Around the World with Josiah Allen's WifeHolley, Marietta
General
Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife
Holley, Marietta
Women travelers -- Fiction
Sometimes you will see such a big load walkin' off and can't for your
life tell what propels it till bime by you will hear a loud bray from
underneath. It sounds quite scareful. The little ridin' wagons of the
poor people are packed too as I never see a hoss car in the U. S.
Sometimes you will see more'n two dozen folks, priests, soldiers, men,
women and children, and sometimes baskets full of vegetables and
babies swingin' underneath and all drawed by a donkey; it hain't right
and I wanted to talk to 'em about it, but didn't know as they would
hear to me. But our old mair is used fur different.
The Cathedral is quite a noble lookin' buildin' and contains tombs of
many noted people, Pope Innocent, King Andrew, Charles I. of Anjou,
and many, many others. The Piazza del Municipio has a beautiful
fountain, and there is one fashionable promenade over two hundred feet
wide containing all sorts of trees and shrubs where you can see the
Neopolitans dressed in fine array. There is a terrace extending into
the sea, temples, winding paths, grottos, etc.
The Piazza del Plebiscito has an equestrian statute that wuz taken in
the first place for Napoleon, then changed to General Murat and
finally to Charles III. It made me think considerable of the daily
papers who use one picture for all social and criminal purposes, and
for Queen Victoria and Lydia Pinkham.
Some of the principal streets are straight and handsome, with blocks
of lava right out of the bosom of the earth for pavement. It give me
queer feelin's to tread on't thinkin' that it come from a place way
down in the earth that we didn't know anything about and thinkin' what
strange things it could tell if stuns could talk. Some of the best
streets had sidewalks. It is well lighted by gas.
As you walk along the streets you see rich and poor, beggar and
priest, soldier and peasant, every picturesque costoom you can think
on and all sorts of faces. But there seems to be a kind of a
happy-go-lucky air in 'em all, even to the beggars and the little
lazy, ragged children layin' in the sunshine. The people live much out
of doors here, you can see 'em washin' and dressin' the children, and
doin' housework, and everything right from the street, and though I
don't spoze the poor suffer so much here on account of the warm
climate, yet dirt and rags and filth and vermin didn't look any better
to me here than they did in Jonesville.
In Naples as a rule the lower parts of the houses are shops,
restaurants, etc., and the upper stories are used for dwellings. The
beautiful terraces of the city and the flat roofs of the houses are
covered with shrubs and flowers, and filled with gayly dressed
promenaders, givin' it a gay appearance. And you don't see in the
faces of the crowd any expression of fear for the danger signal that
smokes up in the sky, no more than our faces to home show signs of our
realizin' the big danger signals on our own horizon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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