Garden of the Villa Reale.

This garden—which, during the winter months, is the lounge of the English idler at Naples, and then looks as flowerless and dingy as Kensington in an east wind—assumes a very different appearance in spring. On the 7th of May, we, who had passed the winter at Rome, were at once struck with the brilliancy of unusual blossoms, and the number of distinguished vegetable foreigners who lifted their heads out of parterres, of the very existence of which in winter one is scarcely conscious. The formal line of clipt Ilex that looks towards the sea, had changed its dusky hue for a warmer tint; statues that had been doing sentinel all the winter without relief, now seem to bend delighted over fragrant flower-beds, and enjoy the spring. Two high shrubs in flower (Metresiglias) hoist from opposite beds, the one its white, the other its red banner. Two of the Muses, the Speciosa and Paravisogna, or bread-tree plant, were raising their light spiry trunks out of a corbeille taller than a life-guardsman. They want no hothouse in Naples:—would you shade your face from the sun, an elsewhere exotic, the Brazilian Camarotta at your feet, furnishes you with a screen. The white flocks of the Acacia verticillata are peeping out from the ranks of those small triangular leaves, which are so singularly attached, without stalks, by one of these angles to the stem. Amidst these pleasant perfumes camphor would be unwelcome, but there is the laurel that yields it. Fennel has here become a tree, in which, like the mustard of the Gospels, the fowls of the air may lodge; we are dwarfs beside it! Three kinds of the soft, slimy Mallow of the Marsh are here so much WOODY and so tall, that we must pick their flowers on tiptoe. The flattened disk of the sky-blue Nana arborea contrasts with the Betula sanguinea, glowing deeply in the flower-bed of many lighter-coloured petals; the sweet-scented African laurel grows against the long-leafed Babylonian willow, which susurrates droopingly over your head, as if it were "by the waters of Babylon." The fountains, with their hydrophilous tribes, add to the charm; and many a beautiful Launaria aquatica had already buoyed himself up on his large cordate leaves on the surface of the tazza, and was filling his vegetable skin with water. All these beauties and peculiarities, a mere scantling of the whole of the Villa Reale, escape the lounger, and the nurserymaids, and children, and those of either sex who have appointments to keep, or to look out for; and the soldiers, and the police, and the Neapolitan nobility and gentry, and the pickpockets, and others:—to the nurseryman and botanist, things not to be forgotten; and at present the weather is not too hot to interfere with their enjoyment.

Servi di Pena.

At Castel Nuovo, a penal settlement of Naples, we held conversation with a man sentenced to the galleys, and wearing, accordingly, a yellow jacket; but yellow is not here, as at Leghorn, the deepest dye. Here, it is red cloth and manacles that go together. We asked him his crime. "Un piccolo omicidio." "A small homicide, provoked by a dispute for a single ducat! I quarrelled with a man now in paradise. I killed him at one stab, but the devil possessed me to give him another colpo di coltello after he had fallen; and as the judges asked me why I did this, and I could not perfectly satisfy them, they concluded I was a sanguinary fellow, and gave me eighteen years galleys—but, as you see, I have no chains; nor ever had—mai! mai!" and he extended his hands in somewhat of the attitude of Raphael's Paul before Festus, to suit the action to the word. "No! he was of a very different order of criminals to a boatful of birboni in red jackets, all bad cases of homicide and robbery!"

"What do you call bad cases?"

"Why, I call it a bad case to kill a man for nothing."

"Well, but theft to any amount is not so bad as taking away life."

"Oh! as to that, the police are quite right! A decent and a devout man does not commit homicides every day: but he that steals at all, steals always!" So that our culprit reasoned, like Paley, on the tendency of crimes. It was his Chapter of the Silver Spoon, with a new exposition from the mouth of a Galeote! And they pluck men at Cambridge for not getting up their Paley! Our philosophical criminal seemed satisfied with his lot.

"We are not so badly off after all: we walk out with an obliging escort, who let us do pretty much as we like; and all our work is confined to sweeping the courts in front of the king's palace. We are free of the castle, and allowed to conduct strangers over it, as in your case. Oh! for the fellows at St Stefano, it is quite another matter; as a part of their punishment, they are compelled to be idle!"

Our rascal was allowed a new coat once every eighteen months, with two pair of drawers and as many shirts, and a penny a-day for pocket-money! These piccoli omicidii at home do not get off so cheap, but stabbing is endemic at Naples. When a queen of Naples brings the Neapolitans a new prince—great joy of course!—all the penal settlements except St Stefano receive three years' mitigation of their sentence; but the crimes that consign to that island are senza grazia—the rays of royal bounty do not reach those dark and solitary cells. The St Stefano convicts form a body of three hundred doomed men, incorrigible housebreakers or systematic assassins. The food of all classes of criminals is the same, whatever the offence, and consists of twenty-four ounces of bread, with half-a-pint measure of beans and some oil—a basin of cabbage soup, without meat, for dinner, and meat once in fourteen days: there are eight thousand out-of-doors convicts, many of whom being under sentence for a less space than two years, work in their own clothes—which is, of course, a considerable saving to government. Although all the galley-slave establishments are full, no place swarms like Naples with so many meritorious candidates for the red and yellow liveries of the state.

St Carlo, &c.

St Carlo is, as the guide-books tell us, "a very fine theatre." What we particularly like, is the absence of all side-lights round its boxes. Two hundred burners, arranged in three rows round a small chandelier, give just light enough to set off the fine chastened white and gold, and the one quiet fresco which embellishes the ceiling. A pit of vast size, divided into comfortable sittings, six tiers of boxes, and an orchestra of great space, suited to the extraordinary size of the house, secure a far less adulterated playhouse atmosphere than we are used to; and so exempt from the ordinary inconveniences, that we were able to sit out the Semiramide, even with Ronzi di Begnis, now old and out of keeping, for the heroine. Surely she never should have been Semiramis, even in her palmy day! Actors and actresses will not know that words written for them, scenery and dresses adapted for them, and attitudes invented for them, can never make them the personages mentioned in the playbill. On returning home, we stood at our balcony gazing on the lovely face of a true Naples night—a night beyond description!—the whole vault of heaven lighted by one light: a full moon, like a subdued sunshine over earth and water. A world of light, that shone on a world of darkness, tinging the air, gilding the mountain-tops, and making the sea run like melted phosphorus. And what a silence abroad! not the perilous cessation of sound which so often only anticipates the storm; nor the sultry stillness of an exhausting noon; but a mighty and godlike display, as it were, of the first full moon after creation shining on an entranced world!

Pozzuoli.

An amphitheatre is one of those few ruins that leave no problem to solve. Here we have a grey antiquity without any mutilation of form, and merely spoliated of its benches. The patron saint of Naples was, they say, imprisoned here. A little chapel ascertains the spot, but he does no miracles on this arena. When we come to temples, we are always at a great loss for proprietors. The very large one here is called of Jupiter Serapis. The remaining columns of this temple, whatever it was, exhibit a very remarkable appearance. Three pillars, forty-two feet in height, up to about twelve feet above their pedestals, have the surface of the marble as smooth as any in the Forum; then comes a portion of nine or ten feet, of which the marble has been bored, drilled in all directions, by that persevering bivalve the Lithodomus; the perforations are so considerable, and go so deep, as to prove "the long-continued abode" of these animals within the stone, and by consequence, as Mr Lyell observes, "a long-continued immersion of the columns in the sea at some period recent, comparatively, with that of its erection." Indeed, there is abundant evidence adduced in the fourth volume of his Geology to show, that all this ground was at a no very distant period under the sea, like Monte Nuovo in its neighbourhood, and was thrust out of the water to its present level. When the ground on which this temple stood, collapsed, the bottom part of its columns was protected by "the rubbish of decayed buildings and strata of turf;" the middle or perforated part was left exposed to the action of the sea bivalves above alluded to; and the upper part, which was never under the water, remained smooth and free from perforation. But these columns not only prove by internal evidence the general fact of the ground on which they stand having been submerged—they also furnish an exact measure of the degree to which it sunk; viz. twenty feet—i.e. the height where these perforations terminate at present. You can only cross the floor of this building on stepping-stones; and as you do so, you see shoals of small sea-fish darting about in the shallow water which occupies its area, into which the sea has been admitted on purpose, to prevent the accumulation of the stagnant water that had infected this particular spot with intense malaria.

BaiÆ.

We took a hot bath under the soi-disant villa of Lucullus. Steam, sulphur, and hot water, may be had cheap any where along this coast. An awful place it was to enter naked, and be kept in the dark, stifling, as we were, for some seconds which seemed minutes, till our guide returned with a milord's dressing-gown, which he assured us had been hung up as a votive offering for cured rheumatism. Being candidates ourselves for a similar benefit, we desired to be rubbed down like milord, till aluminous perspiration stood thick upon us, the alum being deposited from the walls and atmosphere of the place. We were soon obliged to beg for quarter. The milord, whose dressing-gown we were possessed of, was so bad as to be obliged to be rubbed sitting; but so powerful is the remedy, that after fifteen such sittings, he walked round the lake (two miles), and went home in his carriage "guerito!" "Such baths!" that had cured he knew not how many persons:—

"Men who'd spent all upon physician's fees,
Who'd never slept, nor had a moment's ease,
Were now as roaches sound, and all as brisk as bees!"—Crabbe.

What with its hot water, sulphur, vapour, and alum, we too should have fancied Naples might have been comparatively exempt from rheumatisms and skin diseases, in both of which it abounds.

Lucrine and Avernus Lakes.

From the sea and its inlet called the Lucrine Lake, we pass along a pleasant green lane, about a mile long, which issues on Avernus, whose waters we find both limpid and clear; but are instructed that two months later will change them to a dark-red colour, and that the neighbourhood will then become very malarious and unsafe. A piece of semicircular wall on one side of the lake, indicates the whereabouts of a temple of Proserpine, or Apollo, or any god or goddess you please. We were so absurd as to pay a scudo to be taken through a vile tunnel, accompanied by two torch-bearers, and two other dirty wretches, who often carry us pick-a-back through one black hole into another, splashing us through dark pools, putting us down here and there as they pleased, picking us up again, grinning like demons, and by dint of shaking their torches above, and disturbing the water below, raising foul smells enough to intoxicate fifty Sybils. At length, half suffocated by those classical delights, we cry Enough! enough! and beg to be put into our saddles again. The Stufa di Nerone, a little further on the high-road, is another volcanic calidarium in full activity, where you may boil eggs or scald yourself in a dark cavern. There you may deposit your mattrass and yourself in any one of a store of berths wrought into that most unpicturesque tufa, of which the exterior face constitutes the whole of the sea view of BaiÆ. If ever there were decorations in these caverns, they are gone; but there probably never were. Diana, Mercury, Venus, and Apollo all claim brick tenements, called temples, in this little bay, all close together on the seaside, and none having any claim at present either on the artist or the poet.

We quit the seaside at this spot, and reach the summit of the hill above, where there is more torch-work and more disappointment for those that go a Sybil-seeking with the sixth book of Virgil for a guide. Those who like it may also grope their way through Nero's prisons, and descend into the Piscina Mirabilis, that vast pilastered cellar like an underground dissenting chapel. They say the Roman fleet was supplied with water from this huge tank; but if this had been the intention of its construction, why obstruct it with more pillars or supports of square masonry than the roof absolutely required, without which incumbrances a reservoir of half its size would have held more water,—and for water it was evidently meant? Ascending the hill we see a man or two working away at a newly-discovered tomb, from which he told us he had removed several skulls in perfect preservation, even to the teeth of both jaws, together with some small sepulchral lamps and old copper coins. We dine on the summit of a low hill, immediately opposite a cape better known to fame than the Cape of Good Hope—the promontory of Misenum, with Procida and Ischia on our right, and Nisida with its white lazaretto, and Puteoli (Pozzuoli,) where St Paul landed, on our left. We took to plant collecting after dinner, and were glad to learn that we should find at Puzzuoli a celebrated botanist of the locality, who could declare to us the unknown of all we should collect. On our return, therefore, the man of science was fetched to look at our wild nose-gay and at us. We show him a specimen; he calls it by some outlandish name; we tell him what we want is its Latin one. It is Latin, he says, which he is actually speaking! We thought not. A crowd of fishermen and rustics are fast collecting around us; we try him with another one of the grasses. "Questo È asparago," cries a bumpkin, unasked, from behind. "Che asparagi?" says il mio Maestro, "È Pimpinella." We show him a Cytisus, and he calls it a Campanula. Seeing that so great a difference exists between our friend and LinnÆus, we ask no further questions.

Tench and eels abound in Avernus, and coot and teal also blunder here occasionally, as if to contradict Virgil and confute etymology—for Avernus is a????? (birdless,) and Latinised as every one knows. However, few birds are to be found here. The Lucrine is now a mere salt-water pond of small extent, affording the little sea fish, in rough weather, a sort of playground. No Lucrine oysters now, though these dainties are of excellent quality at Naples, and might have satisfied Montanus himself. As to the Mare Mortuum, it is another rank, unwholesome, unpicturesque pond. We walked all round it, and have a right to say so; and, if we had done so twice after sunset, might perchance have had to say more.

Procida.

"Ego vel Prochytam prÆpono SuburrÆ," says Juvenal, and so would we if compelled to live in that nasty St Giles's beyond the Coliseum; but as the "vel" seems strangely misapplied—for the situation of Procida must always have been delightful—the poet's preference must be understood as of a dull unlively place, with few inhabitants or resources, to a dense and dangerous population. BaiÆ itself is not three miles from Procida; but the Roman BaiÆ was thronged with good society, and this little island was doubtless then as unpeopled as it is now populous. Procida is about three-fourths of an hour's fair rowing from MiniseolÆ, on the Baian side; but you may run your boat over on a fine day in half an hour. As you approach the houses, you discern the not unpicturesque frontage of a little fishing town; but all is as revolting within as fair without. Something of the Greek or Albanese costume is still preserved here, and they offer to dress up one of their families in full parure for our further satisfaction, if we will pay them. The view from the leads of the fort (under which the galley-slaves are confined) is fine indeed! Ischia and Vesuvius, and the whole stretch of the bay, and Sorrento, and the promontory of Minerva. Procida builds good enough trading vessels. We saw two in the harbour of BaiÆ, as we rowed back on a delicious evening towards sunset; they were going on a first voyage, bound for our London docks;—and À propos of the London docks, all this country is, as it always was, rich in productive vineyards and bad wine. Every hill once gave its own epithet to wines celebrated in longs and shorts of immortal celebrity, whereas the land round Rome could never have been viniferous. You may still drink Falernian, if so minded, on its native seat of St Agatha. The wine of Gaurus has not deserted Monte Babaro, and Lachryma, though not classical, has its own celebrity; and the islands of Ischia and Procida also produce a strong, heating, white wine. But there is not any wine, from the Alps to Messina, to be compared to those of the Garonne, and the Rhine, or the Moselle. The Barbarians subdued by the Roman legions have long had it all their own way, not only in this, but in every other good thing except sunshine; but the vine, growing as it grows, suspended as it is suspended, and wreathed round the hills of Italy, is still the plant which secures the loudest admiration of the foreigner. "The vine of Italy for ever!"—so we join the chorus of all travellers, and say-"till it lies bruised, bleeding, fermenting in the vat! then commend us to the Bacchus of lands far nearer home." And here, feeling ourselves called upon for a song, we will sing one.

A VINTAGE SONG.

Abridged from BÉranger.

The Palace of Caserta.

About thirteen miles from Naples is one of the finest kingly residences in Europe—so say all the guide-books, and they are right. Vanvitelli is the very Michael Angelo of palace-rearing! Its shape is a parallelogram approaching to a square. Counting mezzanines, it has six stories besides the attics; and is pierced with no less than 1700 windows. Its stair, the very perfection of that sort of construction, is vast in all its dimensions, and so very easy, that you look down from its summit admiring, with untried lungs, the enormous height you have reached. It starts double from the ground, and twenty persons might ascent either branch abreast, and meet one another at the spot where it begins to return upon itself; so that the noble octagonal landing above finds itself just over the starting-place below. From this post four large windows command four spacious courts, and the simple construction of this gigantic edifice stands unveiled. You now begin your journey through vast, lofty, magnificently marbled, and very ill-furnished apartments, of which, before you have completed the half circuit of a single floor, you are heartily tired, for, beyond the architecture, there is nothing to see. The commonest broker's shop would furnish better pictures. Boar-hunts of course, to represent how Neapolitan kings kill boars at Portici, and shoot wild-ducks on the Lago di Fusina. There is also an ample historical fresco on the ceiling of the antechamber to the throne-room, on which Murat had caused to be represented some notable charge where he proved victorious; but after he was shot, Ferdinand, with great taste, judgment, and good feeling, erased, interpolated, and altered the picture into a harmless battle of Trojans against Greeks, or some such thing! The palace has two theatres and a chapel; and you must change your conductor four times if you would be led through the whole. For this enormous edifice boasts of only twelve servants, at eleven dollars a-month from the privy purse. Caserta, which, even in its present imperfect state, has cost 7,000,000 scudi, is raised amidst a swarm of paupers, who are permitted to besiege the stranger, and impede his progress, with an importunity such as could be shown by none but men on the eve of famishing. We never saw such a population of beggars as those which infest the walls of this most sumptuous palace and its park—but the park is a park indeed! It may have something of the formality of Versailles or Chantilly; but its leading features are essentially English; its thickets and copses abound in hares and pheasants. The ilex attains twice the height we remember to have seen it reach elsewhere. Its islands and fishponds, its kitchen and flower-gardens, put one in mind of a first-rate English country-seat. The ornamental water is fetched, by an aqueduct worthy of old Rome, from mountains seven miles off, first emptying its whole charge over a high ledge of rock, making a waterfall (which you see from the drawing-room window) over a series of steps and terraces, which get wider as they get lower, till they terminate in a superb basin within a quarter of a mile of the palace, where the water makes its last bound, and forms a broad lake fit for Diana and her nymphs, amidst woods fit for Actaeon and his dogs. Of course we asked to be conducted to these stone terraces, over which the dash of the mountain stream into the lake is effected: but as we passed the latter, we were surprised by our guide approaching the water, and, beginning to whistle, he begs us to observe the water begins to be troubled at a distance, and the more he whistles the more the commotion increases. Ten, twenty, and in half a second hundreds of immense fish come trooping up, and, undeterred by our presence, approach as near as they dare to the surface of the water where he stands; they swim backwards and forwards, and lash the water with their tails. What is the matter? Why! they come to be fed! and such is the ferocious impatience of this aquatic menagerie, that we long to assist in quelling it; and so we dip our hand into the man's basket of frogs, and drop a few right over the swarm—and now the water is bubbling and lathering with the workings and plungings of these mad fish; and so large are they, so strong, so numerous, that, all angler as we are, we really felt unpleasantly, nor would we, after what we saw, have trusted hand or foot in the domain of such shark-like rapacity. They consume five basketsful of frogs and minnows a-day. Except that of the Caserta beggars, we never saw any thing like the hunger of the Caserta fish.

The Silk Manufactory.

The silk manufactory at Caserta is worth a visit. The labour is chiefly accomplished by the hand, as is all labour in Naples. Silk is wound off into skeins by a mill turned by the artificial falls of the aqueduct. At one extremity you see the unpromising cocoons; at the other the most rare and beautiful velvets and gros de Naples. The locality of this manufactory is delightful, and the old queen preferred its comforts and cheerfulness to the solitary grandeur of the palace in the plain. In place of occupying and paying the poor round his palace to make silk and satins for his court and the Pope, the present king spends his money in gunpowder and soldiering. They accuse him of having less compassion for the misfortunes of the poor than even his father Francis, or his grandfather Ferdinand of blessed memory. The view from this spot of the huge palace itself, with Vesuvius smoking to our right, and Capri shining before it, is one of those not to be forgotten.

The Snake Tamer.

Behold the old snake-finder with his sack! "Ola! vecchio, che cosa avete pigliato quest' oggi?" was a question put from our one-horse cart, till then going at a great rate through the village of Somma, to a little old man, with a humpback, a sack, and a large shallow box. He was dressed in a queer costume, had a wolf's brush in his hat, and remarkably tight-fitting leather leggings. "Tre! fra altri una vipera meschia." "Oh! oh! aspetta," added we—we must see the viper. Upon which there was a broad grin all round the circle; but the driver stopped, and down we got. The old man, seeing our intention to be serious, got a chair for us from a cottage, and putting his box on his knee, looked knowing, and thus began.

"Gentlemen, you have all seen a viper, basta feroce—a reptile that every one runs from except me, and those who know, as I do, how to humour him. I have a viper in this box whom I have so perfectly tamed, that he lives with two others, and never quarrels with them. I will open the box, and, as you will see, they will all lie as if they were dead, until I notice one, when he will put up his head that I may take him out."

He opened the box, where lay coiled, and perfectly still, a spotted viper, an immense black snake, and one very light and silvery like an eel.

"Here's my family," said the old man; and catching the viper round the middle, brought him out, while the others wriggled a little, as if in expectation of being caressed in their turn. "This animal, signor, is not so bad in his temper as you have been told. It is only when he is making love that he is poisonous—to all but his females; but in this, gentlemen, he is scarcely worse than many of yourselves, whom it is not safe then to approach."

"Bravo, bravo, vecchaccio! ancora! Go it again!" sounds every where from the circle collected round the old snake-charmer.

"If you tread upon his tail, gentlemen, what can you expect but a bite? Would not you bite if you had your tails trodden on?"

The viper now raised his head, and darted it out, with about half of his body behind it, at the crowd. The two nearest peasants fell back. The viper, missing his spring, turns round to bite the hand that is holding him, but no sooner touches it, than off it glides from the horny finger, wriggling both head and tail at a great rate.

"He has been warmed by my hand, sirs, and wants to escape! Ingrato! Come, I have something to tell you that these gentlemen must not hear!"

And he opened his month, and the viper thrust his head between his lips; upon which the old man closes them and makes believe to mumble the horrid head, the body appearing violently convulsed, as if it really suffered violence.

"He has lost his teeth," said one, "and can't bite."

"Sicuro," said another, and began to yawn.

"No," said the old man, "his teeth are all in his head. You doubt it, do you? See here, then."

And catching him by the head, and drawing down his lower jaw, having forced the mouth to its full stretch, he drew the red surface of his upper-jaw smartly over the back of his own hand two or three times, so as to bring blood from six or seven orifices. Then, drying the blood off his hand, he returns his viper to the box, and asks a baiocco for the exhibition.

"What's the price of your viper?" ask we.

"Two carlines, excellenza."

"Here, tie him up for me in my handkerchief." Which was accordingly done, and we popped him into spirits of wine, as a souvenir of Monte Somma, and of the old man whom we saw handling him.

"Does he gain a livelihood by his trade?" we enquired.

"He teaches people how to catch serpents; and by familiarizing them with the danger, they work in greater comfort, and are not afraid of going over any part of Monte Somma, which, as it abounds in vipers and snakes, still deters the unpractised a little. Besides, they like to see the snake caught and exhibited, and every body gives him something."