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washing in this filthy water, what was the good of
disinfecting myself when everybody and
everything around me was infected, the food I ate, the
water I drank, the bed I slept in, the very air I
breathed! Often I was too frightened to go to
bed, too frightened to be alone. I had to rush
out into the street again, to spend the remainder
of the night in one of the churches. Santa Maria
del Carmine was my favourite night-quarter,
the best sleep I have ever had I have had on a
bench in the left-side aisle of that old church.
There were plenty of churches to sleep in when I
dared not go home. All the hundreds of churches
and chapels of Naples were open the whole night,
ablaze with votive candles and thronged with
people. All their hundreds of Madonnas and
saints were hard at work night and day to visit
the dying in their respective quarters. Woe to
them if they ventured to appear in the quarter of
one of their rivals! Even the venerable Madonna
della Colera who had saved the city in the terrible
epidemic of 1834, had been hissed a few days
before at Bianchi Nuovi.
But it was not only of the cholera I was afraid.
I was also terrified from first to last of the rats.
They seemed just as much at home in the fondaci,
bassi and sotterranei of the slums as the wretched
human beings who lived and died there. To be
just, they were on the whole inoffensive and
well-behaved rats, at least with the living,
attending to their business of scavengers, handed over
to them alone since the time of the Romans, the
only members of the community who were sure
to get their fill. They were as tame as cats and
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