Burial in Naples
John Jolliffe
-Prancis H, the last Bourbon King of
Naples, was recently laid to rest in the capital where he reigned for a few months in 1860 (when he was 23) before being driven out by the insidious combination of Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel of Savoy. Not an earth-shaking event, especially in a place where regular eruptions have always given life an unusually precarious quality. But those who attended the ceremony, some of them from little more than a keen but undisciplined sense of historical curio- sity, were richly rewarded.
There are many reasons why few tourists in Italy nowadays venture south of Rome. But it was not always so. When Naples was a royal capital, from 1734 to 1860, the list of famous visitors was endless. It was there that Nelson was acclaimed in a frenzy of glory by Sir William and Lady Hamilton, there that Goethe found the lemon trees in bloom. To Madame Vigee-Lebrun, the city was 'tine lanterne magique ravissante% Mozart and Pergolesi and Cimarosa filled the San Carlo opera house with perhaps the most excitedly appreciative audiences in the world; and it was there that Shelley found 'the Metropolis of a ruined Paradise'.
Over this paradise ruled a branch of the Bourbons, reviled by chilly northerners as pompous tyrants until their qualities were gradually revealed to a delighted readership by Sir Harold Acton, who brought them to life, after several decades of inspired re- search, in a sprightly and vigorous style. Unlike the early Hanoverians, who went on talking and eating in German long after be- ing established at St James's, the Spanish Bourbons were quite happy to become Neapolitans: Stendhal has left a wonderful picture of Ferdinand I, the Lazzarone king, whom he compared with Fielding's Squire Western, and who reigned longer than Queen Victoria. He and all his court spoke
and thought in the dialect of Naples, and he had himself painted as a fisherman on the seashore. No wonder he was tumultuously welcomed back, even though Sir William Hamilton claimed that 'No European sovereign, without exception, has been so ill educated.'
Ferdinand II, who ruled from 1830 to 1859, has been unfairly saddled with the nickname Bomba, after a bombardment which he never ordered. A benevolent despot to his own people, he was admittedly severe on those who tried to introduce revolutionary ideas from outside. But he also frequently saved from bankruptcy the San Carlo, where the first triumphs of Rossini and Bellini, and later on many of those of Donizetti and Verdi, were heard again and again. He built the first railways in Italy, the first electric telegraph, and the most advanced dockyard, as well as pro- viding gas lighting in the main streets of Naples (not without reason) as early as 1839. All this encouraged new generations of delighted visitors. Schiller and Turner and, of course, Bulwer Lytton were follow-
Spectator 23 June 1984 ed by Dickens and John Stuart Mill, Cal' dinal Newman and Edward Le.ar; Gladstone may have pontificated against' the Bourbon rule being 'the negation 01 God', yet King Bomba refused to send iP troops to dispel the mob at the barricades is May 1848, and bellowed out to a general of ficer for all to hear: 'Spare my misguide, people! Take prisoners! Do not kill! Macaulay, on a visit in the following Year: gave the lie to other condemnations: `i say that the accounts that I have heard at` very incorrect. There is far less beg.80,, than in Rome, and far more industry • .; is the only place in Italy that has Wine° me to have the same sort of vitality whic"A you will find in the great English ports ail" cities. Rome and Paris are dead and goate,p; Florence is not dead, but sleepeth; Naples overflows with life.' It is this vitality, tinged admittedly witb violence, that makes Naples such an 6. citing place today. The contrasts are strongi; The sun shines down out of a clear skY,°ed heroic statues and fountains, surroursi by decaying rubbish whether the dustillef are on strike or not. And above all, the tte fic jams are on an operatic scale. In the aar; row slits of streets that run straight a ramrods up the steep hillside, under towe'll ing baroque facades festooned with daitof ing laundry and a perpetual spider's web t. electric wires, there is just room — and °th 10. just — for deafening dilapidated car' 5. hurtle past, while excited shoPkeePerd spasmodic beggars and a handful of da,lesi visitors hurriedly flatten themselves aga'il the walls. King Bomba died in 1859. He rojgbite easily have jockeyed for position to rihis over a united Italy, but Naples was, nil home, and in pleasing contrast to NaPraes's, III with his meddlesome, futile aspirado,net he felt under obligations to the otn.,, rulers concerned. His son fraricit;), `Franceschiello', was unprepared eithe,.r.,„ temperament or by training to follow Pl—os. Scorning the world and the flesh, he vi„ci guided by lofty but limited principles, a'se above all by a veneration for a father whc)tis; autocratic spirit, in Acton's war re 'haunted and paralysed his futtiod movements'. Rather than play the hero ate, lead his army against Garibaldi, he Pre' of red to save his subjects from the ravage; on war, and to save his beautiful capital and it contained from becoming a battlefleh'uis Poor Francis, and poor Mariaeen beautiful and spirited wife, who had u.„;tii brought up on horseback in Bavaria her sister, the future Empress Elizabeth , Francis died in 1895, but his widow survt.,$• ed till 1925, to be seen from afar both tbwe Proust and Sacheverell Sitwell. BY then tile supplanters of the Bourbons were in by process of being themselves replaced regimes which, to quote Acton agaie lambs'. The Bourbon tyrants look like gent
,
The unification of Italy was alvv.t is generally unpopular in the South, aild,..1,0
not surprising that Naples Football its has recently adopted the Bourbon lilY as emblem, less perhaps out of affection for the dynasty than in order to testify symboli- cally to its natural separateness from the aggressive and predatory North. Still, at the requiem celebrated recently by the Cardinal Archbishop of Naples, the place of honour was taken by the present heir of Francis II, the Duke of Castro, and the red and blue ribbons of the two orders of chivalry over which he presides, that of San Gennaro and the Constantinian Order of St George, were much in evidence.
The small English contingent (described next day in La Repubblica as 'looking as if they had come off a Bunuel film set') was patiently shepherded by Desmond Seward, whose admirable historical an- thology Naples, A Traveller's Companion, will be published by Constable next month. The Scottish party, though even smaller, was by no means inconspicuous, since it contained the national genealogist-in- chief. His encyclopaedic knowledge con- trasted uneasily with his unbuttoned behaviour, for which, in the 1470s, he would certainly have been shut up in the Castel dell' Ovo in company with the crocodile which King Ferrante kept for the disposal of superfluous prisoners. Be that as it may, the Hamlet of Naples now lies in peace, as he so richly deserves, in the church of Santa Chiara, beside his heroic Queen, and surrounded by his more fiery forebears.
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