WE SET OUT FROM ROME at one o’clock on Sunday afternoon, leaving the town by the Lateran Gate and the Appian Way. Aqueducts fretted the horizon, and tombs of forgotten emperors sprouted from the vineyards as we drove along the fringe of the Campagna. A brown tram runs by the side of the road, connecting the capital with Frascati and the Alban Hills. We had not gone fifteen miles before the near hind tyre collapsed with a loud report. The driver of a tram, which was labouring up the slight incline on which we had stopped, drew up beside us, and the passengers leant their heads out of the windows and crowed with pleasure, as they watched us raising Diana’s very heavy load upon an extremely inadequate jack. The road was bad, but improved when it ceased to be the Appian Way. It became unswervingly straight and quite flat for thirty miles, along the side of a completely straight canal and beneath a completely straight range of mountains. The utter straightness of everything began to affect our nerves. We became giddy with rectitude. David could hardly hold the road. At last we came in sight of the sea. This was the first glimpse that we had had of it since we had turned our backs on the stagnant waters of the Hamburg docks.
On a rocky white promontory, jutting out into the dazzling ultramarine of the Mediterranean, stood the town of Gaeta, where Maria of Bavaria had made her last heroic stand for the Neapolitan Bourbons in 1860, holding the town for four months against the Sardinian fleet. As we watched, another tyre slowly flattened. A hundred yards further on we were obliged to wait at a level crossing, where two Wandervögel, caked with dust and sweat, gazed beseechingly at us. As we were now without a spare wheel, David, who is a great believer in the good luck that follows charity, offered them a lift. We did not have another puncture.
Diana now presented an extraordinary appearance, as though of some group of ornamental statuary moving along the southern Italian roads – to the bewilderment of their more regular frequenters. The back being entirely occupied with luggage, the two Germans, garbed with the dishevelled and semi-nude conventionality that characterizes modern sculptures of ‘Youth in Industry’, were obliged to coil themselves on pedestals of cabin-trunks and suitcases in those precarious poses exhibited by Michael Angelo’s ‘Dawn and Twilight’, or the slithering torsos of Robinson and Cleaver’s ‘Linen Hall’ in Regent Street. Gradually, as the carts grew more frequent and the volume of dust increased, they became but vague white forms, scarcely human beneath the livid coating of soft, choky powder. The effect of the municipal ornament was thus completed.
The level crossing at which they had mounted our hospitable step proved to be the first of a series of five in as many miles. The road and the railway seemed intertwined like the serpents round the wand of Hermes. In each case, we successfully arrived some twenty minutes before the train. And each time the gates were closed. When the train did come, the same fat man in a blue, striped shirt invariably leaned from the window next the engine, and guffawed at us.
Late in the afternoon, far away on the left, Vesuvius burst upon the view, surmounted by her little spike of smoke. No sooner had she taken flesh, than the correct umbrella-pine, leaning at exactly the angle most suited to this dearest of all the amateur photographer’s compositions, appeared in the corner of the picture, and repeated itself with beautiful precision at every twist of the road, sometimes growing from a neighbouring crag, occasionally rising from a piece of marshy flat. Being a Sunday, the peasant women were out walking in great flapping starched caps of clean white linen, very bright, tightly-laced magenta bodices, and clogs. The sun began to set, its copper rays shooting fire over a flat mass of brilliant purple cloud. The mountain, the tree, the peasant woman and the glowing discord of the sunset, all combined to transport one into the stippled midst of a Victorian water-colour. One felt as if one was hanging on a wall, surrounded by a pattern of brown and pink chrysanthemums flecked with silver, and one wondered how the peasant woman had escaped from her glass dome.
At length, when nearly dark, we came to Caserta. The palace, as it was in the glory of the past, has lately lived again in the prose of Sacheverell Sitwell. Of its present he has spoken little. Built in 1752 by Vanvitelli, of a delicate brick, the colour of dying rose-petals, finished and coped with a dull white stone, this vast home of Charles III, king of Naples, stands a seventh-of-a-mile in length, 182 yards in breadth, and 125 feet in height. So perfectly proportioned is the whole, that at first sight it seems nothing out of the ordinary. Then, as the myriads of windows stretch away into a blur of dots, the immensity of the building strikes the eye with a jerk. Entirely detached from it are two curving wings that flank a wide, open space in front of it.
Far from apparent, as we drove past in the deepening shadow of the airless, August twilight, were the profusion and luxury of the tastes of kings and the vocabularies of authors. An atmosphere of decay, of desolation, a spirit of uselessness, of the body of a giant paralysed and unwanted, of the trunk of a fallen beech, pervaded the silent, uncurtained expanse of brick and window, the grand staircases to the main entrance on the first floor, and the peeling stucco of the empty wings. Situated in the centre of the town, the large open semi-circle in front of the palace was covered with matted, trodden yellow grass, From this there led for several miles a magnificent avenue broad as Whitehall, of dark-leaved planes, interrupted half-way down by a circular opening, whence radiated eight tributary roads. Directly across the spot where the trees began, the railway had been laid, not five hundred yards from the central entrance of the palace; and in addition, at this exact point, a large roofed station had been constructed, with goods yards and sidings; so that the vista chronicled by many former writers of travel books, as the grandest approach to the grandest palace in Europe, was now confined to shunting rolling stock, which is perhaps less ornamental in Italy than in most countries. As a final vindication of Italian nationalism the open space between the wings had been renamed the ‘Piazza Garibaldi’. It is said, however, that there is still a Bourbon party in Naples.
We hurried past, the Wandervögel still clinging, and circumventing the station, drove down the great avenue, despite its holes. A few carts were crawling wearily along the edge. Darkness fell. Our progress became slower and slower as the dust from the harvesting wagons caught and deflected the light of the lamps. Eventually we were brought to a standstill in a small town, en fête for some religious ceremony. Squalid and half ruined, it presented the appearance of a Luna Park, with every building outlined in electric bulbs, and a series of tall wooden frames that had been erected in the piazza, spluttering with Catharine-wheels and sacred devices. Instead of the rhythmic exhilaration of the merry-go-round organ, there sounded the bored chanting of men and boys. Round a corner came the procession, the priests marching past with supercilious nonchalance as they swung their censors. Last of all was borne aloft the image, that of a female saint, to the back of whose head was attached a halo of small electric lights. The crowd seemed mainly interested in us.
We had some difficulty in finding our way through Naples. The view of the town from the hills above, a maze of dotted lights stretching far out along the shores of the bay, soon gave place to high houses and small streets, filled with a surging crowd of chattering pedestrians and jangling cabs. David was very tired and was thankful to pull up at the Santa Lucia Hotel on the front, though aware that it was not the best. There was no downstairs accommodation and the hall was filled with the English professional classes. The Wandervögel, looking as though they had been dipped in flour, offered to wash the car out of gratitude for their ride. We suggested that they should go and wash themselves.
The next day we spent in a fever of agitation between Cook’s and the garage. The garage refused to mend the punctures with the requisite despatch, and it was necessary to go once every hour to see that they were being done. Cook’s had heard nothing from Brindisi and were prepared to make no effort for our convenience, until at last we sent for the manager, who proved more amenable than his assistants. We also paid a visit to the museum, but found it shutting as we arrived. I was not sorry. We lunched on the terrace of the Castel del Ova, that frowning pile of dark stone that rises from an island in the bay and dates from the Norman occupation of the twelfth century. It is joined to the mainland by a stone jetty and was not more than 300 yards from the door of our hotel. As we sat on the balcony of the restaurant, digging with delight at freshly caught languste, the view seemed to embody all the traditional features of the Neapolitan existence. Before us stretched the bay, blue and flat, with the huge town straggling away to a line of white houses on its furthest shore; and beyond, the lower slopes and furrowed summit of Vesuvius, rising to a little puff of soft silky smoke that dissolved into the sky like a bored summer cloud. From over the water, a fresh breeze flapped the white curtains above us, and the table cloth. The menu was expensive, the food good. Yet, immediately below us, the stone quays with their fleets of little boats, were proclaiming that fabulous poverty for which the town has always been renowned. The lazzaroni, whose lack of clothing was once a cause of ‘une frayeur extrème’ to Madame de Genlis, are no longer. Their tradition has fallen on the fishermen and fisherboys, lying about in all directions and in all positions beneath the boiling rays of the midday sun. Old women, seated amongst baskets of marine edibles, piles of nets, coils of rope and rusting anchors, munched lethargically at their indescribable foods, in the intervals of begging from the passers-by. Groups of men were playing cards over bottles of red wine. Old sailors, their faces crinkled and deformed with disease, lay huddled in their rags upon the coping at the water’s edge. The sound of a song floated up. On the left gleamed the long row of high modern hotels. Far out on the right the dim blue shape, as the ancients saw it, of a recumbent goat, hovered against the sky-line: the island of Capri.
There are few individual spots in the world that can have inspired such a multitude of writings and legends as this tantalizing rock with its inaccessible cliffs and its exquisite confusion of clustering gardens and forbidding mountain peaks. Who has not read of the golden broom, the roses and the wistaria, and the oranges dripping from their dark-leaved trees? Of the grassy vales and wind-blown uplands, the damp deep gorges, the weathered crags, and falling cliffs a thousand feet sheer to the peacock hues of the sea? Of the grottos, the villas and the miniature castles? History has left her touch: the bath of Tiberius, the castle of Barbarossa; the old red coats of the troops of Sir Hudson Lowe, the literary lustres of Compton Mackenzie; Marchesa Casati posed amid her bearskins; Gerard Lee Bevan disguised as Mr Smith; the Queen of Sweden in a green veil; each adds its breath to that siren charm, which so many outcasts, artists, and elderly women in search of adventure in small communities, find impossible to resist. Imagine it in the old days, when the Phoenician steps, cut in precipitous flights up nine hundred feet of cliff, were the only possible approach to Anacapri, when the tourist steamer was the exception rather than the daily rule. The siren of today, draped in a kind of aesthetic Union Jack, is the siren isle of yesterday, grown old with wooing.
In the afternoon I felt restless and plunged into the middle of the town. Naples is an alarming place. In the sunlight of the quays it may seem innocuous enough; but amid the dark shadows of the squalid tenement houses, the washing stretched bunting-like from attic window to attic window, the unkempt crowds jostling through the narrow streets and alleyways, some sinister current seems transmitted through the air. The poverty of the slums is no longer happy-go-lucky, basking in the sun. It is terrifying. The ordinary canons of decency are not observed. The day’s toilet and the day’s cooking are alike performed in the gutter. Many of the windows have no glass, some no frames. Children swarm. The whole population seems to suffer from perpetual sores and inflammations. The streets are paved with blocks of stone, fifteen inches square and six deep. Most are missing and the roads are consequently almost impassable, save when the tramlines serve as bridges.
I wandered on and on at a feverish pace, and at length, as it was growing late, boarded a tram, or rather clung to a handrail, in company with a struggling mass of itinerant humanity. The others thought I had been murdered. We dined at Bertolini’s overlooking the town. During the meal an operatic tenor sang to the homely troughing sound of several families of Germans.
