The Sole Poetic Novelty Of My Experience Was
In My Being Offered Loaves Of Bread Which, When I Bought Them, Would Be
Given To The Poor, In Honor Of What Saint's Day I Did Not Learn.
But it
was all charming; even the inattention of the young woman over the
book-counter was charming, since
It was a condition of her flirtation
with the far younger man beside me who wanted something far more
interesting from her than any brief sketch of the history of Naples, in
either English or Italian or French or, at the worst, German. She was
very pretty, though rather powdered, and when the young man went away
she was sympathetically regretful to me that there was no such sketch,
in place of which she offered me several large histories in more or less
volumes. But why should I have wanted a history of Naples when I had
Naples itself? It was like wanting a photograph when you have the
original. Had I not just come through the splendid Piazza San
Ferdinando, with the nobly arcaded church on one hand and the
many-statued royal palace on the other, and between them a lake of
mellow sunshine, as warm as ours in June?
What I found Naples and the Neapolitans in 1908 I had found them in
1864, and Mr. Gray (as he of the "Elegy" used to be called on his
title-pages) found them in 1740. "The streets," he wrote home to his
mother, "are one continued market, and thronged with populace so much
that a coach can hardly pass.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 46 of 353
Words from 12318 to 12583
of 97259
