Just Without The City Gate, On The Albara Road, Is A Small House,
With An Altar In It, And A Stationary Money-Box:
Also for the
benefit of the souls in Purgatory.
Still further to stimulate the
charitable, there is a monstrous painting on the plaster, on either
side of the grated door, representing a select party of souls,
frying. One of them has a grey moustache, and an elaborate head of
grey hair: as if he had been taken out of a hairdresser's window
and cast into the furnace. There he is: a most grotesque and
hideously comic old soul: for ever blistering in the real sun, and
melting in the mimic fire, for the gratification and improvement
(and the contributions) of the poor Genoese.
They are not a very joyous people, and are seldom seen to dance on
their holidays: the staple places of entertainment among the
women, being the churches and the public walks. They are very
good-tempered, obliging, and industrious. Industry has not made
them clean, for their habitations are extremely filthy, and their
usual occupation on a fine Sunday morning, is to sit at their
doors, hunting in each other's heads. But their dwellings are so
close and confined that if those parts of the city had been beaten
down by Massena in the time of the terrible Blockade, it would have
at least occasioned one public benefit among many misfortunes.
The Peasant Women, with naked feet and legs, are so constantly
washing clothes, in the public tanks, and in every stream and
ditch, that one cannot help wondering, in the midst of all this
dirt, who wears them when they are clean.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 60 of 268
Words from 16174 to 16452
of 73541
