I hold that in many ways Naples is the most characteristic, the most Italian, of all Italy’s cities. It is the most exaggeratedly Italian of them all. _L’Italie au grand complet._ It is there you see the bluest of blue skies, the yellowest of yellow houses, where you hear Italian talk at its most garrulous, Italian smells at their most pungent, and Italian song at its most nasal sentimental pitch, those squalling, pathetic, imploring, slightly flat love songs, the best of all love songs, because they express real love without any nonsense, plain love, unendurable, excruciating love. “Excruciating” is the word. It is the love Catullus sings of in one of the shortest of poems:-- “Odi et amo, quave id faciam fortasse requiris Nescio sed fieri sentio et excrucior.” I hate and I love; and if you want to know how that can be, I can’t tell you, but I feel it, and I am excruciated--that is to say, I am in agony. I imagine Catullus living at Naples and sailing on the bay in his yacht (_phaselus ille_) and going out to dinner and drinking too much wine, and being witty and sometimes insolent to important people such as Julius Cæsar, and squalling love songs, bitter-sweet, desperate, passionate songs, in the gardens of his Lesbia, whose real name was Clodia. She was the wife of a politician called, I think, Metellus Celer, and the professors say she was very, very bad. I don’t trust the professors. I don’t believe they know what the Romans, and especially the she-Romans, were like. I distrust their knowledge. But I trust Catullus’s verse, and from that it is evident that he was very much in love, indeed, and very unhappy. Wretched Catullus, as he calls himself. And she, Lesbia, didn’t care a rap. And in his misery he calls her hard names, which were probably well deserved. The note you hear in his poetry is the same you get in certain Neapolitan songs you hear in the street. You can get them on the gramophone, sung by Anselmi. “At Florence,” according to an Italian saying, “you think; at Rome, you pray; at Venice, you love; at Naples, you look.” There is plenty to look at, especially in the evening, when Vesuvius turns rosy and transparent and the sea becomes phosphorescent; and plenty even in the daytime, when you watch “The blue Mediterranean where he lay Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ’s bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave’s intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers.”