they call the aria cativa [sic], the bad air; hence in summer the evening stroll begins at midnight. At that season everyone goes about chewing cinchona bark, and people look as if they had just come out of the hospital. The heat is as fierce as in Toledo, for Rome is on the same meridian. So the women wear only a thin little tunic over their blouse, and inside their houses they go about bare naked or nearly so.
The newcomer has difficulty knowing what time it is, since he is told, for instance, that it is fifteen or eighteen o’clock, because they do not reckon clock time the way we do, but rather, like a large part of Germany, they count by periods of twenty-four hours in a row, beginning half an hour after nightfall, and when it is one o’clock they ring a bell. Hence the time of day constantly varies, depending on the hour that night falls. Nor do church clocks ever strike more than six times; and since the one at Saint Peter’s strikes twelve like ours do, the Romans say that it never stops striking.
I am now in Rome, without letters of holy orders, without acquaintances and without money. The sergeant of Spain, thinking that I had money, put me up for a few days. The sergeant of Spain is the name given to the one who guards the Spanish minister, who has a company of soldiers at his orders, as well as jurisdiction over the district of the Piazza di Spagna, which is very large. The Roman forces of law and order cannot enter it without his permission, and therefore prostitutes, who are not allowed in Rome, and are buried outside consecrated ground if they die in the course of plying their trade, take refuge in the aforementioned piazza. If the constabulary asks the Spanish minister for permission to go eject them, the sergeant gives the prostitutes warning in exchange for the annual contribution that they give him on Epiphany, which is the day when Christmas tips are given in Rome, and then they go off to the Piazza di Venezia, another exempt jurisdiction, until the constables’ visit has come to an end. And it is noteworthy that the common people, who in Spain and England are overawed and allow themselves to be shackled by constables, but are enraged and stand up to soldiers, in Rome allow themselves to be arrested by the latter, because they say that they represent the sovereign, whereas they regard it as an unspeakable outrage to be arrested by the constables, whom they stone.
I was on friendly terms from the beginning with very distinguished gentlemen, men of learning in particular; but finding myself incapable of revealing my dire poverty to anyone, more than once I nearly starved to death. My reader will ask why I did not betake myself to a monastery of my Order; [I will answer that it was] because I had no habits, no credentials; because in Europe it is necessary to pay for what one eats in the monasteries; because in view of what I had suffered in them they terrified me, like caves of Cyclopes; and because they were destroyed by the French, and in those that were not in total ruins the cardinals had taken refuge, inasmuch as the pontifical table, which had also been destroyed, was unable to provide the two thousand pesos or Roman escudos needed to feed them. All of Rome was poverty-stricken.
Cardinal Lorenzana, who was not in dire need because he had benefices in Toledo, had a habit made for me. But I went without eating for two or three days; I kept my mind off my hunger either in the library founded by Cardinal Casanate in the Minerva, the mother house of the Dominicans, so called because its church was built on top of the old temple of the goddess Minerva, or in the Biblioteca Angélica founded at the monastery of Sant’ Agostino by an American who was a general of the Order. These are the largest libraries in Rome. From there I would go to the Villa Borghese (which we would call the Quinta Borghese), a good quarter of a league away, wash my clothes and drink water; until, after having gone without a thing to eat for four days, I fell ill with a fever, and was taken with a terrible pain in my head to the hospital for Spaniards, called Monserrate. Spain has two of them in Rome, and used to have one in Naples, and another in Vienna; but their nationals have taken over these latter.
They wanted to give me an emetic at the hospital, and I told them to give me papa first (that is what they call soup in Italy) so as to have something to throw up. In fact, my stomach was so weak that merely eating the soup made me vomit; but I must have kept some of it down; I slept and felt fine. While I was there I received news of a bill of exchange for three hundred pesos being sent me by my brother in Monterrey, because as a consequence of the peace of Amiens communications had been reestablished. At that juncture an Italian, the son of a former Spanish Jesuit, took me home with him; but I am so doomed to misfortune that by an odd turn of fate the bill of exchange failed to come through. I had written to my brother of my hardships, and that was what led him to send the bill of exchange; but I also wrote to Dr. Pomposo, of Mexico City, and told him that everything was well with me, doing so both because he was under no obligation to remedy my impoverished state, and because I did not want my enemies to rejoice if they saw a letter from me giving an account of my dire straits. Dr. Pomposo sent the letter on to my brother, and more readily believing what I had told a stranger than what I myself had told him, he countermanded the bill of exchange.
When this setback occurred, I got out my brief of secularization, which I had already requested when I was in Spain, addressed to Cardinal Borbón, and another, of entitlement to curacies, benefices and prebends, addressed to the archbishop of Mexico. Nothing of this sort is worth money in Rome, just as relics, even though they be the bodies of saints, are worthless, despite the fact that commercial agents keep asking money for them. With these documents in hand, I decided to leave for Naples, with the aim of getting myself appointed as a member of the escort of the infanta, who was going to Spain to marry Ferdinand VII.1 The former American Jesuit Noriega provided me with the means to make the journey, and I boarded a little Calabrian boat on the Tiber. The ballast for the vessel was gun carriages, which we left off at a little island called Portolanzó, and we were making for Terracina without ballast when a storm that came up put us in such dire straits that we came within a hair’s breadth of drowning. We made our escape and took shelter at the foot of Mount Circeo, where I spent the rest of the night remembering the passages in Homer about Ulysses and the enchantress Circe, who must have given her name to that mountain. In the morning we went to wait out the storm off Poncia Island, which is a rock with a spring and a house well suited for the exile of martyrs, which if memory serves me was the one to which the pope Saint Marcellinus was exiled.
When the weather calmed two days later, we resumed our journey, and disembarked in Naples, whose beauty, as seen from the sea, is surpassed only by that of Constantinople; but the infanta had already left for Spain. I had bought an old habit at the Minerva in Rome; I put it on and a Dominican lector* who happened to come across me in the famous street called Toledo, named after the viceroy Toledo, who hanged the last Inca of Peru, Sayri Tupac, because it is the proper thing to do, took me to his provincial** to introduce me. The latter was in fact a Spaniard who from an early age had been reared in Naples, and he recommended me to the monastery of Il Rosario, which is charged with offering hospitality to those who arrive by sea. Italian friars are well mannered and friendly. Having recognized that I was a man of learning, they spread the word, and I was accorded their general esteem. After the reigns of Joseph Bonaparte and Murat the number of friars had greatly diminished.2 But I had never seen a bigger mob of them, for I couldn’t take twenty steps without meeting one. There were friars belonging to thirty Orders, and within the city the Dominicans alone had religious houses under the jurisdiction of three Provinces, for there were twelve monasteries and fourteen convents, not counting the domestic nuns, because there are nuns who live in their own homes, wear habits like those who are cloistered, and in the churches are given the same preferential places that were always accorded virgins bound by vows of devotion to God. Dominican lay sisters, who are called mantelatas in Italy, also wear a long cape and a great veil over their headdress, and look like nuns.
The common folk, who are called lazzaronis [sic], are very talkative, rude, dirty and so cruel that when, following the first invasion of the French in the days of the Republic, their king reconquered Naples, his commanding general being Cardinal Rufo, who for this reason was called Cardinalis galeatus,* and the king did not appear at the capitulation whereby the Neapolitan nobles or patricians surrendered the city (on the arrogant pretext that kings are not obliged to attend capitulations by vassals), the lazzaronis took the decapitated body of each noble and deposited it in front of his residence, shouting for bread to be thrown out to them to eat with the corpse, which they proceeded to devour.3 Strips of human flesh, four fingers wide, were sold in the public square for four granos (the equivalent of our cuartos). The only one they didn’t eat was a bishop; they had earlier taken it as a grave insult that the king should hang him, when all he did to the secular nobles was cut off their heads.
The accent with which they speak their local jargon is most unpleasant. All the provinces of every kingdom in Europe naturally speak their language with very different accents; but in every city in Italy there is what the French call a patois, and the Spaniards a patán. Kindly allow me to digress for a moment to explain this. Since the Latin language was the general language in Spain, Italy and France, and these kingdoms were divided into many small sovereignties after the invasion of the barbarians from the North, Latin gradually became corrupted in each of them in a different way, and many terms of the dominant barbarians were adopted. In a number of provinces, because the Court was more refined, letters were more highly cultivated, and better writers were forthcoming, the corrupted Latin forms were normalized and brought into harmony, a greater abundance of terms was introduced, and Latin came into general use among cultivated people over a greater expanse of territory, the inhabitants of which had closer ties to one another, and which today we call a kingdom or a nation. And we call the language of that cultivated province either the language of the nation or of that province. But in each one of them the common people have kept their own form of corrupted Latin, and that is what today we call their patois or patán.
In France the corrupted form of Latin was first standardized in the kingdom of the Franks, whose capital was Paris, because of its university, and because its king was more powerful than the others. And that is what we call the French language; but their own regional patois is spoken by the people of Gascony, of Burgundy, of continental Brittany, where the old Celtic language is still spoken, of Provence and Languedoc, and so on, where Catalan is spoken. In Spain the corrupted Latin forms were systematized thanks to the cultivation and learning of the scholars of King Alfonso the Wise, who ordered that in cases of doubt with regard to the language, the example of Toledo should be consulted. But the language was finally polished and perfected when the Court took up residence in Valladolid and Burgos, thanks to the scholars of the sixteenth century. And that language is called Spanish or Castilian, and from there it spread to the united mountain regions, to Burgos, to Castilla la Nueva and La Mancha, where it is spoken, albeit very badly, especially in Madrid; and in the Andalusian regions, Extremadura and Murcia, although in those parts it is all mixed up with Arabic terms, and ll is pronounced like y, s like zz, hh is butchered, and the final letter is dropped altogether.4 Although Aragon spoke the Provençal or Limousin patois, brought there with the domination of the French, it adopted Castilian, except for villages along the borders of Valencia and Catalonia. In these latter Limousin is spoken, although in Catalonia it has a very harsh sound and in Valencia it is softened. Since in Valencia everyone prays and hears sermons preached in Castilian, everyone understands it; the contrary is true in Catalonia, where even Latin grammar is studied in Catalan and the Spanish language is thoroughly detested. What with the eight years of occupation during the last war, Catalonians have been Castilianized to a considerable extent because of their contacts with the soldiery. In Asturias they speak a patán mixed with Latin terms, and in Galicia what we call Portuguese today, differing from the latter only in pronunciation. This patán spread from Galicia to Portugal after the Moorish conquest. Even in the regions where Castilian is spoken, the accent is so different that when I heard the mountain folk speak all I could understand was the final word of whatever it was they said. The truly Gothic people of Madrid talk like this: “Go call the doctu to have them come atone to treat Manolo for his stomachache, and we’ll give him twenty maiz,”* meaning maravedís. There are streets in Madrid that go by names such as “Drag-Ass,” “Tumble Doll,” “Wide Ninny,” “Narrow Ninny,” and so on.
In Italy, in Tuscany, under the rule of the Medicis and after the Greeks who had fled Constantinople had been taken in, in the sixteenth century the sciences flourished and the corrupted Latin underwent refinement. Thus what is today called the Italian language is also called the Tuscan language, since it took shape there and only there is it generally spoken by the people, in a pure form, although they pronounce cc like Spanish jj. It is also spoken—and spoken better—throughout the Papal State, and with such a good accent in Rome that it is proverbial throughout Italy: Lingua toscana in bocca romana.** But in nearly every large city in Italy, such as Genoa, Milan, Venice, Bologna, Naples etc, people speak in a different patán with a very different monotonous drone; but the Neapolitan one is the ugliest.
Something else happened to me just after I arrived in Naples: on asking a canon in a café whether he knew Spanish (which would not have been surprising, since up until Charles III the laws still were promulgated in Spanish, although attorneys, in that city as in Rome, make their perorations in Latin), he replied by asking what reason there would be for his knowing a language of barbarians. The ill will borne Spaniards throughout Europe is beyond belief. They fought a revolution to regain their honor; but they lost it again the moment they were once more placed under the yoke, as heavy as the former one, if not heavier. It is now said that it was an uprising by barbarians, staged out of rancor and caprice, which has profited them nothing.
I had already seen that French priests who had emigrated to Spain patiently put up with every sort of insult, including being called Spaniards. In Bayonne I saw some youngsters taking a man off to give him a thrashing, calling him a Spaniard; believing that he was one, I freed him. “What part of Spain are you from?” I asked him. And he answered: “I’m French, but they’re calling me that to insult me.” “It’s the same thing”—a Jew who was passing by said to me—”as being called stupid, ignorant, superstitious and slovenly.” And, unfortunately, no matter where I have gone in Europe, there has been some Spaniard who has caused a scandal because of some notorious dirty deed. I heard later on in England and the United States that mothers, meaning to call their children dirty pigs, told them they looked like Spaniards. In all truth, they are indeed filthy pigs; but less so than the Portuguese and even less than the Moors. The Italians are not very clean; the French are, though not as clean as the Dutch, the English and the Anglo-Americans.
The Spanish ex-Jesuits killed themselves writing to defend their countrymen from their general bad reputation as barbarians. But they failed to notice that where they themselves had ceased to be such was in Italy, and the same thing happened to them as happens to our gachupines,* who, since they have come to America as children and have never seen Spain through rational eyes, it appears to them to be the best thing in the world; but once they have grown up, when they go back to Spain, they immediately return to America grumbling and grousing. The ex-Jesuits returned to Spain because of the first revolution, when Pius VI was taken to France as a prisoner. They had no sooner arrived in Spain when the Marqués del Mérito, their advocate, published the little opus by the Jesuit Bonola entitled: Liga de la teología moderna con la filosofía para arruinar la Iglesia y el Trono.** The Augustinian Fernández replied with El pájaro en la liga,*** a congratulatory letter to don Cornelio Suárez de Molina, three thousand copies of which were sold in one day. This uproar caused them to be sent back to Italy. Many of them had already taken off proprio motu once they saw Spain through rational eyes. The rest flocked together in Alicante and made repeated representations to be rescued for good from the land of the barbarians.
“Good Lord, what barbarians!” Montengón, the author of the Eusebio, said to me in Rome. “My pen has fallen from my hand. I am not going to write another word in Castilian. I am writing my history of Rome in Italian.” Masdeu recounted with gusto things that had happened to him in Spain, which would not have happened even in Siberia, he said. Hervás told me that what he wrote in Horcajo, the part of the country he was originally from, not far from Madrid, had been set down according to his notes, and once when he needed a Bible in order to quote a passage, the only one to be found among the parish priests in the environs was one lacking both the beginning and the end. “A person can’t write in Spain; there are no books,” he remarked to me.
What else is there to say, save that in the villages only the parish priest and the sacristan know how to read? Sometimes we were unable to find a single soldier in an entire battalion who knew how to read so as to promote him to corporal, and there were captains who didn’t know how to read either, and their aides gave them oral reports. In Catalonia during the war, we were asked if the king of Castile that we had was the same one they had. Ours, they told us, is the king of Madrid. In Catalonia this is nothing to be surprised at. In Madrid, when I said that I was from Mexico: “How rich that king of yours must be, seeing as how such a lot of silver comes from there!” In a royal office in Madrid that I happened to go into, when I stated that I was an American they were amazed. “But you aren’t black,” they said to me. “A countryman of yours came by just now,” the friars at the monastery of San Francisco in Madrid said to me, and when I asked how they knew that, they answered that he was black. In the Cortes the deputy from Cádiz, a Philippine priest, asked whether we Americans were white and professed the Catholic religion. In certain hamlets, hearing that I was from America, they asked after señor X or Y; you must know him, they said to me, because in such-and-such a year he went to the Indies. As though the Indies were the size of a small village. When I arrived in Las Caldas, the mountain folk “came to see the Indian,” as they put it.6 “Spain,” Archbishop de Malinas says in his Guerra de España, “is part of Europe only because of its religion; it is part of Africa, and only through a geographical error is it located in Europe.”
To return to the Neapolitans, they call Vesuvius, whose crater is now much lower down, by the name Montezuma. Nowhere have I found more things from America than there. Pine nuts and corn on the cob are sold in the streets, the reason being that in the early days viceroys of America usually became viceroys of Naples later on, and brought with them many things from the territories they had once ruled. But the usual food of Neapolitans is macaroni, day in and day out.
When one enters Naples it is as though one were entering an Indian pueblo, for the people are the same color. The women in particular are swarthy and ugly, and the men much better looking by comparison, something all travelers notice. But in general they are much given to stealing, and are the counterpart in Italy of men from La Mancha in Spain. Their King Ferdinand was a worthy brother of Charles IV; his wife one of the three royal mares of Europe, and Neapolitans weren’t sure whether his Godoy was Florentine or English. The king had a separate part of the sea to fish in, and his own stall where he sold the fish and hobnobbed with the lazzaronis who bought them. I was there when Isabelita, who came from Spain to marry Franciscone (that was what they called their prince), arrived in Naples. She went with her husband and her in-laws to visit San Gennaro, the patron saint of Naples, in pomp, or fiochi, that is to say, the way the Pope goes about in his coach with very long teams of horses, and footmen on either side, with her hat tucked underneath her arm; and the people said of her: “She is beautiful, but she is too stout; she doesn’t look like the daughter of a king.” How true!
In Naples there is a Greek and Latin priest, who, incidentally, had eleven daughters, for all Greek priests (save the bishops) have been married for some time when they are ordained, and close by the Papal Palace itself in Rome I saw their living quarters and all the balconies full of children and diapers. Since the kingdom of Naples was part of Magna Graecia, it is full of Greeks and Greek churches. I used to attend their offices and the Mass celebrated by their priests, who wear their hair halfway down their back, and a beard just as long, a black tunic and a cloak with purple revers but no collar, and a broad-brimmed hat with a cross made of ribbon in the front part of the crown.
The Greeks allow no images save painted ones. And as soon as they enter the church they go to a large lectern standing in the middle of it, with the Gospel open and a cross on top of it; they kiss both, then cross themselves repeatedly and after that go over to kiss the images of Christ and Mary, of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, which are painted on the partition that closes off the presbytery and has three doors and a small window above the one in the middle. They then seat themselves here and there in the church, on chairs like those in a choir. There are no women seated in the nave, and one sees them only upstairs in the choir or the galleries. The priests always wear a cope when saying Mass, with a sort of little square of cloth with a cross hanging from the sash of it. There is only one altar in the entire church, and only one Mass is celebrated on feast days. The leavened bread that is to be consecrated and the wine are brought from the sacristy by a priest in vestments, and as soon as he shouts that he is bringing the symbols, the congregation bows (because the Greeks never kneel) and venerates the symbols of the Eucharist with such devotion that those who observe the Latin rites are shocked. As soon as the Canon begins, the doors of the presbytery are closed and the only words of the priest that the congregation hears are those of the consecration, which he speaks very loudly, and the choir, still singing, bows deeply, repeating, Agios otheos, which is pronounced thus: Aguios ozeos, Aguios isjiros, Aguios azánatos, Eleyson unas.*
Once the Canon has been recited, the middle door is opened, and the chalice and the bread are presented (the chalice being covered, as it was earlier on in the Latin Church, until the Dominicans introduced the usage of bringing it in uncovered, since they did not use a pall but, rather, large corporals**) for the veneration of the congregation at the little door in the middle of the partition. The congregation keeps coming forward to the aforementioned door until the end of the Mass, and the deacon places in their hand the eulogiae, consecrated bread that he has broken into bits and placed on a tray. Greek Catholics do not say ámen, but amén, just as Roman Catholics do not say amén, but ámen.
As for myself, I was well treated at the monastery of Il Rosario, and when I went to see the provincial, who presented me with several gifts of clothing, he called me Your Most Illustrious Lordship. That is proof of how common that title is here. I was the one who accompanied the young novices of Il Rosario on their evening strolls. And at various times they took me to Portici, which is the royal residence; or else to the musical conservatories, of which there are several; or to the large, magnificent charterhouse, which is on the mountain that overlooks Naples; or to the library of Sant’Angelo in Guido, which is open to the public; or to see the great San Carlos theater; or to other more distant places by way of the grotto of Pausilipus, that is to say, a wide path hewn out through a hill with pick and shovel by Cocceyo, that is a quarter of a league long. At its entrance Virgils epitaph is engraved on a marble plaque:
Mantua me genuit; calabri rapuere, tenet nunc
Parthenope: cecini pascua, rura, duces.*** 7
Above the entrance is Virgil’s tomb. On the same hill, not very far away, is the tomb of Sincero San Nazario, famous for his poem Departu virgineo,*** with the epitaph placed there by Cardinal Bembo:
Da sacro cineri flores: hae ille Maronis
Sincerus musae proximus ut tumulo.8
Once past the grotto I saw Elysium, a deadly place today because of the miasmal air, and Avernus, which today has nothing terrible about it. It was once shaded by a grove of trees.
In the Dominican monastery I venerated the right arm of Saint Thomas, and saw, in his own hand, which is very even and very small, his exposition of Saint Dionysus’s De divinis nominibus.* It is displayed in the sacristy under glass. I visited the chapel where he was in the habit of praying, and I saw the Holy Christ who spoke to him and approved his doctrine. I visited the classroom where he taught; for his doing so the king of Naples paid a substantial sum each year: four pesos, enough to maintain the entire convent. That was how valuable the coin of the realm was before America was discovered. I also visited his cell, so small that there is barely room for an altar and a chair. For this reason another cell was made into a sacristy for him. The cell I saw is not, materially speaking, the very same one that the saint lived in, because the floor of the monastery has been raised; but when they raised the walls, they retained the original dimensions of the cell. The saint’s head, the size of which is extraordinary, is in a small chapel that is looked after by a Cistercian nun, and this is all that remains of the celebrated monastery of Tosanova, where he died. His body is in Toulouse, in France, and escaped the wholesale burning of relics carried out by the revolutionaries.
I shall not take my leave of Naples without telling of a notorious lawsuit brought by the Dominican Minacci, a Calabrian and a professor of botany at the University of Palermo, the capital of the island of Sicily. From the earliest times onward, the immense majority of the inhabitants of Europe, both men and women, were slaves. A twelfth-century Pope ordered all Christians to be freed, as Voltaire concedes in his analysis of history. The Romans considered it their pagan right to make prostitutes of their female slaves so as to live off them, as is still the practice today in the Antilles with regard to black female slaves. And in the days of feudalism, in almost the whole of the Roman Empire it was a right of the prince to deflower the brides of all his vassals. Although Christian ethics abolished the practice, it is still the tradition in Germany, and in certain parts of France it was the custom to present the bride to the lord and master, who touched her foot with his, as if to re mind her of his right. In Calabria, Prince Sguila could claim the right of muriatico (as it was called) with the brides of his vassals, assuming it at his discretion, depending upon the estate or the beauty of the newly wedded wife. Being offended by this continual wrong done his fellow Calabrians, Friar Minacci brought suit against their prince in Naples, a suit that caused a great deal of talk and aroused everyone’s curiosity, and he won it.
All this happened in the three months that I remained in Naples wanting all the while to return to Rome to see to my secularization. There was a boat from Mahón in the port, bound for Civitavecchia, held up only because its captain was suffering from a bubo in the groin. I cured him of it, and he gave me free passage in return. As I took my leave of them, there was a great show of feeling on the part of my brothers at Il Rosario, who were very fond of me and sought my advice in all matters. We reached Civitavecchia in three days, borne by a storm that blew itself out, entering port at the same time as two small frigates that Bonaparte was presenting to the Pope as a gift in recompense for the galleys that the French had taken from him previously. I pressed the captain to take me on to Rome, and he did so. I did not suffer grievously there this time, for I was already familiar with the terrain now, and betook myself immediately to the home of my old friend don Domingo Navázquez.