 Chapter 6 Part 2 of Glimpses of Italian Society in the 18th Century by Hester Lynch Piozzi. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Florence Part 2. I have been out to dinner in the country near Prato and what a charming, what a delightful thing is a nobleman's seat near Florence. How cheerful the society, how splendid the climate, how wonderful the prospects in this glorious country. The are no roaming before his house, the upper nines rising behind it. A sight of fertility enjoyed by its inhabitants and a view of such defences to their property's nature alone can bestow. A peasantry so rich too that the wives and daughters of the farmer go dressed in jewels and those of no small value. A pair of one-drop earrings, a broadish necklace with a long piece hanging down the bosom and terminated with a cross. All of set garnets, clear and perfect, is a common, a very common treasure to the females about this country. And on every Sunday or holiday when they dress and mean to look pretty, their elegantly disposed ornaments attract attention strongly. Though I do not think them as handsome as the Lombard Lasses and our Venetian friends protest that the Parmesan Cramer in their state are still richer. La Contadinella Toscana, however, in a very rich white silk petticoat, exceedingly full and short to show off her neat pink slipper and pretty ankle, her pink coat of hob and straps with white silk lacing down the stomacher. Puffed shirt sleeves with heavy lace robins ending at the elbow and fastened at the shoulders with at least eight or nine bows of narrow pink ribbon. A lawn handkerchief trimmed with broad lace put on somewhat caceticly and finishing in front with a nose gate. Must make a lovely figure at any rate, though the hair is drawn away from the face in a way rather too tight to be becoming. Under a red velvet cushion edged with gold, which helps to wear it off, I think, but gives the small leg-on hat lined with green a pretty perking air, which is infinitely nimpish and smart. A tolerably pretty girl so dressed must surely more than buy with a fide operade upon the Paris stage, even if she were not set off as these are with a very rich suite of pearls or set garnets that in France or England would not be purchased for less than 40 or 50 pounds. And I am now speaking of the women perpetually under one's eye, not one or two picked from the crowd, like Mrs. Fanini, an innkeeper's wife in Florence, who when she was dressed for the masquerade two nights ago submitted her finery to Mrs. Greatheed's inspection and my own who agreed. She could not be so adorned in England for less than a thousand pounds. It is true the nobility are proud of letting you see how comfortably their dependents live in Tuscany, but can any pride be more rational or generous or any desire more patriotic? Oh, may they never look with less delight on the happiness of their inferiors, and then they will not murmur at their prince whose protection of this rank among his subjects is eminently tender and attentive. I have been showed at the horse race, the theatre, etc., the unfortunate grandson of King James II. He goes much into public still, though old and sickly, gives the English arms and livery and wears the garter, which he has likewise bestowed upon his natural daughter. The princess of Stolberg, his consort, whom he always called Queen, has left him to end a life of disappointment and sorrow by himself, with the sad reflection that even conjugal attachment, and, of course, domestic comfort, was denied to him, and fled in defiance of poetry and fiction, fled with the crown to its powerful and triumphant possessors. The states of Italy, being all under different rulers, are kept separate from each other and speak a different dialect. That of Malayan full of consonants and harsh to the ear, but abounding with classical expressions that rejoice one's heart and fill one with the oddest but most pleasing sensations imaginable. I heard a lady there call a runaway nobleman Profugo, mighty prettily, and added that his conduct had put all the town into orgasmo grande. All this, however, the Tuscans may possibly have in common with them. My knowledge of the language must remain ever too imperfect for me to depend on my own skill in it. All I can assert is that the Florentines appear as far as I've been competent to observe, to depend more on their own copious and beautiful language for expression than the Milanese do who run to Spanish, Guic, or Latin for assistance. While half their tongue is avowedly borrowed from the French, his pronunciation in the letter they even profess to retain. At Venice, the sweetness of the patois is irresistible. Their lips, incapable of uttering any but the sweetest sounds, reject all consonants they can get quit of and make their mouths drop honey more completely than it can be said by any eloquence less malifluous than their own. The Milanese dialect is detested by the other Italians as gross and disagreeable in its sounds, but every nation has the good word of its own inhabitants and the language which Abate Bianconi praises as nervous and expressive. I would advise no person less learned than himself to censure as disgusting or condemn as dull. I stayed very little at Bologna, saw nothing but their pictures, and heard nothing but their prayers. Those were superior, I fancy, to our rivals. Language can never be spoken of by a foreigner to any effect of conviction. I have heard our countryman Mr Great Heed himself, who perhaps possesses more Italian than almost any Englishman and studies it more closely, refused to decide in critical disputations amongst his literary friends here that the sonnets he writes in the Tuscan language are praised by the natives who best understand it and have been by some of them preferred to those written by Milton himself. Meantime this is acknowledged to be the prime city for purity of praise and delicacy of expression, which at last is so disguised to me by the gutter or manner in which many sounds are pronounced that I feel half weary of running about from town to town so I'm never arriving at anywhere I can understand the conversation without putting all the attention possible to their discourse. I am now told that less effort will be necessary at Rome. Nothing can be prettier, however, than the slow and tranquil manners for Florentine. Nothing more polished than his general address and behaviour, ever in the third person don't we'll blag it in the street if he has not the honour of his particular acquaintance, but intimacy produces boy in those at the highest rank who call one another Carlo and Angelo very sweetly. The ladies taking up the same notion by saying Louisa or Maddalena without any addition at all. The Don and Donna of Milan were offensive to me somehow as they conveyed an idea of Spain, not Italy. Here Signore is the term which better pleases ones ear and Signore Contessa, Signore Principessa, if the person is of higher quality, resembles our manners more when we say my Lady Duchess, etc. What strikes me as most observable is the uniformity of style in all the great times. At Venice the men of literature and fashion speak with the same accent and I believe the same quick terms of expression as their gondolier and the coachman of Milan talks no broader than the countess who if she does not speak always in French to a foreigner as she would willingly do tries in vain to talk Italian and having asked you thus, Alia Capì, which means Ha Ele Capita, laughs at herself for trying to Tosca negliare as she calls it and gives the point up with Nocco Altro that comes in at the end of every sentence and means non occorre altro. There is no more occurs upon the subject. The La Cade de Plasso attended as a bologna was one of the few persons I had met with who spoke a language perfectly intelligible to me. Are you a Florentine, pray friend, said I? No madam, but the combinations of this world having led me to talk much with strangers, I contrived to Toscanize it all I can for their advantage and doubt not, but it will tend to my own at last. Such a sentiment so expressed by footmen would set a plain man in London a laughing and make a fanciful lady imagine he was a nobleman disguised. He and nobody laughs, nor nobody stares, nor wonders that their dullet speaks just as good language or utters as well-turned sentences as themselves. Their cold answer to my amazement is as comical as the fellow's fine style. A batizzato, say they, gomme noi altri. Putnam, he has been baptised as well as we, end footnote. But we are called away to hear the fair Fantastici, a young woman who makes improviso verses and sings them such homy with infinite learning and taste. She is successor to the celebrated Corrilla, who no longer exhibits the power she once held without a rival, yet to her conversations everyone still strives for admittance, though she is now ill and old and hoarse with repeated coals. She spares, however, now by no labour or fatigue to obtain and keep that superiority and admiration which one day perhaps gave her almost equal trouble to receive and to repay, but who can bear to lay their laurels by? Corrilla is gay by nature and witty if I may say so by habit, replete with fancy and powerful to combine images apparently distant. Mankind is at last more just to people of talents than is universally allowed, I think. Corrilla without pretensions either to immaculate character in the English sense, deep her additional high birth, which an Italian esteems above all earthly things, has so made her way in the world that all the nobility of both sexes crowd to her house, that no prince passes through Florence without waiting on Corrilla, that the capital will long recollect her being crowned there, and the many sovereigns have not only sought her company but have been obliged to put up with slights from her independent spirit and from her eerie rather than haughty behaviour. She is however, I cannot guess why, not rich and keeps no carriage, but enjoying all the effect of money, convenience, company and general attention is probably very happy, as she does not much suffer her thoughts on the next world to disturb her felicity in this, I believe, while willing to turn everything into mirth than to make all admire her wit, even at the expense of their own virtue. The following epigram made by her would explain my meaning and give a specimen of her present powers of improvisation, undecayed by ill health, and I might add undismayed by it. An old gentleman here, one Ghettano Testigrosa, had a young wife whose name was Mary, and who brought him a son when he was more than 70 years old. Corrilla led him gaily into the circle of company with these words, Mie Signori io vi presento il buon uomo ghettano che non sa che cosa sia in misterio sovrumano del filiolo di Maria. We were walking last night in the gardens of Porta Sangallo, and met two or three well-looking women of the second rank, with the baby, four or five years old at most, dressed in the habit of a Dominican friar, bestowing the benediction as he walked along like an officiating priest. I felt a shock, given to all my nervous at once, and asked Cavalier Delci the meaning of so strange a device. His reply to me was edificione malintesa Signora, footnote. It's an ill-understood devotion, madam, end footnote. And turning round to the other gentleman, now this folly, said he, a hundred years ago, would have been the object of profound veneration and prodigious applause. Fifty years hence it will be censured as hypocritical. It is now passed by wholly unnoticed except by this foreign lady, who I believe thought it was done as a joke. But I must bid adieu to beautiful Florence, where the streets are kept so clean, one is afraid to dirty them and not oneself by walking in them. Where the public walks are all nicely weeded, as in England, and the gardens have a home-ish and bath-like look that is exceedingly cheering to an English eye. Where, when I dined at Prince Coruscini's table, I heard the cardinal say grace and thought of the ceremonies at Queen's College Oxford. Where I had the honour of entertaining at my own dinner on the 25th of July, many of the Tuscan and many of the English nobility. And Nardini kindly played a solo in the evening at a concert we gave in Meggott's great room. Where we have compiled the little book amongst us, known by the name of the Florence Miscellany, as the memorial of that friendship which does me so much honour, and which I earnestly hope may long subsist among us. Where, in short, we have lived exceedingly comfortably. But where, dear Mrs. Great-Ear to myself have encouraged each other in saying, it will be particularly sad to die not of the gnats, or more property mosquitoes, for they do not sting one quite to death. Though their venom has swelled my own arm, so was to oblige me to carry it for this last week in a sling, but of the Maldipeto, which is endymial in this country, and much resembling our pleurisy in its effects. Blindness too seems no uncommon misfortune of Florence. From the strong reverberation of the sun's rays on houses of the cleanest and most brilliant whiteness. Kept so elegantly nice too that I should despair of seeing more delicacy at Amsterdam. Apoplex is likewise frequent enough. I saw a man carried out stone dead from Sam Pancrazio's church one morning about Nunde, but nobody seemed disturbed at the event, I think, except myself. So this is no good town to take one's last leave of life in neither, as the body one has been so long taken care of would, in 24 hours, be hoisted up upon a common cart, with those of all the people who died the same day, and being fairly carried out of Porto Sangallo towards the dusk of evening, will be shot into a whole dug away from the city, properly enough to protect Florence and keep it clear of putrid disorders and disagreeable smells. All this with little ceremony, to be sure, and less distinction. For the grand duke suffers the pride of birth to last no longer than life, however, and demolishes every hope of the woman of quality, lying in a separate grave from the distressed object who begged at a carriage door when she was last on an airing. Let me add that his liberality of sentiment extends to virtue, on the one hand, if hardness of heart may be complained of on the other. He suffers no difference of opinions to operate upon his philosophy, and I believe we heretics here should sleep among the best of his Tuscan nobles, but there is no comfort in the possibility of being buried alive by the excess of haste with which people are catched up and hurried away before it can be known almost whether all spikes of life are extinct or no. Of elegant Florence then so ornamented and so lovely, so neat that it is said she shall be seen only on holidays. Dedicated of old to flora and still, the residents of sweetness, grace, and the fine arts particularly, of these kind friends too, so amiable, so hospitable, when I had the choice of four boxes every night at the theatre and a certainty of a charming society in each, we must at last unwillingly take leave. And on tomorrow the 12th day of September 1785 once more commit ourselves to our coach, which has, here the two, met with no accident the good effectors, and in which with God's protection I fear not my journey through what is left of Italy. Though such tremendous tales are told in many of our traveling books of terrible roads and wicked bestillians and ladies laboring through the mire on foot to arrive at bad ins where nothing eatable could be found. End of chapter six, part two. Chapter seven part one of the Limpses of Italian Society in the 18th century by Hestel Inge Piazzi. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Luca Pisa. From the headquarters of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture then where art is at her acme, and from a people polished into brilliancy, perhaps a little into weakness, we drove through the celebrated Veilavano, thick hedges on each side of us which in spring must have been covered with blossoms and fragrant with perfume, now loaded with uncultivated fruits, the wild grape, raspberry and azaroli, inviting to every sense and promising every joy. This beautiful and fertile, this highly adorned and truly delicious country carried us forward to Luca, with a panther since at the gate, and a liberty is written up on every wall and door. It is so long since I've seen the word that even the letters of it rejoice my heart, but how the panther came to be at Zemblum, who can tell? Unless the philosophy we learned from older Lily and our childhood were true, Nekwood Panthera Domari, footnote, that the panther will never be tamed, end footnote, that this very commonwealth should so long have maintained its independence here strange, but how ill attributes her freedom to the active and industrious spirit of the inhabitants, who he says resemble a hive of bees for order and for diligence. I never did see a place so populace for the size of it, one is actually thronged running up and down the streets of Luca, though it is a little town enough for a capital city to be sure. Larger than Salisbury, though and prettier than Nottingham, the beauties of both which places it unites, with all the charms peculiar to itself. The territory they claim, and of which no power dares attempt to dispossess them, is much about the size of Rutlandshire, I fancy, surrounded and apparently fenced in on every side by the upper nines as by a wall. That wall a hot one on the southern side and wholly planted over with vines, while the soft shadows which fall upon the reclivity of the mountains make it inexpressibly pretty, and formed by the particular disposition of their light and shadow, a variety which no other prospect so confined can possibly enjoy. This is the ham gardens of Europe, and whoever has seen that singular spot in Derbyshire belonging to Mr Port has seen little looker in a convex mirror. Some writer calls it a ring upon the finger of the emperor, under whose protection has been hitherto preserved safe from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, till these days when the interests of those two sovereigns united by intimacy, as by blood and resemblance of character, have become almost exactly the same. A doge, whom they call the Princepe, is elected every two months and is assisted by ten senators in the administration of justice. Their armour is the prettiest plaything I ever yet saw, neatly kept and capable of furnishing 25,000 men with arms. Their revenues are about equal to the Duke of Bedford's I believe, 80 or 85,000 pounds sterling a year. Every spot of ground belonging to these people being cultivated to the highest pitch of perfection that agriculture, or rather gardening, for what cannot call these enclosures fields, will admit. And though it is holiday time just now, I see no neglect of necessary duty. They were watering away this morning at seven o'clock just as we do at a nursery ground about London. A hundred men at once or more before they came home to make themselves smart and go to hear music in their best church in honour of some saint. I've forgotten who, but he is the patron of looker and cannot be accused of neglecting his charge, that is certain. This city seems really under admirable regulations. Here are fewer beggars than even at Florence, where however one for fifty in the states of general Venice do not meet your eyes. And either the word liberty has bewitched me or I see an air of plenty without insolence and business without noise that greatly delight me. Here is much cheerfulness too and gay good humour. But this is the season of devotion at looker and in these countries the ideas of devotion and devotion are so blended that all religious worship seems connected with, and to me now regularly implies, a festive show. Well, as the Italians say, il mondo ibello perché è variabile, end footnote. The world is pleasant because it is various. End footnote. We English dress our clergymen in black and go ourselves to the theatre in colours. Here matters are reversed. The church at noon looked like a flower garden, so gaily adorned with the priests, conferees, etc. While the opera house at night wore more the air of a funeral as everybody was dressed in black. A circumstance I had forgotten the meaning of, to remind it that such was once the emulation of finery among the persons of fashion in the city, that it was found convenient to restrain the spirit of expense by obliging them to wear constant mourning. A very rational and well devised drool in a town so small where everybody is known to everybody, and where when this silly excitement or envy is wisely removed, I know not what should hinder the inhabitants from living like those one reads of in the golden age, which above all others this climate most resembles, where pleasure contributes to soothe life, commerce to quicken it, and faith extends its prospects to eternity. Such is, or at least appears to me, this lovely territory of Luka, where cheap living, free government and gentile society may be enjoyed with the tranquility unknown to larger states, where there are delicious and salutary bards a few miles after town for the nobility to make village yattura at, and where if those nobility were at all disposed to cultivate and communicate learning, every opportunity for study is afforded. Some drawbacks will however always be found from human felicity. I once mentioned this place with warm expectations of delight to a millionaire's lady of extensive knowledge and every elegant accomplishment worthy her high birth, the Contessa Melchiresta. My yes, said she, if you would find out the place where common sense stagnates, and every topic of conversation dwindles and perishes away by two frequent or too unskillful touching and handling, you must go to Luka. My ill health set me to their beautiful bards one summer, where all the faculties of my body were restored, thank God, but those of my soul were stupefied to such a degree that at last I was fit to keep no other company but Dame Lucchese, I think. And our talk was soon ended, heaven knows, for when they had once asked me of an evening what I had for dinner and told me how many pairs of stockings their neighbours sent to the wash, we had done. This was a young, charming, a lively lady of quality full of curiosity to know the world and of spirits to bustle through it, but had she been battered through the various societies of London and Paris for eighteen or twenty years together, she would have loved Luka better and despised it less. We must not look for Wales in the yoke some seas, says an old writer, and we must not look for great men or great things in little nations to be sure, but let us respect the innocence of childhood and regard with tenderness the Territory of Luka, where no man has been murdered during the life or memory of any of its peaceful inhabitants, where one robbery alone has been committed for sixteen years, and the thief hanged by a Florentine executioner borrowed for the purpose, no look case of being able or willing to undertake so horrible an office with terrifying circumstances of penitence and public reprehension, where the governed are so few in proportion to the governor's all power being circulated among 450 nobles and the whole country producing scarcely 90,000 souls. A great boarding school in England is really an infinitely more licentious place and the grosser immoralities are every day connived at in it than are known to pollute this delicate and curious commonwealth, which keeps a council always subsisting called the Discordy to examine the lives and conduct professions and even help of their subjects, and once a year they sweep the town of Vagabonds, which till then are caught up and detained in a house of correction and made to work, if not disabled by lameness, till the hour of their release and demission. I wondered, there were so few beggars about, but the reason is now apparent. These we see are neighbors, come hither only for the three days gala. I was wonderfully solicitous to obtain some of their coin, which carries on at the image of no earthly prince, but his head only who came to redeem us from general slavery on the one side, Jesus Christ, and on the other the word libetas. Our peasant girls here are in a new dress to me, no more jewels to be seen, no more pearls, the finery which so dazzled me in Tuscany. These winches are prohibited such ornaments it seems. A muslin handkerchief folded in a most becoming manner and starched exactly enough to make it wear clean for days is the headdress of the casellases. It is put on turban wise and they button their gowns close with long sleeves alasaboyad, but it is made often of a stiff brocaded silk and green lapels with cups of the same color, nor do they wear any hats at all to defend them from a sum which does undoubtedly mature the fig and drive in the vine, but which by the same excess of power exalts the venom of the viper and gives the scorpion means to keep me in perpetual torture for fear of his poison, of which though they assure us death is seldom the consequence among them. I know his sting would finish me at once, because the nets at Florence were sufficient to lame me for a considerable time. The dialect has lost much of the guttural sound that hurt once here at the last place of residence, but here is an odd squeaking accent that distinguishes the Tuscan of Luka. The place appropriated for airing, showing fine equipage, etc, is beautiful beyond all telling from the peculiar shadows on the mountains. They make the bastions of the town their corso, but none except the nobles can go and drive upon one part of it. I know not how many yards of ground is thus set apart to sovereignty, but it makes one laugh. Our inn here is an excellent one, as far as I'm concerned, and the salad oil, green like Irish Uskabor. Nothing was ever so excellent. I asked the French valet who dresses our hair, si c'est d'être pas une République mignonne, put note if it were not a dear little pretty commonwealth this, end footnote. Replyes the fellow who had not slept all night high afterwards understood, for the noise those troublesome animals made in his room. Pisa. The battle of the bridge here at Pisa drew a great many spectators this year, as it has not been performed for a considerable time before. The waiters that are in here give a better account of it than one should have got perhaps from Cavalier or Dama, who would have felt less interested in the business and to seen it from a greater distance. The armies of Sant Antonio and I think Sant Giovanni Battista, but I will not be positive as to the last, disputed the possession of the bridge and fought gallantly I fancy, but the first remained conqueror, as our very conversable Camerieres took care to inform us. As it was on that side it seems that they had exerted their valor. Calling theaters and ships and running horses and mock fights and almost everything so by the names of saints, whom we venerate in silence, and they themselves publicly worship, has the most profane and offensive sound with it to be sure, and shock's delicacy is very dreadfully. And I used to reprimand my maids at Malayan for bringing up the Blessed Virgin Mary's name on every trivial, almost on every ludicrous occasion with the degree of sharpness they were not accustomed to, because it kept me in a constant shivering. Yet let us reflect a moment on our own conduct in England, and we shall be forced candidly to confess that the Puritans alone keep their lips unpolluted by breach of the Third Commandment, because the common exclamation of good God, scrupled by few people on the slightest occurrence as it apparently without any temptation in the world, is no less than gross irreverence of his sacred name. The misery of Tuscany is that all animals thrive so heavily under this productive sun, so that if you scorn the sansariere, you are half devoured before morning, and so disfigured that I defy one's nearest friends to recollect one's countenance, while the spiders sting as much as any of their insects, and one of the bit me this very day till the blood came. With all this not ill-founded complaint of these are active companions, my constant wonder is that the grapes hang untouched, this 20th September in vast hairy clusters covered with bloom and unmalested by insects, which with a quarter of this heat in England are encouraged to destroy all our fruit, in spite of the gardener's diligence to blow up nests, cover the walls with netting and hang them about with bottles of syrup to court the creatures in, who otherwise sow damage every fig and grape and plum of ours, that nothing but the skins are left remaining by now. Here no such contrivances are either wanted or thought of, and while our island is assiduously bent to guard and studious to invent new devices to protect their half-dozen peaches from their half-dozen wasps, the standard trees of Italy are loaded with high-flavoured and delicious fruits. The roadside is indeed hedged with festoons of vines, crawling from olive to olive, which they plant in the ditches of Tuscany as we do willows in Britain. Mulberry trees too, by the thousand, and some polluted poplars serve for support to the glorious grapes that will now soon be gathered. What least contributes to the beauty of the country, however, is perhaps most subservient to its profits. Now I'm ashamed to write down the returns of money gained by the oil alone in this territory and that of Luka, where I was much struck with the colour, as well as the excellence of this useful commodity. Nor can I tell why none of that green cast comes over to England, unless it is that like essential oil of chamomile it loses the tent by exposure to the air. An olive tree, however, is no elegantly growing or happily coloured plant, straggly and dusky. One is forced to think of its produce before one can be pleased with its merits as in a deformed and ugly friend or companion. The fogs now begin to fall pretty heavily in the morning and rising about the middle of the day leave the sun at liberty to exert his violins very powerfully. At night come forth the inhabitants like door beetles at sunset on the coast of Sussex. Then is their season to walk and chat and to sing and to make love and run about the street with a girl and a guitar to eat ice and drink lemonade, but never to be seen drunk or quarrel some more riotous. Though night is the true season of Italian felicity they place not their happiness in brutal frolics any more than in malicious titterings. They are idle and they are merry, it is I think the worst we can say of them. They are idle because there is little for them to do and merry because they have little given to them to think about. To the busy Englishman they might well apply these verses of his own Milton in the Mask of Comus. What have we with day to do? Sons of care it was made for you. End of chapter seven part one. Chapter seven part two of Glimpses of Italians aside in the 18th century by Hester Lynch Piazzi. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Lake Horn, Bani di Pisa, Siena. Here we are by the seaside once more in the trading town too and I should think myself in England almost but for the difference of dresses that pass under my balcony for here we were immediately addressed by a young English gentleman who politely put us in possession of his apartments the best situated in the town and with him we talked at the dear coast of Devonshire, agreed upon the resemblance between that and these environs but gave the preference to home on account of its undulated shore finely fringed with woodlands which here I'm wanting nor is this verger equal to ours in vivid colouring or barricaded with so much taste as those lovely hills which were adorned by the antiquities of Powderham Castle and the fine disposition of Lord Lisbon's Park that here is an English consul at Lake Horn. Yes indeed an English chapel too our own king's arms over the door and in the desk and pulpit an English clergyman high in character eminent for learning Gentile in his address and charitable in every sense of the word has such truly loved and honoured by those of his own persuasion exceedingly respected by those of every other which filled this extraordinary city a place so populous that cheap side alone can surpass it. It is not a large place however one very long straight street and one very large wide square not less than Lincoln's in fields I think but bigger form the whole of Lake Horn which I can compare to nothing but a camera obscura or magic lantern exhibiting prodigious variety of different and not uninteresting figures that pass and repass to my incessant delight and give that sort of empty amusement which is a la porte de chacune footnote within everyone's reach and footnote so completely that for the present it really serves to drive everything else from my head and makes me little desirous to quit for any other diversion the windows or balcony when I look down now upon a Levantine Jew dressed in long robes a sort of odd turban and immense beard now upon a Tuscan Contadinella with little straw hat no-scan jewels I've been so often struck with here an Armenian Christian with long hair long gown long beard or black as a raven who calls upon an old gray Franciscan friar for a walk by the Greek woman obliged to cross the street on some occasion throws a large white veil over all her person lest she should undergo the disgrace of being seen at all sometimes a group goes by composed of a broad Dutch sailor a dry starched Puritan and an old French officer whose knowledge of the world and habitual politeness can try to conceal the contempt he has of his companions the Contadinella leghorn are really very pretty the Apennine mountains degenerate into hills as they run round the bay but gain in beauty what in sublimity they lose to enjoy an open sea view one must drive further and it really affords a noble prospect from that rising ground where I understand that the rich Jews hold their summer habitations they have a synagogue in the town where I went one evening and heard the Hebrew service and thought of what Dr. Bernie says of their singing it is however no credit to the Tuscans to tell that of all the people gathered together here they are the worst looking I speak of the men but it is so when compared with the German soldiery the English sailors the Venetian trade is the Neapolitan peasants for I have seen some of them here how feeble a fellow is a genuine Florentine and when one recollects the cottages of Lombardy that handsome hardy race brighten their expression and muscular in their strength it is still stranger what can have weakened these two delicate Tuscans so as they're very rich and might be very happy under the protection of a prince who lets no opportunity preferring his plebeian to his patrician subjects yet here at leghorn they have a tender frame and an unhealthy look occasioned possibly by the stagnant waters which render the environs unwholesome enough I believe and the millions of live creatures they produce are enough to distract a person not accustomed to such buzzing company we went out for air yesterday morning three or four miles beyond the town walls but I looked steadily at the sea but I half thought myself at home the ocean being peculiarly British property favored the idea and for a moment I felt as if on our southern coast we walked forward towards the shore and I stepped upon some rocks that broke the waves as they rolled in and was wishing for a good bathing house that one might enjoy the benefit of salt water so long withheld till I saw a lacquered applause crossing himself at the carriage door and wondering as I afterwards found out at my matchless intrepidity the mind however took another train of thought and we returned to the coach which when we arrived at I refused to enter not without screaming I fear as a vast hornet had taken possession in our absence and the very notion of such a companion threw me into an agony our attendant speech to the coachman however made me more than amends put note no my friend do but observe what a thing is a woman she is not afraid even of the roaring ocean and yet she goes into fits almost at the sight of a fly in footnote this truly Tuscan and highly contemptuous harangue uttered with the utmost deliberation and added to the absence of the hornet sent me laughing into the carriage with greater steam of our philosophical Ross saw for so the fellow was called because he had red hair our evening's walk was directed towards the burying ground appointed here to receive the bodies of our countrymen and consecrated according to the rights of the Anglican church for here under protection of a factory we enjoy what his family sought were under the auspices of a king's ambassador here we have a church out of our own and are not condemned as at other towns in Italy to be stuffed into a whole like dogs after having spent our money among them like princes budget is so ever is not banished from Lake Horn though convenience keeps all in good humor with each other the Italians fail not to class the subjects of great Britain among the pagan inhabitants of the town and to distinguish themselves say no other Christiani food node we that are Christians and food node they're a version to a Protestant conceal it as they may as ever implacable and the last day only will convince them that it is criminal mutant food node one changes one sky but not one soul and food node is an old observation i passed this afternoon in confirming the truth of it among the English traders settled here whose conversation manners ideas and language were so truly londonish so little changed by trans migration that i thought some enchantment had suddenly operated and carried me to drink tea in the regions of Buckblersbury well it is a great delight to see such a society subsisting in Italy after all established where distress may run for refuge and sickness retire to prepare for lasting repose whence narrowness of mind is banished by principles of universal benevolence and prejudice precluded by Christian charity where the purse of the british merchant ever open to the poor is certain to sucker and to soothe affliction it were disagreed that more arms are given by the natives of our island alone than by all the rest of leghorn and the palaces of pizza put together mani di pizza it was perhaps particularly delightful to me to obtain once more a cottage in the country after running so from one great city to another and for the first week i did nothing but rejoice in a solitude so new so salutiferous so total i therefore begged my husband not to hurry us to Rome but to take the house we lived in for a longer term as i would now play the English housewife initially i said and accordingly began calling the chickens and ducks under my window tasted the new wine as it ran purple from the cask caressed the meek oxen that drew it to our door and felt sensation so unaffectedly pastoral that nothing in romance ever exceeded my velocity these springs are much frequented by the court i find and here are very tolerable accommodations but it is not the season now and our solitude is perfect in a place which beggars all description with the mountains are mountains of marble and the bushes on them bushes of myrtle largest our hawthorns and whitewood blossoms as they are at the same time of year in dementia where the waters are solubrious the herbiger divorous every trodden step breathing immediate fragrance from the crushed sweets of time and marjoram and winter savory while the birds and the butterflies frolic around and flutter among the loaded lemon and orange and olive trees till imagination is fatigued with following the charms that surround one i'm come home this moment from a long but not tedious walk among the crags of this glorious mountain the base of which nearly reaches within half a mile perhaps to the territories of looker some country girls passed me with baskets of fruit chickens etc on their heads i addressed them as natives of the last named place saying i knew them to be sucked by their dress and air one of them instantly replied put note oh yes we are looker people sure enough and i persuaded that you soon saw in our faces that we come from a land of liberty end foot note i will add that these females wear no ornaments at all are always proud and gay and sometimes a little saucy too the tusk and damsel's loaded with golden pearls have a less assured look and appear disconcerted when in company with their freer neighbors let them tell why meantime my fairy dreamer fantastic delight seems fading away apace mr peyodzie has been ill and of a putrid complaint in his throat which above all things i should dread in this hot climate this accident assisted by other concurring circumstances has convinced me that we are not shot up in measureless content as shakespeare calls it even under st julian's hill for here was no help to be got in the first place except the useless conversation of a medical gentleman whose accent and language might have pleased a disengaged mind but had little chance to tranquilize in a frightened one what is worse here was no rest to be had for the multitudes of vermin upstairs and below when we first hired the house i remember my maid jumping up on one of the kitchen chairs while a ragged lad cleared that apartment for her abscorpions to the number of 17 but now the biters and stingers drive me quite wild because one must keep the windows open for air and a sick man can enjoy none of that being closed up in the zanzariere and obliged to respite the same breath over and over again which with a sore throat and fever is most melancholy but i keep it wet with vinegar and defy the hornets how i can what is more surprising than all however is to hear that no lemons can be procured for less than tuppence english apiece and now i am almost ready to join myself in the general cry against italian imposition and recollect the proverb which teaches us chi ha da far con tosco non bisogna essere losco footnote who has to do with tuskin white of both his eyes will need the light end footnote as i'm confident they cannot be worth even tuppence a hundred here where they hang like apples in our cider countries but the rogues know that my husband is sick and upon poor me they have no mercy i have sent our folks out to gather fruit at a venture and now this misery will be soon ended with his illness driven away by deludos of lemonade i think made in defiance of wasps flies and a kind of violent beetle wonderfully beautiful and very pertinacious in his attacks and who makes dreadful depredations of my sugar and current jelly so necessary on this occasion of illness and so attractive to all these detestable inhabitants of a place so lovely my patient however complaining that although i kept these harpies at a distance no sleep could yet be obtained i resolved when he was risen and had changed his room to examine into the true cause and with my mate's assistance unripped the mattress which was without exaggeration or hyperbole all alive with creatures wholly unknown to me nondescripts in nastiness i believe they are like maggots with horns and tails such a race as i never saw or heard of and as would have discussed to mr leavenhook himself my willingness to quit this place and its hundred footed inhabitants was quickened three nights later by a thunderstorm such as no dweller in more northern attitudes can form an idea of which assisted by some few slight shocks of an earthquake frightened us all from our bed sick and well and gave me an opportunity viewing such flashes of lightning as i had never contemplate until now and such as it appeared impossible to escape from with life the tremendous claps of thunder re-echoing among these happenings which double every sound were truly dreadful i really and sincerely thought sedulience mountain was rent by one violent stroke accompanied with a rough concussion and that the rock would fall upon our heads by morning while the agonies of my english made and french ballot became equally insupportable to themselves and me who could only repeat the same unheeded constellations and protest a resolution of releasing them from this theater of distraction the moment our departure should become practicable meantime the rain fell and such a torrent came tumbling down the sides of mount juliano as i'm persuaded no female courage could have calmly looked on i therefore waited its abatement in a darkened room packed up our coach without waiting to copy over the verses my admiration of the place had prompted and drove forward to sienna through pizza again where our friends told us of the damages done by the tempest and showed us a pretty little church just out of town with the officiating priest of the altar was saved almost by a miracle as the lightning melted one of the chalices completely and twisted the brace and guilt crucifix quite round in a very astonishing manner sienna sienna 20th of october 1786 we arrived here last night having driven through the sweetest country in the world and here are a few timber trees at last such as i have not seen for a long time the tuscan spirit of mutilation being so great that everything till now has been polluted that would have passed 20 feet in height this is done to support the vines and not suffer their rambling produce to run out of the way and escape the gripe of the gatherers i've eaten too many of these delicious grapes however and it is now my turn to be sick no wonder i know few who would resist a like temptation especially as the inn afforded but a sorry dinner but every hedge provided so noble a dessert passerà pur la malatia footnote the disorder will die away though in footnote as these soft mouths that people tell me the sooner perhaps as we are not here annoyed by insects which poison the pleasure of other places in italy here are only lizards lovely creatures who being of a beautiful light green color upon the back and legs reside in whole families of the foot of every tree and turn their scarlet bosoms to the sun as if to display the glories of coloring which his beams alone can bestow the pleasing tales told of this pretty animal's amicable disposition to its man are strictly true i hear and it is no longer ago than yesterday i was told an ordnantic toad of a young farmer who carrying a basket of figs to his mistress lay down in the field as he crossed it quite of a come with weather and fell fast asleep a serpent attracted by the scent twined round the basket and would have bit the fellow as well as robbed him had not a friendly lizard weight and given him warning of the danger swift says that in the course of life he meets many asses but they have not lucky names i have met many vipers and so few lizards it is surprising but they will not live in london all the stories one has ever heard of sweetness of language and delicacy and pronunciation falls short of cnese converse the girls who waited us at the in here would be treasures in england could one get them dither and they need to move nothing but their tongues to make their fortunes i told rosetta so and said i would steal from them a poor girl of eight years old whom they kept out of charity and called olympia to be my language mistress but it's out of come la la germo cristiana was the answer hoodnote being baptized she is we will leave her a christian end hoodnote it is impossible without their manners to express their elegance their superior delicacy graceful without diffusion and toast without laconicism you ask at the weighted town of a peasant girl and she replies passato ponte o por pacato yume e cola asciena hoodnote the bridge once passed or the river crossed sienna lies before you end hoodnote as we drove towards the city in the evening a pestilian sung improvisor verses on his sweetheart a widow had lived down a pastoria they told me i was ashamed to think that no desk or study was likely to have produced better on so try to subject can door must confess however that no thought was new though the language made them for a moment seem so this town is neat and cleanly and comfortable and airy the prospect from the public walks wants no beauty but water and here is a suppressed convent on the neighboring hill where we have longed to build a pretty cottage as the ground is now to be disposed of vastly cheap and half one's work is already done in the apartments once occupied by the friars with half a words persuasion i should fix for life here the air is so pure the language so pleasing the place so inviting but we drive on end of chapter seven part two chapter eight of glimpses of italian society in the 18th century by Hester Lynch Piodsi this LibriVox recording is in the public domain Rome this is the first town in Italy i have arrived at yet where the ladies ferry drive up and down along street by way of showing their dress equipage et cetera without even a pretense of taking fresh air at Turin the view from the place destined to this amusement would tempt one out merely for its own sake and at Milan they drive along a planted walk at least a stone's throw beyond the gates Bologna calls its serious inhabitants to a little rising ground whence the prospect is luxuriously verdant and smiling the look of bastions are beyond all in a peculiar style of miniature beauty and even the florentines though lazy enough creep out to port at a singalo but here at Rome alla Santa the street is all our course so a fine one doubtless and called the strada del popolo with infinite propriety for except in that strada there is little populousness and up god knows 12 men to a woman even there and as many ecclesiastics to a layman all this however is fair when celibacy is once endured as a duty in one profession and encouraged as a virtue in all where females are superfluous and half prohibited it were foolish to complain of the decay of population or crest as the French say we must not be too sure that all who dress like abates are such many gentlemen wear black as the court garb many because it is not costly and many for reasons of mere convenience and dislike of change I see not here the attract of beauty which caught my eye at Venice but the women at Rome have a most Juno like carriage and fill up one's idea of livia and agrippina well enough the men have rounder faces than one sees in other towns I think bright black and somewhat prominent eyes with the finest teeth in Europe a story told me this morning struck my fancy much of an herb woman who kept a stall here in the market and who when the people ran out flocking to see the Queen of Naples as she passed began exclaiming to her neighbors now poverty Rome tempo fu condo passo cui bridgiani era la regina Zenobia altra cosa rameca roba tutta diversa di questa reginuccia but no ah poor degraded Rome time was made when the great Zenobia passed through these streets and chains another guess figure from this little Queenie in good time and footnote a characteristic speech enough but in this town unlike to every other the things take my attention all away from the people while in every other the people have had much more of my mind employed upon them than the things the music is not in a state so capital as we left it in the north of Italy we regret Nardini of Florence Alessandro of Venice and Oronsia Milan and who that has heard Sino Marrakesi sing could ever hear a successor for rival he has none without feeling a total indifference to all their best endeavors the conversations of Tatana de Berni and Madame de Bocca Padulli are what my country women talk most of but the Roman ladies cannot endure perfumes and faint away even at an artificial rose I went but once among them when Memo the Venetian ambassador did me the honor to introduce me somewhere but the conversation was soon over not so my shame when I perceived all the companies shrink from me very oddly and stopped their noses with rue which a servant brought to their assistance on open salvers I was by this time more like to faint away than they from confusion and distress my kind protector informed me of the cause said I had some grains of marachile powder in my hair perhaps and let me out of the assembly to which no entreaties could prevail on me ever to return or make further attempts to associate with a delicacy so very susceptible of offense meantime the weather is exceedingly bad heavy thick and foggy as our own for what I see but so it wasn't my land too I will remember once I could not reach many mornings across the novellio that ran directly under our windows for fine bright novembers who must go to Constantinople I fancy certain it is that Rome will not supply them what however can make these Roman ladies fly from Odori so that a drop of lavender water in one's handkerchief or a carnation in one's stomach or is to throw them all into convulsions thus sure this is the only instance in which they forbear to fabricare so lantico footnote build upon the old foundations endwood note in their own phrase the names of whom juvenile delights to tell liked perfumes well enough if I remember and Horace and Marshall cry Carpe Rosas perpetually other modern inhabitants still more refined than they and their researchers after pleasure and of the present race of ladies capable of increasing beyond that of their ancestors the keenness of any corporeal sense I should think not here are however amusements enough at Rome without trying for their conversations the Barbarini Palace with which I carried a distracting toothache amused even that torture by the variety of its wonders nothing can equal an arstiness at one's entrance to this magazine of perfection but the roman nobles are not disgusted with all sorts of scents it is plain these are not what we should call perfumes indeed but certainly Odori of the same nature as those one is obliged to wade through before Trajan spillet can be climbed that the general appearance of a city which contains such treasures should be mean and disgusting while one literally often walks upon granite and tramples red porphyry under one's feet is one of the greatest wonders to me in a town of which the wonders seem innumerable that it should be nasty beyond all telling or endurance with such perennial streams of the purest water liberally dispersed and triumphantly scattered all over it is another unfathomable wonder that so many poor should be suffered to begin the streets when not a hand can be got to work in the fields and that those poor should be permitted to exhibit sites of deformity and degradations of our species to me unseen till now at the most solemn moments and in churches where silver and gold and richly arrayed priests scarcely suffice to call off a tantrum from their squalid miseries I do not try to comprehend that the palaces which taste and expense combined to decorate should look quietly on while common passengers use their noble vestibules nay stairs for every nauseous purpose the princes whose incomes equal those of our dukes of Bedford and Marlborough should suffer their servants to dress other men's dinners for hire or lend out their echibage for a day's pleasuring and hang wet rags out of their palace windows to dry as in the mean habitation of a pauper while looking in at those very windows nothing is to be seen but proofs of opulence and decents of splendor I will not undertake to explain sure I am that whoever knows Rome will not condemn this awash of it when I spoke of their beggars many not unlike Salvatore Horses Job at the Santa Croce Palace I ought not to have omitted their eloquence and various talents we talked to a lame man one day at her own door whose account of his illness would not have disgraced a medical professor so judicious for his sentiments so scientific was his discourse the accent here too is perfectly pleasing intelligible and expressive and I like their cantalena vastly the excessive lenity of all Italian states makes it dangerous to live among them a seeming paradox yet certainly most true and whatever is evil in this way at any other town is worst at Rome with those who deserve hanging and draw almost a moral certainty of never being hanged so unwilling as everybody to detect the offender and so numerous the churches to afford in protection if found out a man asked impetuously in our anti-chamber this morning for the padronee naming no names and our servants turned him out he went however only five doors further found a sick old gentleman sitting in his lodging attended by a feeble servant whom he bound stuck a knife in the master rifled the apartments and walked culliard again at noonday nor should we have ever heard of such a trifle but that it happened just by so for here are no newspapers to tell who is murdered and nobody's pity is excited unless for the malefactor when they hear his court but the palazzo faranei say is a more pleasing speculation there were several broken statues in the place and while my companions were examining the group after I had done the winches conversation who showed it made my amusement as we look together at an egyptian isis or as many call her the aphesian diana with a hundred brists very hideous and swathed about the legs like a mummy at Cairo or a baby at Rome I said to the girl they worshiped these filthy things formally before jesus christ came but he taught us better and I and we are wiser now how foolish was it not to pray to this ugly stone the people were wickeder then very likely replied my friend the wench but I do not see that it was foolish at all who says the modern romans are degenerated I swear I think them so like their ancestors that it is my delight to contemplate the resemblance a statue of a peasant carrying game at this very palace is habited precisely in the modern dress and shows how very little change has yet to been made the shoes of the low fellows too particularly attract my notice they exactly resemble the ancient ones after three days more we go to Naples news perfectly agreeable to me who never have been well here for two hours together all the great churches remain yet unvisited they are to be taken at our return in spring for piscas said that the statues in his time at Rome outnumbered the people and I trust the remark is now almost doubly true as every day and hour digs up dead worthies and the unwholesome with them must surely send as many of the living ones to their ancestors upon the whole the men and women of porphyry etc please me best as they do not handle long knives to so good an effect as the others do qui aime bien assegouger encore footnote who have still a taste to be cutthroat's end footnote says a french gentleman of them the other day there is however an error of cheerfulness in the streets at a night among the poor who fry fish and eat root sausages etc as they walk about gaily enough and though they quarrel too often never get drunk at least end of chapter eight chapter nine part one of a glimpses of italian society in the 18th century by Hester Lynch Pianzi this Librivox recordings in the public domain Naples part one on the 10th day of this month we arrived earlier at Naples but i think it was about two o'clock in the morning and sure the providence of god preserved us for never was such weather seen by me since i came into the world thunder lightning storm at sea rain and wind contending for mastery and combining to extinguish the torches bought to light us the last stage the suvious vomiting fire and pouring torrents of red hot lava down its sides was the only object visible and that we saw plainly in the afternoon 30 miles off when i asked a franciscan friar if it was the famous volcano yes replied he that's our mountain which throws up money for us by calling foreigners to see the extraordinary effects of so surprising a phenomenon the weather was quiet then and we had no notion of passing such a horrible night but an hour after dark a storm came on which was really dreadful to endure or even look upon the blue lightning whose color showed the nature of the original minerals from which you do her existence shone round us in a broad expanse from time to time and sudden darkness followed in an instant no object then but the fiery river could be seen till another flash discovered the waves tossing and breaking at a height i never saw before nothing sure was ever more sublime or awful than our entrance into naples at the dead hour we arrived when not a whisper was to be heard in the streets and not a glimpse of light was left to guide us except this small lamp hung now and then at a high window before a favorite image of the virgin my poor maid had by this time nearly lost her wits with terror and the french vallet crushed with fatigue and covered with rain and sea spray had just life enough left to exclaim no madame in the somble can you some venusie express pour voilà fan du monde footnote lord madame why we came here on purpose sure to see the end of the world and footnote the vide laundry in was full and could not accommodate our family but calling up the people of the crocelle we obtained a noble apartment the windows of which look full upon the celebrated bay which washes the wall at our door caprea lies opposite the drawing room or gallery which is magnificent and my bed chamber commands a complete view of the mountain which i value more and which called me the first night 20 times away from sleep and supper they're never so in want of both as at that moment surely such were my first impressions of this wonderful metropolis of which i had been always reading summer descriptions and had regarded somehow as an hisperian garden a earthly paradise where delicacy and softness subdued every danger and general sweetness captivated every sense nor have i any reason yet to say it will not still prove so for though wet and weary and hungry we wanted no fire and found only inconvenience from that they lighted on our arrival it was the passion at florence to struggle for a terreno but here we are all perched up 142 steps from the level of the land and see large balconies apparently well secured give me every enjoyment of a prospect which no repetition can render tedious and here we have agreed to stay till spring which i trust will come out in this country as soon as the new year calls it our eagerness to see sights has been repressed at naples only by finding everything a sight one need not stir out to look for wonders sure while this amazing mountain continues to exhibit such various scenes of sublimity and beauty at exactly the distance one would choose to observe it from a distance which almost admits examination and certainly excludes immediate fear when in the silent night however one listens to its groaning while hollow sighs as of gigantic sorrow were often heard distinctly in my apartment nothing can surpass one's sensations of amazement except the consciousness that custom will abate their keenness i have not however yet learned to lie quiet when columns of flame highest the mountain self shoot from its crater into the clear atmosphere with a loud and violent noise nor shall ever forget the senior presenter one day to my astonished eyes on a thick cloud charged heavily with electric matter passing over met the fiery explosion by mere chance and went off in such a manner as effectively baffles all verbal description and lasted too short a time for a painter to seize the moment and imitate its very strange effect monsieur de volet however a native of france long resident in the city has obtained by perpetual observation a power of representing vassuvius without that black shadow which others have thought necessary to increase the contrast but which greatly takes away all resemblance of its original upon reflection it appears to me that the men most famous at london and paris for performing tricks with fire have been always italians in my time and commonly neapolitan's no wonder i should think naples would produce prodigious connoisseurs in this way we have almost perpetual lightning of various colors according to the soil from whence the vapours are exhaled sometimes of a pale straw or lemon color often white like artificial flame produced by camphor but oftenest blue bright as the rays emitted through the colored liquor set in the window of a chemist's shop in london it was such thunder for god sakes sir sir i to some of them is there no danger of the ships in the harbour here catching fire why we should all fly up in the air directly if once these flashes should communicate to the room where any of the vessels keep their powder powder madam replies the man amazed why if saint peter and saint paul came you with gunpowder on board we should soon drive them out again don't you know and hear that every ship discharges her contents at such a place naming it and never comes into our port with a grain on board superstition still keeps her footing in this country and inspires such veneration for sainty anewarius his name his blood his statue etc that the neapolitan's were famous for blasphemous odes and a facility of taking the most sacred words into their mouths on every and i may say or no occasion i never heard to repeat his name without pulling up the hat or making some reverential sign of worship at that moment and i have seen italians from other states greatly shocked at the grossness of these their unenlightened neighbours particularly the half-indian custom of burning figures upon their skins with gunpowder these figures large and oddly displayed too according to the coarse notions of the wearer as the weather is exceedingly warm and there is little need of clothing for comfort our lads are only have a small care about appearances and go with the vast deal of their persons uncovered except by these strange ornaments the man who rose you about this lovely bay has perhaps the angel rafael or the blessed virgin mary delineated on one brawny sunburnt leg the saint of the town upon the other his arms represent the glory or the seven spirits of god or some strange things while the brass middle hangs from his neck expressive of his favorite martyr who they confidently affirm is so madly venerated by these poor and instructed mortals that when the mountain burns or any great disaster threatens them they beg of our savior to speak to saint januaryus in their behalf and to treat him not to refuse than his assistance now the wall this was told me by friends of the romish persuasion and told me to with the just horror of the superstitious folly i think my remarks and inferences were not agreeable to them when expressing my notion that it was only a relic of the adoration originally paid to janus in italy as to saint januaryus there certainly was a matter of that name at naples and to him was transferred much of the veneration originally bestowed on the deity from whom he was probably named one need not however wandered around the world with banks and slander or stares so at the accounts given us in cook's voyages of tattooed indians when naples will show on the effects of a like operation very very little better executed on the broad shoulders of numberless ladzaroni and of this there is no need to examine books for information he who runs over qianye may read in large characters the gross superstition of the napolitani who have no inclination to lose their old classical character for laziness et inotian na tam paten open says offered i wonder however there are people would work much surrounded by similar circumstances i fancy not englishmen poor fellows must either work or starve these folks want for nothing a house would be an inconvenience to them they like to sleep out of doors and it is plain they have small care for clothing as many who possess decent abilaments enough i speak of the ladzaroni throw almost all off till some holiday or time of gala and sit by the seaside playing at morrow with their fingers a florentine nobleman told me once that he asked one of these fellows to carry his portmanteau for him and offered him a canine no small some certainly to a neapolitan and rather more in proportion than an english shilling he had not twenty yards to go with it are you hungry master christ the fellow no replied count manucci but what of that right then no more am i was the answer and it is too hot weather to carry burdens so turned about upon the other side and lay still this class of people amounting to a number that terrifies one but to think on some say 60 000 souls and experience confirms no less give the city an air of gaiety and cheerfulness that one cannot help honestly rejoicing in this throughout the del toledo is one continual crowd nothing can exceed the confusion to a walker here are little gigs drawn by one horse which without any bit in its mouth but a string tied around its nose tears along with inconceivable rapidity a small narrow guilt chair set between the two wheels and no spring to it nor anything else which can add to the weight and this flying car is a kind of fiac you pay so much for a drive-in i forget the sum horses are particularly handsome in this town not so large as apmalan but very beautiful and spirited the cream colored creatures such as draw our king's state coach are a common breed here and shine like satin here are some two of a shining silver white wonderfully elegant and ladies upon the corso exhibit a variety scarcely credible in the color of their cattle which draw them but the coaches harness trappings at cetera vastly inferior to the milanese whose liveries are often splendid while the four or five ill-dressed strange-looking fellows that disgrace the neapolitanic ipage seem to be valued only for their number i'd have often very much the era of sejohn faultstaff's recruits yesterday however showed me what i knew not had existed a skew ball or pie balled ass eminently well proportioned coated like a race of an english stud 16 hands and a half high his color bay and white in large patches and his temper as the proprietor told me singularly docile and gentle i have longed perhaps to purchase few things in my life more earnestly than this beautiful and useful animal which i might have had for two pounds 15 shillings english but dead not less like dogberry i should have been written down for an ass by my married country folks who i remember could not let the queen of england herself possess in peace a creature of the same kind but handsome as still and from a still hotter climate called the zebra apropos to quadrupedes when pausher in the merchant of venice enumerates her lovers she names the neapolitan prince first who she says does nothing for his part but talk of his horse and makes it his greatest boast that he can show him himself this is almost literally true of a nobleman here and they really do not throw their pains away for it is surprising to see what command they have their cattle in though bits by scarcely used among them the coat armor of naples consists of an unbridled horse and by what i can make out of their character they much resemble him quales ubiobructus vulgopricepia wingless tandem liebe echoes etc footnote freed from his keepers thus with broken reins the wanton corsa prances of the planes dryden end footnote resemble him generous and gay headstrong and violent in their disposition easy to turn but difficult to stop no authority is respected by them when some strong passion animates them to fury yet lazily quiet and unwilling to stir the accident rouses them to terror or rage urges them forward to incredible exertions of suddenly bestowed strength in the eruption of 1779 their fears and superstitions rose to such a height that they seized the french ambassador upon the bridge told him almost out of his carriage as he fled from portigy and was met by them upon the ponte de la madalena where they threatened him with instant death if he did not get out of his carriage and prostrating himself before the statue of a saint januaryus which stands there entreat his protection for the city all this however missy lucombe declare mondon boys did not comprehend a word of but taking all the money out of his pocket threw it down happily for him at the feet of the figure and pacified them at one scanning time by those means to escape their vengeance it was i think upon some other occasion that sodium hamilton's book relates their unworthy treatment of the venerable archbishop who refused them the relics with which they had no doubt of saving the menace town but every time visivius burns with danger to the city they scruple not to insult their sovereign as he flies from it throwing large stones after his chariot guards etc making the insurrection it is sure to occasion more perilous if possible than the volcano itself and last night when la montaña for cativa footnote when the mountain was in ill humor in footnote as their expression was i likely to plus observed that it might possibly be because so many heretics and unbelievers have been up at the day before end of chapter nine part one