England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [68]
CHAPTER 19
The Greatest Splendor in the World
Naples was the third biggest city in Europe after London and Paris. About nine miles in circuit, it contained just fewer than 400,000 inhabitants, as well as hundreds of foreigners and troops of soldiers. As a bestselling guidebook of the time put it, the “gay and populous” city was “one of the most agreeable places in the world to reside at.”1 Naples was a town of big-time glamour and massive spending, an eighteenth-century Las Vegas, but it was a flimsy pack of cards, built on the slenderest of economic and political props.
Today, the Palazzo Sessa is in the wealthiest area of the city, just off the Piazza dei Martiri in Chiaia. Emma's old home is now an exclusive residential block, near via Filangeri and via dei Mille, which houses the boutiques of international designers. Exquisite women, fingers sparkling with jewels, wander the piazza with their dogs. The road to Sir William's house hosts Naples's best bookshop and a few chic wine bars and is flanked by a handsome cake shop. The window bursts with elaborate confections of cream and puff pastry and chocolate and ricotta, topped with cherries or strawberries, all very like the sweet cakes full of ricotta, citrus peel, and nuts that so thrilled eighteenth-century English travelers long habituated to plum pudding. So many of the places that Emma lived are now changed entirely: Ness is a comfortable commuter village, Hawarden is a housing estate, Chatham Place, Arlington Street and Clarges Street are covered in office blocks, and Paradise Merton is a car park. Only in Chiaia are there the remnants of the luxurious life Emma led there over two hundred years ago.
Neapolitan buildings were painted bright colors: garnet, sapphire blue, pink, and mint green. Foreign visitors sighed after the clean lines of the buildings in Rome and declared themselves disgusted by the tacky, florid excess of the palaces, churches, and the recently completed San Carlo Opera House. But the extravagant architecture suited Naples. People, noise, and color spilled out of every doorway. Even travelers from London, a city more than twice as populous, gazed openmouthed at the throngs. Unlike London, where the poor congregated in hidden slums, the Neapolitans seemed to live almost entirely outdoors. There were about 40,000 lazzaroni, the ragged unemployed who filled the streets, all fervent fans of the king and, to the horror of English visitors, rather fond of swimming and sunbathing naked.2 At the other end of society were over a hundred princes and dozens more dukes, all obsessed by, according to one commentator, "the brilliancy of their equipages; the number of their attendants, the richness of their dress, and the grandeur of their titles," despite the hot climate.3
The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which covered Naples and most of the area south of the city, including Sicily, had not been governed by a Neapolitan since the medieval period, ruled instead by a seemingly endless succession of foreign dynasties. Rich and poor Neapolitans alike had family histories of repression and resentment, and Ferdinand was not the monarch to bring them together. He had ascended to the throne in 1759, as an eight-year-old boy king. At the age of nearly forty, he was still a big baby, spoiled and sometimes spiteful. As Sir William's friend and relation William Beckford observed, he needed only a "boar to stab or a pigeon to shoot" to be entirely satisfied.4 He laughed off protocol, teased his diplomats, devoted every day to hunting or fishing, and could not speak French or even correct Italian, sticking to a broad Neapolitan vernacular. Sir William sighed that his "habits of dissipation have taken such a firm root that there is little probability of his ever changing."5 Largely ruled