Masaniello began – is memorable for having been the scene of one of
his earliest proclamations to the people, and is particularly
remarkable for nothing else, unless it be its waxen and bejewelled
Saint in a glass case, with two odd hands; or the enormous number
of beggars who are constantly rapping their chins there, like a
battery of castanets. The cathedral with the beautiful door, and
the columns of African and Egyptian granite that once ornamented
the temple of Apollo, contains the famous sacred blood of San
Gennaro or Januarius: which is preserved in two phials in a silver
tabernacle, and miraculously liquefies three times a-year, to the
great admiration of the people. At the same moment, the stone
(distant some miles) where the Saint suffered martyrdom, becomes
faintly red. It is said that the officiating priests turn faintly
red also, sometimes, when these miracles occur.
The old, old men who live in hovels at the entrance of these
ancient catacombs, and who, in their age and infirmity, seem
waiting here, to be buried themselves, are members of a curious
body, called the Royal Hospital, who are the official attendants at
funerals. Two of these old spectres totter away, with lighted
tapers, to show the caverns of death – as unconcerned as if they
were immortal. They were used as burying-places for three hundred
years; and, in one part, is a large pit full of skulls and bones,
said to be the sad remains of a great mortality occasioned by a
plague. In the rest there is nothing but dust. They consist,
chiefly, of great wide corridors and labyrinths, hewn out of the
rock. At the end of some of these long passages, are unexpected
glimpses of the daylight, shining down from above. It looks as
ghastly and as strange; among the torches, and the dust, and the
dark vaults: as if it, too, were dead and buried.
The present burial-place lies out yonder, on a hill between the
city and Vesuvius. The old Campo Santo with its three hundred and
sixty-five pits, is only used for those who die in hospitals, and
prisons, and are unclaimed by their friends. The graceful new
cemetery, at no great distance from it, though yet unfinished, has
already many graves among its shrubs and flowers, and airy
colonnades. It might be reasonably objected elsewhere, that some
of the tombs are meretricious and too fanciful; but the general
brightness seems to justify it here; and Mount Vesuvius, separated
from them by a lovely slope of ground, exalts and saddens the
scene.
If it be solemn to behold from this new City of the Dead, with its
dark smoke hanging in the clear sky, how much more awful and
impressive is it, viewed from the ghostly ruins of Herculaneum and
Pompeii!
Stand at the bottom of the great market-place of Pompeii, and look
up the silent streets, through the ruined temples of Jupiter and
Isis, over the broken houses with their inmost sanctuaries open to
the day, away to Mount Vesuvius, bright and snowy in the peaceful
distance; and lose all count of time, and heed of other things, in
the strange and melancholy sensation of seeing the Destroyed and
the Destroyer making this quiet picture in the sun. Then, ramble
on, and see, at every turn, the little familiar tokens of human
habitation and every-day pursuits; the chafing of the bucket-rope
in the stone rim of the exhausted well; the track of carriagewheels
in the pavement of the street; the marks of drinking-vessels
on the stone counter of the wine-shop; the amphorae in private
cellars, stored away so many hundred years ago, and undisturbed to
this hour – all rendering the solitude and deadly lonesomeness of
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Dickens, Charles – Pictures From Italy
the place, ten thousand times more solemn, than if the volcano, in
its fury, had swept the city from the earth, and sunk it in the
bottom of the sea.
After it was shaken by the earthquake which preceded the eruption,
workmen were employed in shaping out, in stone, new ornaments for
temples and other buildings that had suffered. Here lies their
work, outside the city gate, as if they would return to-morrow.