"Naples '44" [.]

[fiefoe]

<'The genial trickeries of our environment' and more:>

• Ninety-nine per cent of the information recorded there was numbingly unimportant, and revealed as a whole that most Italians lead political lives of utter neutrality, although prone to sexual adventures. In all, the unending chronicles of empty lives.
• She wanted to know all about his marital status and he hers, and they lied to each other to their hearts' content while I kept a straight face and interpreted.
• On inspecting her buttocks he had found them covered with hundreds of pinpoint marks, some clearly very small scars. What could they be? I put his mind at rest. These were the marks left by iniezione reconstituenti: injections which are given in many of the pharmacies of Naples and which many middle-class women receive daily to keep their sexual powers at their peak.
• Lo Scalzo took me up to see Donna Maria Fidora, otherwise known as La Pitonessa (the Pythoness), who lives on her estate near Caivano, and is the richest landowner in this locality. Donna Maria was originally a circus performer who specialised in wrestling with a python,
• His mother if still alive will kiss and suck at his wounds in the presence of those invited to the funeral as a demonstration of her insatiable desire for vengeance.
• We were flabbergasted to discover that one of these was the famous midget gynaecologist Professore Dottore Salerno.. who is said to employ a tiny stepladder to work at his gynaecologist couch.
• But now a problem presented itself. Only four prisoners had been taken, and a man could be charged with banditry only if he was a member of a criminal association of not less than five persons... The solution in this case was to go straight to the nearest village to the house of a man who happened to have a criminal record and arrest him. He became the essential fifth bandit. His resignation was astonishing.
• ...rabbits of a kind bred only on the island. These are reared in total darkness, and their pale, almost transparent, non-fattening flesh is a gastronomic feature of the regime.
• Coming into the hotel, I found a row of half a dozen regulars - Don Enrico included - sitting under the palms, and at the sight of me I seemed to notice a sly movement of every left hand towards the right side of the crutch. A disconcerting confirmation of loss of favour.

<'Today Vesuvius erupted.'>

• It was the most majestic and terrible sight I have ever seen, or ever expect to see. The smoke from the crater slowly built up into a great bulging shape having all the appearance of solidity. It swelled and expanded so slowly that there was no sign of movement in the cloud which, by evening, must have risen thirty or forty thousand feet into the sky, and measured many miles across.
•  (where Nelson and Emmma Hamilton stood to view the eruption of their day)
• What took one by surprise about Pliny's pine was that it was absolutely motionless, not quite painted - because it was three-dimensional - but moulded on the sky; an utterly still, and utterly menacing shape. This pine, too, trailed uncharacteristically a little tropical liana of heavy ash. 
• A complete, undamaged cupola of a church, severed from the submerged building, jogged slowly towards us on its bed of cinders... A house, cautiously encircled and then overwhelmed, disappeared from sight intact, and a faint, distant grinding sound followed as the lava began its digestion.
• One of the Carabinieri patrolling on the lookout for looters told me that this was an image of San Gennaro, smuggled in from Naples on an outside chance that it might be of some use if all else failed. It had been covered with a sheet to avoid offence to the confraternity of San Sebastian and the Saint himself who might have been expected to resent this intrusion into his territory.

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