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 I had 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 se