We did not demand too much social information of him; all the
more we valued the gratuitous fact that the Neapolitan nobles were now
rather poor, because they preferred a life of pleasure to a life of
business. I could have told him that the American nobles were
increasingly like them in their love of pleasure, but I would not have
known how to explain that they were not poor also. He was himself a
moderate in politics, but he told us, what seems to be the fact
everywhere in Italy, that singly the largest party in Naples is the
Socialist party.
He went with me first one day to the beautiful old Church of Santa
Chiara, to show me the Angevine tombs there, in which I satisfied a
secret, lingering love for the Gothic; and then to the cathedral, where
the sacristan showed us everything but the blood of St. Jannarius,
perhaps because it was not then in the act of liquefying; but I am
thankful to say I saw one of his finger-bones. My guide had made me
observe how several of the churches on the way to this were built on the
sites and of the remnants of pagan temples, and he summoned the
world-old sacristan of St.
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