Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 -- Travel -- Italy; Italy -- Description and travel; Novelists, English -- 19th century -- Biography
The coming back to the city, by the
beach again, at sunset: with the glowing sea on one side, and the
darkening mountain, with its smoke and flame, upon the other: is a
sublime conclusion to the glory of the day.
That church by the Porta Capuana—near the old fisher-market in the
dirtiest quarter of dirty Naples, where the revolt of Masaniello began—is
memorable for having been the scene of one of his earliest proclamations
to the people, and is particularly remarkable for nothing else, unless it
be its waxen and bejewelled Saint in a glass case, with two odd hands; or
the enormous number of beggars who are constantly rapping their chins
there, like a battery of castanets. The cathedral with the beautiful
door, and the columns of African and Egyptian granite that once
ornamented the temple of Apollo, contains the famous sacred blood of San
Gennaro or Januarius: which is preserved in two phials in a silver
tabernacle, and miraculously liquefies three times a-year, to the great
admiration of the people. At the same moment, the stone (distant some
miles) where the Saint suffered martyrdom, becomes faintly red. It is
said that the officiating priests turn faintly red also, sometimes, when
these miracles occur.
The old, old men who live in hovels at the entrance of these ancient
catacombs, and who, in their age and infirmity, seem waiting here, to be
buried themselves, are members of a curious body, called the Royal
Hospital, who are the official attendants at funerals. Two of these old
spectres totter away, with lighted tapers, to show the caverns of
death—as unconcerned as if they were immortal. They were used as
burying-places for three hundred years; and, in one part, is a large pit
full of skulls and bones, said to be the sad remains of a great mortality
occasioned by a plague. In the rest there is nothing but dust. They
consist, chiefly, of great wide corridors and labyrinths, hewn out of the
rock. At the end of some of these long passages, are unexpected glimpses
of the daylight, shining down from above. It looks as ghastly and as
strange; among the torches, and the dust, and the dark vaults: as if it,
too, were dead and buried.
The present burial-place lies out yonder, on a hill between the city and
Vesuvius. The old Campo Santo with its three hundred and sixty-five
pits, is only used for those who die in hospitals, and prisons, and are
unclaimed by their friends. The graceful new cemetery, at no great
distance from it, though yet unfinished, has already many graves among
its shrubs and flowers, and airy colonnades. It might be reasonably
objected elsewhere, that some of the tombs are meretricious and too
fanciful; but the general brightness seems to justify it here; and Mount
Vesuvius, separated from them by a lovely slope of ground, exalts and
saddens the scene.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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