life and
death. Everything "is in a concatenation accordingly." The day gets
brighter, brighter, brighter, till it's night. The summer gets hotter,
hotter, hotter, till it bursts. The fruit gets riper, riper, riper, till
it tumbles down and rots.
Ask me a question or two about fresco--will you be so good? All the
houses are painted in fresco hereabout--the outside walls I mean; the
fronts, and backs, and sides--and all the colour has run into damp and
green seediness, and the very design has struggled away into the
component atoms of the plaster. Sometimes (but not often) I can make out
a Virgin with a mildewed glory round her head; holding nothing, in an
indiscernible lap, with invisible arms; and occasionally the leg or arms
of a cherub, but it is very melancholy and dim. There are two old
fresco-painted vases outside my own gate--one on either hand--which are
so faint, that I never saw them till last night; and only then because I
was looking over the wall after a lizard, who had come upon me while I
was smoking a cigar above, and crawled over one of these embellishments
to his retreat. There is a church here--the Church of the
Annunciation--which they are now (by "they" I mean certain noble
families) restoring at a vast expense, as a work of piety. It is a large
church, with a great many little chapels in it, and a very high dome.
Every inch of this edifice is painted, and every design is set in a
great gold frame or border elaborately wrought. You can imagine nothing
so splendid. It is worth coming the whole distance to see. But every
sort of splendour is in perpetual enactment through the means of these
churches. Gorgeous processions in the streets, illuminations of windows
on festa nights; lighting up of lamps and clustering of flowers before
the shrines of saints; all manner of show and display. The doors of the
churches stand wide open; and in this hot weather great red curtains
flutter and wave in their palaces; and if you go and sit in one of these
to get out of the sun, you see the queerest figures kneeling against
pillars, and the strangest people passing in and out, and vast streams
of women in veils (they don't wear bonnets), with great fans in their
hands, coming and going, that you are never tired of looking on. Except
in the churches, you would suppose the city (at this time of year) to be
deserted, the people keep so close within doors. Indeed it is next to
impossible to go out into the heat. I have
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