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 ROLLO IN NAPLES,

 BY

 JACOB ABBOTT.


 BOSTON:

 PUBLISHED BY TAGGARD AND THOMPSON.

 M DCCC LXIV.




 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1858, by

 JACOB ABBOTT,

 In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
 Massachusetts.

 ELECTROTYPED AT THE
 BOSTON STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY.

 RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE:

 PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON.


 [Illustration: THE ORANGE GARDEN.--See page 218.]

 [Illustration: ROLLO'S TOUR IN EUROPE.
 TAGGARD & THOMPSON. Publishers--Boston.]




 ROLLO'S TOUR IN EUROPE.


 ORDER OF THE VOLUMES

 ROLLO ON THE ATLANTIC.
 ROLLO IN PARIS.
 ROLLO IN SWITZERLAND.
 ROLLO IN LONDON.
 ROLLO ON THE RHINE.
 ROLLO IN SCOTLAND.
 ROLLO IN GENEVA.
 ROLLO IN HOLLAND.
 ROLLO IN NAPLES.
 ROLLO IN ROME.


 PRINCIPAL PERSONS OF THE STORY.

 ROLLO; twelve years of age.
 MR. and MRS. HOLIDAY; Rollo's father and mother, travelling in Europe.
 THANNY; Rollo's younger brother.
 JANE; Rollo's cousin, adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Holiday.
 MR. GEORGE; a young gentleman, Rollo's uncle.




 CONTENTS.


 CHAPTER                                           PAGE

    I.--THE VETTURINO,                              13
   II.--CONTRACTS AND AGREEMENTS,                   37
  III.--THE JOURNEY,                                57
   IV.--SITUATION OF NAPLES,                        76
    V.--PLANNING THE ASCENSION,                     91
   VI.--GOING UP,                                  106
  VII.--THE SUMMIT,                                131
 VIII.--POMPEII,                                   157
   IX.--THE MUSEUM,                                174
    X.--THE STREETS,                               188
   XI.--AN EXCURSION,                              194
  XII.--THE ORANGE GARDENS,                        213




 ENGRAVINGS.


                                                   PAGE

 THE ORANGE GARDEN,                      (Frontispiece.)
 TRAVELLING IN ITALY,                               11
 A CHURCH AT FLORENCE,                              23
 READING THE ARTICLES,                              55
 EMBLEMS ON THE CROSS,                              63
 ASCENDING THE MOUNTAINS,                           67
 SITUATION OF NAPLES,                               77
 VIEW THROUGH THE GLASS,                            87
 CALASH COMING INTO NAPLES,                        111
 THE ASCENT,                                       127
 VIEW OF THE CRATER,                               137
 COMING DOWN,                                      153
 THE MOSAIC,                                       183
 THE PUBLIC GARDENS,                               197


[Illustration: TRAVELLING IN ITALY.]




ROLLO IN NAPLES.

CHAPTER I.

THE VETTURINO.


If ever you make a journey into Italy, there is one thing that you will
like very much indeed; and that is the mode of travelling that prevails
in that country. There are very few railroads there; and though there
are stage coaches on all the principal routes, comparatively few people,
except the inhabitants of the country, travel in them. Almost all who
come from foreign lands to make journeys in Italy for pleasure, take
what is called a _vetturino_.

There is no English word for _vetturino_, because where the English
language is spoken, there is no such thing. The word comes from the
Italian word _vettura_, which means a travelling carriage, and it
denotes the man that owns the carriage, and drives it wherever the party
that employs him wishes to go. Thus there is somewhat the same relation
between the Italian words _vettura_ and _vetturino_ that there is
between the English words _chariot_ and _charioteer_.

The Italian _vetturino_, then, in the simplest English phrase that will
express it, is a _travelling carriage man_; that is, he is a man who
keeps a carriage and a team of horses, in order to take parties of
travellers with them on long journeys, wherever they wish to go. Our
word _coachman_ does not express the idea at all. A coachman is a man
employed by the owner of a carriage simply to drive it; whereas the
vetturino is the proprietor of his establishment; and though he
generally drives it himself, still the driving is only a small part of
his business. He might employ another man to go with him and drive, but
he would on that account be none the less the vetturino.

The vetturino usually takes the entire charge of the party, and provides
for them in every respect,--that is, if they make the arrangement with
him in that way, which they generally do, inasmuch as, since they do
not, ordinarily, know the language of the country, it is much more
convenient for them to arrange with him to take care of them than to
attempt to take care of themselves. Accordingly, in making a journey of
several days, as, for example, from Genoa to Florence, from Florence to
Rome, or from Rome to Venice, or to Naples, the vetturino determines the
length of each day's journey; he chooses the hotels where to stop, both
at noon and for the night; he attends to the passports in passing the
frontiers, and also to the examination of the baggage at the custom
houses; and on arriving at the hotels he orders what the travellers
require, and settles the bill the next morning. For all this the
travellers pay him one round sum, which includes every thing. This sum
consists of a certain amount for the carriage and horses, and an
additional amount of about a dollar and a half or a dollar and three
quarters a day, as agreed upon beforehand, for hotel expenses on the
way. Thus, by this mode of travelling, the whole care is taken off from
the traveller's mind, and he has nothing to do during the daytime but to
sit in his carriage and enjoy himself, and at night to eat, drink,
sleep, and take his comfort at the hotel.

It was at Florence that Mr. George and Rollo first commenced to travel
with a vetturino. They came to Florence by steamer and railway; that is,
by steamer to Leghorn, and thence across the country by railway.
Florence is a very pretty place, with the blue and beautiful River Arno
running through the middle of it, and ancient stone bridges leading
across the river from side to side. The town is filled with magnificent
churches and palaces, built, some of them, a thousand years ago, and all
so richly adorned with sculptures, paintings, bronzes, and mosaics, that
the whole world flock there to see them. People go there chiefly in the
winter. At that season the town is crowded with strangers. A great many
people, too, go there in the winter to avoid the cold weather which
prevails at that time of the year, in all the more northerly countries
of Europe.

There is so little winter in Florence that few of the houses have any
fireplaces in them except in the kitchen. When there comes a cold day,
the people warm themselves by means of a jug or jar of earthen ware,
with a handle passing over across the top, by which they carry it about.
They fill these jars half full of hot embers, and so carry them with
them wherever they want to go. The women, when they sit down, put the
jar under their dresses on the floor or pavement beneath them, and the
men place it right before them between their feet.

You will see market women and flower girls sitting in the corners of the
streets in the winter, attending to their business, and keeping
themselves warm all the time with these little fire jars; and artists
in the palaces and picture galleries, each with one of them by his side,
or close before him, while he is at work copying the works of the great
masters, or making drawings from the antique statues.

There is another very curious use that the people of Florence make of
these jars; and that is they warm the beds with them when any body is
sick, so as to require this indulgence. You would think it very
difficult to warm a bed with an open jar filled with burning embers. The
way they do it is this: they hang the jar in the inside of a sort of
wooden cage, shaped like a bushel basket, and about as large. They turn
this cage upside down, and hang the jar up in it by means of a hook
depending inside. They turn down the bed clothes and put the cage in it,
jar of coals and all. They then put back the bed clothes, and cover the
cage all up. They leave it so for a quarter of an hour, and then,
carefully turning the clothes down again, they take the jar out, and the
bed is warmed.

But to return to Mr. George and Rollo. They engaged a vetturino for the
first time at Florence. Mr. George had gone to Florence chiefly for the
purpose of examining the immense collections of paintings and statuary
which exist there. Rollo went, not on account of the paintings or
statues,--for he did not care much about such things,--but because he
liked to go any where where he could see new places, and be entertained
by new scenes. Accordingly, while Mr. George was at work in the
galleries of Florence, studying, by the help of catalogues, the famous
specimens of ancient art, Rollo was usually rambling about the streets,
observing the manners and customs of the people, and watching the
singular and curious scenes that every where met his eye.

The reason why there are so many paintings and sculptures in Italy is
this: in the middle ages, it was the fashion, in all the central parts
of Europe, for the people to spend almost all their surplus money in
building and decorating churches. Indeed, there was then very little
else that they could do. At the present time, people invest their funds,
as fast as they accumulate them, in building ships and railroads, docks
for the storage of merchandise, houses and stores in cities, to let for
the sake of the rent, and country seats, or pretty private residences of
various kinds, for themselves. But in the middle ages very little could
be done in the way of investments like these. There were no railroads,
and there was very little use for ships. There was no profit to be
gained by building houses and stores, for there were so many wars and
commotions among the people of the different towns and kingdoms, that
nothing was stable or safe. For the same reason it was useless for men
to spend their money in building and ornamenting their own houses, for
at the first approach of an enemy, the town in which they lived was
likely to be sacked, and their houses, and all the fine furniture which
they might contain, would be burned or destroyed.

But the churches were safe. The people of the different countries had so
much veneration for sacred places, and for every thing connected with
religion, that they were afraid to touch or injure any thing that had
been consecrated to a religious use. To plunder a church, or a convent,
or an abbey, or to do any thing to injure or destroy the property that
they contained, was regarded as _sacrilege_; and sacrilege they deemed a
dreadful crime, abhorred by God and man. Thus, while they would burn and
destroy hundreds of dwellings without any remorse, and turn the wretched
inmates out at midnight into the streets to die of exposure, terror, and
despair, they would stop at once when they came to the church, afraid to
harm it in any way, or to touch the least thing that it contained.
Accordingly, while every thing else in a conquered town was doomed to
the most reckless destruction, all that was in the church,--the most
delicate paintings, and the most costly gold and silver images and
utensils--were as safe as if they were surrounded by impregnable castle
walls.

Of course these notions were very mistaken ones. According to the
teachings of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, it must be a greater sin
to burn down the cottage of a poor widow, and turn her out at midnight
into the streets to die, than to plunder for gain the richest altar in
the world.

From these and various other similar causes, it happened that, in the
middle ages,--that is, from five hundred to a thousand years
ago,--almost all the great expenditures of money, in all the great
cities and towns of Europe, were made for churches. Sometimes these
churches were so large that they were several hundred years in building.
One generation would begin, another would continue, and a third would
finish the work; that is, provided the finishing work was ever done.
Great numbers of them remain unfinished to the present day, and always
will remain so.

It is generally, however, the exterior which remains incomplete. Within
they are magnificent beyond description. They are so profusely adorned
with altars, chapels, crucifixes, paintings, vessels of gold and
silver, and with sculptures and monuments of every kind, that on
entering them one is quite bewildered with the magnificence of the
scene.

There are a great many different altars where divine service may be
performed, some arranged along the sides of the church, in the recesses
between the pillars, and others in the transepts, and in various little
chapels opening here and there from the transepts and the aisles; and so
extensive and vast is the interior that sometimes four or five different
congregations are engaged in worship in different parts of the church at
the same time, without at all disturbing one another.

One of the most celebrated of these great churches is the cathedral at
Florence, where Mr. George and Rollo were now staying. There is a
representation of it on the next page, which will give you some idea of
its form, though it can convey no conception of its immense magnitude.

The dome that surmounts the centre of the building is the largest in the
world. It was a hundred years after the church was commenced before the
dome was put on. The dome is about a hundred and forty feet wide from
side to side, and almost as high as it is wide. It is more than a
hundred and thirty feet high, which is enough for twelve or fifteen
stories of a good-sized house. And this is the dome alone. The whole
height of the church, from the ground to the top of the cross, is nearly
four hundred feet. You will get a better idea of how high this is, if
you ask of your father, or of some one that knows, what the height is of
some tall steeple near where you live.

When the architect who conceived the idea of finishing the church by
putting this dome upon it first proposed it, the other architects of the
town declared that it could not be done. It was impossible, they said,
to build so large a dome on the top of so lofty a building. But he
insisted that it was not impossible. He could not only build the dome at
that height, but he could first build an octagonal lantern, he said, on
the top of the church, and then build the dome upon that, which would
carry the dome up a great deal higher. At last they consented to let him
make the attempt; and he succeeded. You see the dome in the engraving,
and the octagonal lantern beneath it, on which it rests. The lantern is
the part which has the round windows.

You see to the left of the church, at the farther end, a tall, square
tower. This is the bell tower. There are six bells in it. It was
designed to have a spire upon it, but the spire has not yet been built,
and perhaps it never will be.

[Illustration: A CHURCH AT FLORENCE.]

This bell tower alone cost an enormous sum of money. It is faced on
every side, as indeed the church itself is, with different 
marbles, and the four walls of it, on the outside, are so profusely
adorned with sculptures, statues, and other costly and elaborate
architectural decorations, that it would take a week to examine them
fully in detail.

The part of the church which is presented to view in the engraving is
the end. The front proper is on a line with the farther side of the bell
tower. The engraving does not show us the length of the edifice at all,
except so far as we gain an idea of it by the long procession which we
see at the side. As I have already said, the length is more than five
hundred feet, which is nearly half a quarter of a mile.

The putting on of the dome was considered the greatest achievement in
the building of the church; and the architect who planned and
superintended the work gained for himself immortal honor. After his
death a statue of him was made, and placed in a niche in the wall of the
houses on one side of the square, opposite the dome. He is represented
as sitting in a chair, holding a plan of the work in his hand, and
looking up to see it as it appeared completed. We can just see this
statue in the foreground of the picture, on the left.

And now I must return to the story.

While Mr. George and Rollo were in Florence, Rollo was occupied mainly,
as I have already said, in rambling about the town, and observing the
scenes of real and active life, which every where met his view in the
streets and squares, while Mr. George spent his time chiefly in the
churches, and in the galleries of painting and sculpture, studying the
works of art. One morning after breakfast, Mr. George was going to the
great gallery in the palace of the grand duke, to spend the day there.
Rollo said that he would walk with him a little way. So they walked
together along the street which led by the bank of the river.

