Planus by Blaise Cendrars Read Free Book Online

have turned up unannounced — that Ricordi had bought Virgil's Tomb, and had built a wall around it and locked it up behind a battered and patched old door, for the court photographer was close-fisted and did not believe in spending money.
    Nevertheless, Ricordi financed my father, and was influential in assisting his career, for the two men were great friends, and Ricordi professed the most fervent admiration for Father when he perfected a photographic colour process, by which it was possible to transfer directly on to watch-cases, pendants, identity discs and other metal or enamel jewellery (whether holy medals or souvenirs for the bazaar) the features of sovereigns, likenesses of the saints, portraits of tourists, marriages, christenings — and the inevitable panorama of Naples, with the peacock-blue sea, blue-black sky, Vesuvius like a cauldron with flashes of fire superimposed with a paintbrush dipped in vermilion (there was also a night view with shells exploding on the sides of the volcano and a plume of smoke hanging over the sea and clouding the darkened moon, a sensational effect!), and before long the 'Quo Vadis' series was on sale, a veritable cinema-show on kitchen pots and pans enamelled in delicate pinks, and this had a tremendous success with its scenes of martyrs, ferocious beasts, gladiators, arenas, games, chariot races, Roman orgies. Equally successful was the 'Museums' series, showing works of Raphael, Michelangelo, antique statuary, the ruins of Rome and Pompeii, monuments, landscapes, the Cathedral of Milan, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, and the canals of Venice in three colours on coffee-pots, trays, bowls and even chamber-pots! Because of his admiration for my father, his recognition of this excellent business deal, which cashed in on bad taste and ugliness, Ricordi sought a closer intimacy, a partnership, an active participation in the multiplicity of business ventures improvised by my father : combines, speculations, inventions, all more or less brilliant, but generally chimerical, since they were conceived in moments of wild inspiration and were too far ahead of their time.
    For example: at a time when gas-lighting had not yet been installed in all the towns in Italy, my father was already buying waterfalls in the Alps and dreaming of the electrification of the whole peninsula!
    Like the housing estate on the Vomero, many other speculations and inventions were never realized, or were only put into practical effect a quarter of a century later, when other speculators and financiers benefited from them, including the photographer, for my father had long since given up the substance for the shadow.
    shudder every time). The base of the triangle was the rectilinear Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, and the two sides were bounded, on the left by the rack-railway of the funicular, bordered by a row of prickly pears, thorn- and sword-cactus, Barbary figs, agaves, and aloes bearing their flowers at the top of a mast that was often broken, and, on the right, by an old wall, very high in places, full of bracken, irises, maidenhair ferns, swarming with lizards which scampered away to hide in the crevices under clusters of little blue flowers that were so fragile one would have thought they were made of porcelain, commonly known as 'Roman ruins'; this wall was crested with broken glass and followed all the twists and turns, the convolutions of the Salita di San-Martino, a swarming hill that led up to the Vomero, reinforced by a kind of buttress of brambles, thorns and bushes, mountains of garbage, broken china, useless pots and pans and other debris which the humble people living on the Salita threw over the wall. Mother was not happy there. She was afraid of thieves. But we children, my brother and sister and the four Ricordi girls — my father had invited his friend to come and live with us, although Mother accepted it with a bad grace, finding the photographer ill-bred, too free and