In The Days Of Salis-Marschlins This City Possessed
Only 18,000 Inhabitants, And "Outdid Even The Customary Italian Filth,
Being Hardly Passable On Account Of The Excessive Nastiness And Stink."
It Is Now Scrupulously Clean - So Absurdly Clean, That It Has Quite
Ceased To Be Picturesque.
Not that its buildings are particularly
attractive to me; none, that is, save the antique "Trinita" column of
Doric gravity - sole survivor of Hellenic Taras, which looks wondrously
out of place in its modern environment.
One of the finest of these
earlier monuments, the Orsini tower depicted in old prints of the place,
has now been demolished.
Lovers of the baroque may visit the shrine of Saint Cataldo, a jovial
nightmare in stone. And they who desire a literary pendant to this
fantastic structure should read the life of the saint written by Morone
in 1642. Like the shrine, it is the quintessence of insipid exuberance;
there is something preposterous in its very title "Cataldiados," and
whoever reads through those six books of Latin hexameters will arise
from the perusal half-dazed. Somehow or other, it dislocates one's whole
sense of terrestrial values to see a frowsy old monk [Footnote: This
wandering Irish missionary is supposed to have died here in the seventh
century, and they who are not satisfied with his printed biographies
will find one in manuscript of 550 pages, compiled in 1766, in the Cuomo
Library at Naples.] treated in the heroic style and metre, as though he
were a new Achilles.
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