, which to our feeble palates and
digestions seem only fit for cooking, though the experienced native
contrives to make them edible by soaking the fruit in wine. The moment he
sits down to table, he carefully pares his _cotogne_ and cuts it into
sections, which he drops into a glass of red wine where they repose until
the meal is finished; by this time the fruit has become thoroughly
saturated, and it is then eaten with apparent relish. There are hundreds
of apples, some of a shining rich crimson and others of dull yellow
peppered over with tiny black specks, the _renati_, highly prized by the
natives for their delicate flavour and soft flesh. There are of course
loads of grapes, varying from the little honey-tasting purple sort, that
has been introduced from California, to the huge but somewhat insipid
bunches of the white _Regina_; we note also the quaintly shaped "Ladies'
Fingers," which are especially sweet. The figs, massed together in serried
layers between fresh vine leaves and costing a _soldo_ the dozen, stand
around in glossy purple pyramids, so luscious that their sugary tears are
exuding from their skins, and so ripe that they seem to cry to be eaten
before noon. Here is a barrow piled high with the little green fruit, each
separate fig being decorated with a pink cyclamen stuck in its crest; and
here is a smaller load of the black _Vescovo_, which is said to obtain its
ecclesiastical name from the fact that the parent stock of this highly
esteemed variety originally flourished in the bishop's garden at Sorrento.
No one who has not visited the shores of the Mediterranean in September or
early October can realize the luscious possibilities of the fig; for there
seems nothing in common between the freshly-picked fruit of the south,
bursting its skin with liquid sugar, and the dry sweetish woolly object
which tries to ripen on the sheltered wall of an English garden and is
eaten with apparent gusto by those who know not its Italian brother. Being
autumn, we have missed one prominent feature of the fruit market, the
great green-skinned water-melons (_poponi_) with their rose-coloured pulp
and masses of coal-black seeds, which form the favourite summer fruit of
the people, who find both food and drink in their cool nutritious flesh.
But even gayer and more striking than the fruits are the piles of
vegetables, arranged with a fine appreciation of colour to which only an
Italian eye can aspire. Carrots, turnips, tomat