On the Shores of the Mediterranean by Eric Newby Read Free Book Online Page B

and paint and dress the miniature terracotta figures, sometimes finding and using ancient materials to do so, and painting the back-cloths, the fondali , for the presepi . At Christmas the whole of this little alley is illuminated and decorated with hundreds of these figures.
    Amongst the most remarkable of the presepi that have survived wars and earthquakes and all the other evils to which Naples and the Neapolitans have been subjected, are those in the Certosa di San Martino, the former Carthusian Monastery on the hill below the Castel Sant’Elmo, now a museum.
    Among the first to inspire the construction of these great eighteenth-century set pieces was a Dominican, Father Rocco, the famous preacher and missionary to the poor of Naples, who was afraid of no one, rich or poor, and saw this as a way to bring the mystery of the nativity to the people of the city. He was also responsible for the setting up of shrines at street corners in the city. This was in the 1750s, and until 1806 the lamps and candles lit at these shrines were the sole source of illumination in the streets of the city.
    It was Father Rocco who inspired Charles to order the building of the enormous Albergo dei Poveri – it has a facade nearly 400 yards long – for the poor to live in, and it was he, too, having set up a presepio in a grotto in the park at Capodimonte, who imbued the King with enthusiasm for what was to become a life-long passion. From that time onwards, Charles and his family reserved a part of each afternoon when he was in residence to working on one of his great presepi , designing and modelling the settings, while his wife and daughters chose materials and sewed and embroidered the costumes. In doing this he set a fashion. One of these presepi in the Certosa, which depicts the arrival of the Magi, is made up of 180 lay figures, 42 angels, 29 animals and 330 finimenti – the jewellery, the musical and agricultural instruments, the ruins, the grottoes, the trees and the temples, the fruit and vegetables, the strings of sausages. The Three Kings, their gold-embroidered turbans encrusted with pearls, wearing silk pelisses lined with fur, have arrived at the scene of the Nativity with a great concourse of followers, Asiatic and African, and are looking down at the Child who is lying on a bed of straw at the foot of what remains of a temple with Corinthian columns and a ruined archway. A band of blackamoors and Turks, ringing bells, blowing into strange wind instruments, playing harps and cymbals and beating drums and blowing on trumpets, is still winding down the hill to the scene of the Nativity through a pass in the mountains, together with the pack animals. The camels which have carried the caskets containing the gifts of gold and myrrh and frankincense on their long journey have already arrived, while others are waiting to be unloaded; and there is a dwarf leading two monkeys on chains dressed in a miniature version of what the other noblemen are wearing, a coat of wild silk embroidered with precious stones and lined with fur and with a turban, like theirs, swathed in pearls, but without the chibouques , the tobaccopipes, some of them carry in their belts, and the yataghans , the curved Turkish swords.
    To the right the scene is more mundane. There is a market place full of miniature facsimiles of fruit and vegetables and meat that are so lifelike that one instinctively reaches out to touch them. The modelling and painting of these fruits and vegetables was a specialized art, the work perhaps of Giuseppe di Luca, one of the great masters of it, but we shall never know.
    And there is la Taverna , the inn with a band of musicians playing outside it, men of a sort you can see today in the streets of Forcella and Spaccanapoli or among the contrabbandieri of Mergellina, apparently oblivious to the great events taking place only a few yards away, above which a band of angels in swirling draperies with attendant putti are suspended by almost