Leopardi! It was but eleven years before the first great
movement of the _Risorgimento_ swept over Italy in 1848 that he passed
away; his poems were indeed songs before sunrise, a sunrise of which he
failed to detect the far-off glimmering, so that he could only lament
without hope the sad condition of his dismembered country, once the
mistress and now the play-thing of the world, and the abject slave of
hated Austria:

"O patria mia, vedo le mure e gli archi
E le colonne e i simulacri e l' erme
Torri degli avi nostri,
Ma la gloria non vedo;
Non vedo il lauro e'l ferro ond' eran carchi
I nostri padri antichi."

It is a flat dusty stretch of road that lies between Fuorigrotta and
Bagnoli; the high walls give only occasional glimpses of well-tilled
_parterres_--one cannot call these tiny patches of cultivation fields--with
thriving crops of brilliant green corn, of claret-red clover, of purple
lucerne, and of the white-flowered "sad lupin," which Vergil has
immortalised in verse. The round bright yellow beans of the lupin crop,
known locally by the name of _spassa-tiempi_ (time-killers), afford an
article of food to the very poorest of the population. A quaint story runs
that one day an impoverished philosopher, reduced to making his dinner off
a handful of these beans, and imagining himself in consequence the most
wretched wight in existence, was cheered and comforted by observing
himself followed by a still more miserable fellow-mortal, who was engaged
in picking up and eating the husks of the beans that, _more italiano_, he
had thrown carelessly on to the pathway after their insipid farinaceous
contents had been sucked out!

Above us to the right are the heights of Monte Spina, covered with groves
of the umbrella pine, the typical tree of Naples; to our left extends the
verdant ridge of Posilipo, ending in Cape Coroglio, beyond which the
massive form of Nisida rises proudly from the blue expanse of water. All
the landscape shows somewhat hard in the glare of noontide, and we find
the enveloping clouds of fine white dust very oppressive and disagreeable.
From time to time a lumbering country cart is passed with its attendant
bare-footed peasant; otherwise there is little sign of life on the high
road. The bright sunlight flashes upon the horse's polished brass harness,
and upon the elaborate erection of charms placed thereon, with the avowed
object of averting the dreaded Evil Eye, that everlasting bugbe