In the effect, art and nature combined to
neutralize each other, as they do with us, for instance, in those
restaurants where they have music during dinner, and where you do not
know whether you are eating the _chef-d'oeuvre_ of a cook or a composer.
It was at the new hotel which is evolving itself through the repair of
the never-finished and long-ruined Palace of Donn' Anna, wife of a
Spanish viceroy in the seventeenth century, that our guide stopped with
us for that cup of tea already mentioned. We had to climb four nights of
stairs for it to the magnificent salon overlooking the finest
postal-card prospect in all Naples. We lingered long upon it, in the
balcony from which we could have dropped into the sunset sea any coin
which we could have brought ourselves to part with; but we had none of
the bad money which had been so easily passed off upon us. This sort
rather abounds in Naples, and the traveller should watch not only for
false francs, but for francs of an obsolete coinage which you can know
by the king's head having a longer neck than in the current pieces.
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