Naples, April 26th, 1830
To the Museum; met the Dalbergs and Prince and Princess Aldobrandini, a good-looking daughter and two sons. They will have all Prince Borghese’s estate. I only went into the Pompeii and Herculaneum part of the collections.
The lazaroni are very amusing. This morning four of them stripped stark naked under my window, put off in a boat, and thirty yards from the shore fished for cockle fish, which they do by diving like ducks, throwing their feet up in the air as the ducks do their tails. The creatures are perfectly amphibious; they don’t care who sees them, and their forms are perfect. Then there are little lazaroni who ape the big ones. Met a christening this morning, and then a funeral. The wet nurse, full dressed, was carried in a sedan chair down the middle of the street, and the child, dressed also, held out of the window in her arms, and so she was going to church. The funeral was a priest’s—a long file of penitents in white, carrying torches, a bier covered with crimson and gold, and the priest dressed in robes and exposed upon it, a ghastly sight, with a chalice in his hand and a book at his feet, other priests following, the cross borne before him. When young girls are buried in this way, they are gaily dressed with chaplets of flowers, a flower in the mouth, and flowers at their feet.
Rode to the race-course and round the hills; such views and such an evening! At seven o’clock I could see the houses at Sorrento, nineteen miles off on the other side of the Bay. Dined with Acton; none but English. In the evening went to Toledo, the Spanish Ambassador’s. The Duc de Dalberg talked of an association to excavate at Calabria and Apulia. The Government reserves four places—Pompeii, Pæstum, Stabiæ, Herculaneum—for its own use, and anybody may excavate elsewhere who will be at the trouble and expense.