It Is An Agglomeration Of Dreary
Streets, Haunted By Legions Of Clamorous Black Swifts, And Constructed
On The Rectangular Principle Dear To The Latin Mind.
Modern, and
surpassingly monotonous.
Are such interminable rows of stuccoed barracks
artistic to look upon, are they really pleasant to inhabit? Is it
reasonable or even sanitary, in a climate of eight months' sunshine, to
build these enormous roadways and squares filled with glaring limestone
dust that blows into one's eyes and almost suffocates one; these Saharas
that even at the present season of the year (early June) cannot be
traversed comfortably unless one wears brown spectacles and goes veiled
like a Tuareg? This arsenal quarter must be a hell during the really not
season, which continues into October.
For no trees whatever are planted to shade the walking population, as in
Paris or Cairo or any other sunlit city.
And who could guess the reason? An Englishman, at least, would never
bring himself to believe what is nevertheless a fact, namely, that if
the streets are converted into shady boulevards, the rents of the houses
immediately fall. When trees are planted, the lodgers complain and
finally emigrate to other quarters; the experiment has been tried, at
Naples and elsewhere, and always with the same result. Up trees, down
rents. The tenants refuse to be deprived of their chief pleasure in
life - that of gazing at the street-passengers, who must be good enough
to walk in the sunshine for their delectation. But if you are of an
inquisitive turn of mind, you are quite at liberty to return the
compliment and to study from the outside the most intimate details of
the tenants' lives within. Take your fill of their domestic doings;
stare your hardest. They don't mind in the least, not they! That feeling
of privacy which the northerner fosters doggedly even in the centre of a
teeming city is alien to their hearts; they like to look and be looked
at; they live like fish in an aquarium. It is a result of the whole
palazzo-System that every one knows his neighbour's business better than
his own. What does it matter, in the end? Are we not all "Christians "?
The municipality, meanwhile, is deeply indebted for the sky-piercing
ambitions which have culminated in the building of this new quarter. To
meet these obligations, the octroi prices have been raised to the
highest pitch by the City Fathers. This octroi is farmed out and
produces (they tell me) 120 pounds a day; there are some hundred
toll-collecting posts at the outskirts of the town, and the average
salary of their officials is three pounds a month. They are supposed to
be respectable and honest men, but it is difficult to see how a family
can be supported on that wage, when one knows how high the rents are,
and how severely the most ordinary commodities of life are taxed.
I endeavoured to obtain photographs of the land as it looked ere it was
covered by the arsenal quarter, but in vain.
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