particularly
attractive, although its situation on the Bay of Baiae is charming and its
quays are full of picturesque life and movement. Lines of irregular
yellow-washed buildings, with faded green _persiani_ and balconies draped
with the domestic washing, with here and there a domed rococo church, look
down upon the clear tideless waters that gently lap the ancient stone-work
of the Mole, whilst a mixed crowd of fishermen with bare bronzed limbs, of
chattering women with gay handkerchiefs tied over their thick black hair,
and of blue uniformed dapper little customs officers,--_lupi marini_
(wolves of the sea) as the poor people facetiously term these revenue
officials of the coast--loiter in the sunlight amidst the piles of tawny
fishing nets or the pyramids of golden oranges. From the quay we make our
way to the Largo del Municipio, a typical square of a provincial town in
the South, enclosed by shabby houses and adorned by a couple of stunted
date-palms and a battered marble fountain, around which numberless
children and some slatternly women noisily converse or dispute. There is
an old proverb in the South, that a good housewife has no need to know any
thoroughfares save those leading to her church and her fountain, and as
conversation cannot well be carried on in the former, it is the daily
visits to the well that usually afford the required opportunity for
exchange of gossip or for the picking of quarrels. Two statues decorate
this unlovely but not uninteresting space; one is that of a Spanish
bishop, Leon y Cardenas, one of King Philip the Third's viceroys, which
serves as a reminder of the many vicissitudes this classic land has
experienced in the course of history:--Phoenician, Greek, Carthaginian,
Roman, Barbarian, Norman, German, French, Spanish conquerors have all left
"footprints on the sands of Time" in the coveted land of the Siren, which
all have possessed in turn but none have held in perpetuity. His
Excellency the Bishop Cardenas stands therefore in the open as a solid
memento of the glory that once was Spain, when half Europe and all America
owned the sway of the Catholic King. The second statue, though not a thing
of beauty, has always had the attraction of an unsolved puzzle, for we
cannot decide whether it proves a complete absence or an abundant
superfluity of humour in the Puteolani of to-day. It is the figure of a
Roman senator, vested in his flowing toga, and owning (as the ancient
inscription i