Part 13

For no trees whatever are planted to shade the walking population, as in Paris or Cairo or any other sunlit city.

And who could guess the reason? An Englishman, at least, would never bring himself to believe what is nevertheless a fact, namely, that if the streets are converted into shady boulevards, the rents of the houses immediately fall. When trees are planted, the lodgers complain and finally emigrate to other quarters; the experiment has been tried, at Naples and elsewhere, and always with the same result. Up trees, down rents. The tenants refuse to be deprived of their chief pleasure in life—that of gazing at the street-passengers, who must be good enough to walk in the sunshine for their delectation. But if you are of an inquisitive turn of mind, you are quite at liberty to return the compliment and to study from the outside the most intimate details of the tenants’ lives within. Take your fill of their domestic doings; stare your hardest. They don’t mind in the least, not they! That feeling of privacy which the northerner fosters doggedly even in the centre of a teeming city is alien to their hearts; they like to look and be looked at; they live like fish in an aquarium. It is a result of the whole palazzo-system that every one knows his neighbour’s business better than his own. What does it matter, in the end? Are we not all “Christians”?

The municipality, meanwhile, is deeply indebted for the sky-piercing ambitions which have culminated in the building of this new quarter. To meet these obligations, the octroi prices have been raised to the highest pitch by the City Fathers. This octroi is farmed out and produces (they tell me) 120 pounds a day; there are some hundred toll-collecting posts at the outskirts of the town, and the average salary of their officials is three pounds a month. They are supposed to be respectable and honest men, but it is difficult to see how a family can be supported on that wage, when one knows how high the rents are, and how severely the most ordinary commodities of life are taxed.

I endeavoured to obtain photographs of the land as it looked ere it was covered by the arsenal quarter, but in vain. Nobody seems to have thought it worth while preserving what would surely be a notable economic document for future generations. Out of sheer curiosity I also tried to procure a plan of the old quarter, that labyrinth of thick-clustering humanity, where the streets are often so narrow that two persons can barely squeeze past each other. I was informed that no such plan had ever been drawn up; it was agreed that a map of this kind might be interesting, and suggested, furthermore, that I might undertake the task myself; the authorities would doubtless appreciate my labours. We foreigners, be it understood, have ample means and unlimited leisure, and like nothing better than doing unprofitable jobs of this kind.

There is a map of old Taranto in Lasor a Varea (Savonarola) Universus terrarum etc., Vol. II, p. 552, and another in J. Blaev’s Theatrum Civitatum (1663). He talks of the “rude houses” of this town.

One is glad to leave the scintillating desert of this arsenal quarter, and enter the cool stone-paved streets of the other, which remind one somewhat of Malta. In the days of Salis-Marschlins this city possessed only 18,000 inhabitants, and “outdid even the customary Italian filth, being hardly passable on account of the excessive nastiness and stink.” It is now scrupulously clean—so absurdly clean, that it has quite ceased to be picturesque. Not that its buildings are particularly attractive to me; none, that is, save the antique “Trinità” column of Doric gravity—sole survivor of Hellenic Taras, which looks wondrously out of place in its modern environment. One of the finest of these earlier monuments, the Orsini tower depicted in old prints of the place, has now been demolished.

Lovers of the baroque may visit the shrine of Saint Cataldo, a jovial nightmare in stone. And they who desire a literary pendant to this fantastic structure should read the life of the saint written by Morone in 1642. Like the shrine, it is the quintessence of insipid exuberance; there is something preposterous in its very title “Cataldiados,” and whoever reads through those six books of Latin hexameters will arise from the perusal half-dazed. Somehow or other, it dislocates one’s whole sense of terrestrial values to see a frowsy old monk treated in the heroic style and metre, as though he were a new Achilles. As a jeu d’esprit the book might pass; but it is deadly serious. Single men will always be found to perpetrate monstrosities of literature; the marvel is that an entire generation of writers should have worked themselves into a state of mind which solemnly approved of such freaks.

This wandering Irish missionary is supposed to have died here in the seventh century, and they who are not satisfied with his printed biographies will find one in manuscript of 550 pages, compiled in 1766, in the Cuomo Library at Naples.

Every one has heard of the strange position of this hoary island-citadel (a metropolis, already, in neolithic days). It is of oval shape, the broad sides washed by the Ionian Sea and an oyster-producing lagoon; bridges connect it at one extremity with the arsenal or new town, and at the other with the so-called commercial quarter. It is as if some precious gem were set, in a ring, between two others of minor worth. Or, to vary the simile, this acropolis, with its close-packed alleys, is the throbbing heart of Taranto; the arsenal quarter—its head; and that other one—well, its stomach; quite an insignificant stomach as compared with the head and corroborative, in so far, of the views of Metchnikoff, who holds that this hitherto commendable organ ought now to be reduced in size, if not abolished altogether. . . .

From out of this window I gaze upon the purple lagoon flecked with warships and sailing-boats; and beyond it, upon the venerable land of Japygia, the heel of Italy, that rises in heliotrope-tinted undulations towards the Adriatic watershed. At night-time an exquisite perfume of flowers and ripe corn comes wafted into my room over the still waters, and when the sun rises, white settlements begin to sparkle among its olives and vineyards. My eyes often rest upon one of them; it is Grottaglie, distant a few miles from Taranto on the Brindisi line. I must visit Grottaglie, for it was here that the flying monk received his education.

The flying monk!

The theme is not inappropriate at this moment, when the newspapers are ringing with the Paris-Rome aviation contest and the achievements of Beaumont, Garros and their colleagues. I have purposely brought his biography with me, to re-peruse on the spot. But let me first explain how I became acquainted with this seventeenth-century pioneer of aviation.

It was an odd coincidence.

I had arrived in Naples, and was anxious to have news of the proceedings at a certain aviation meeting in the north, where a rather inexperienced friend of mine had insisted upon taking a part; the newspaper reports of these entertainments are enough to disturb anybody. While admiring the great achievements of modern science in this direction, I wished devoutly, at that particular moment, that flying had never been invented; and it was something of a coincidence, I say, that stumbling in this frame of mind down one of the unspeakable little side-streets in the neighbourhood of the University, my glance should have fallen upon an eighteenth-century engraving in a bookseller’s window which depicted a man raised above the ground without any visible means of support—flying, in short. He was a monk, floating before an altar. A companion, near at hand, was portrayed as gazing in rapturous wonder at this feat of levitation. I stepped within and demanded the volume to which this was the frontispiece.

The salesman, a hungry-looking old fellow with incredibly dirty hands and face, began to explain.

“The Flying Monk, sir, Joseph of Copertino. A mighty saint and conjuror! Or perhaps you would like some other book? I have many, many lives of santi here. Look at this one of the great Egidio, for instance. I can tell you all about him, for he raised my mother’s grand-uncle from the dead; yes, out of the grave, as one may say. You’ll find out all about it in this book; and it’s only one of his thousand miracles. And here is the biography of the renowned Giangiuseppe, a mighty saint and——”

I was paying little heed; the flying monk had enthralled me. An unsuspected pioneer of aviation . . . here was a discovery!

“He flew?” I queried, my mind reverting to the much-vaunted triumphs of modern science.

“Why not? The only reason why people don’t fly like that nowadays is because—well, sir, because they can’t. They fly with machines, and think it something quite new and wonderful. And yet it’s as old as the hills! There was Iscariot, for example—Icarus, I mean——”

“Pure legend, my good man.”

“Everything becomes legend, if the gentleman will have the goodness to wait. And here is the biography of——”

“How much for Joseph of Copertino?” Cost what it may, I said to myself, that volume must be mine.

He took it up and began to turn over the pages lovingly, as though handling some priceless Book of Hours.

“A fine engraving,” he observed, sotto voce. “And this is the best of many biographies of the flying monk. It is by Rossi, the Minister-General of the Franciscan order to which our monk belonged; the official biography, it might be called—dedicated, by permission, to His Holiness Pope Clemens XIII, and based on the documents which led to the saint’s beatification. Altogether, a remarkable volume——”

And he paused awhile. Then continued:

“I possess a cheaper biography of him, also with a frontispiece, by Montanari, which has the questionable advantage of being printed as recently as 1853. And here is yet another one, by Antonio Basile—oh, he has been much written about; a most celebrated taumaturgo, (wonder-worker)! As to this Life of 1767, I could not, with a good conscience, appraise it at less than five francs.”

“I respect your feelings. But—five francs! I have certain scruples of my own, you know, and it irks my sense of rectitude to pay five francs for the flying monk unless you can supply me with six or seven additional books to be included in that sum. Twelve soldi (sous) apiece—that strikes me as the proper price of such literature, for foreigners, at least. Therefore I’ll have the great Egidio as well, and Montanari’s life of the flying monk, and that other one by Basile, and Giangiuseppe, and——”

“By all means! Pray take your choice.”