As this is strictly a chapter of travel and weather, I may not stop to say how impressive and beautiful Florence seemed to us; how bewildering in art treasures, which one sees at a glance in the streets; or scarcely to hint how lovely were the Boboli Gardens behind the Pitti Palace, the roses, geraniums etc, in bloom, the birds singing, and all in a soft, dreamy air.The next day was not so genial; and we sped on, following our original intention of seeking the summer in winter.In order to avoid trouble with baggage and passports in Rome, we determined to book through for Naples, making the trip in about twenty hours.We started at nine o'clock in the evening, and I do not recall a more thoroughly uncomfortable journey.It grew colder as the night wore on, and we went farther south.Late in the morning we were landed at the station outside of Rome.There was a general appearance of ruin and desolation.The wind blew fiercely from the hills, and the snowflakes from the flying clouds added to the general chilliness.There was no chance to get even a cup of coffee, and we waited an hour in the cold car.If Ihad not been so half frozen, the consciousness that I was actually on the outskirts of the Eternal City, that I saw the Campagna and the aqueducts, that yonder were the Alban Hills, and that every foot of soil on which I looked was saturated with history, would have excited me.The sun came out here and there as we went south, and we caught some exquisite lights on the near and snowy hills; and there was something almost homelike in the miles and miles of olive orchards, that recalled the apple-trees, but for their shining silvered leaves.
And yet nothing could be more desolate than the brown marshy ground, the brown hillocks, with now and then a shabby stone hut or a bit of ruin, and the flocks of sheep shivering near their corrals, and their shepherd, clad in sheepskin, as his ancestor was in the time of Romulus, leaning on his staff, with his back to the wind.Now and then a white town perched on a hillside, its houses piled above each other, relieved the eye; and I could imagine that it might be all the poets have sung of it, in the spring, though the Latin poets, I am convinced, have wonderfully imposed upon us.
To make my long story short, it happened to be colder next morning at Naples than it was in Germany.The sun shone; but the northeast wind, which the natives poetically call the Tramontane, was blowing, and the white smoke of Vesuvius rolled towards the sea.It would only last three days, it was very unusual, and all that.The next day it was colder, and the next colder yet.Snow fell, and blew about unmelted: I saw it in the streets of Pompeii.
The fountains were frozen, icicles hung from the locks of the marble statues in the Chiaia.And yet the oranges glowed like gold among their green leaves; the roses, the heliotrope, the geraniums, bloomed in all the gardens.It is the most contradictory climate.We lunched one day, sitting in our open carriage in a lemon grove, and near at hand the Lucrine Lake was half frozen over.We feasted our eyes on the brilliant light and color on the sea, and the lovely outlined mountains round the shore, and waited for a change of wind.
The Neapolitans declare that they have not had such weather in twenty years.It is scarcely one's ideal of balmy Italy.
Before the weather changed, I began to feel in this great Naples, with its roaring population of over half a million, very much like the sailor I saw at the American consul's, who applied for help to be sent home, claiming to be an American.He was an oratorical bummer, and told his story with all the dignity and elevated language of an old Roman.He had been cast away in London.How cast away? Oh! it was all along of a boarding-house.And then he found himself shipped on an English vessel, and he had lost his discharge-papers; and "Listen, your honor," said he, calmly extending his right hand, "here I am cast away on this desolate island with nothing before me but wind and weather."RAVENNA
A DEAD CITY
Ravenna is so remote from the route of general travel in Italy, that I am certain you can have no late news from there, nor can I bring you anything much later than the sixth century.Yet, if you were to see Ravenna, you would say that that is late enough.I am surprised that a city which contains the most interesting early Christian churches and mosaics, is the richest in undisturbed specimens of early Christian art, and contains the only monuments of Roman emperors still in their original positions, should be so seldom visited.Ravenna has been dead for some centuries; and because nobody has cared to bury it, its ancient monuments are yet above ground.Grass grows in its wide streets, and its houses stand in a sleepy, vacant contemplation of each other: the wind must like to mourn about its silent squares.The waves of the Adriatic once brought the commerce of the East to its wharves; but the deposits of the Po and the tides have, in process of time, made it an inland town, and the sea is four miles away.
In the time of Augustus, Ravenna was a favorite Roman port and harbor for fleets of war and merchandise.There Theodoric, the great king of the Goths, set up his palace, and there is his enormous mausoleum.
As early as A.D.44 it became an episcopal see, with St.