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By Root 1398 0

by his formidably intelligent wife, Queen Maria Carolina, sister of Queen Marie-Antoinette of France, he occupied himself with setting up factories to make the splendid silk and china for the palace, specifying that they must be staffed by beautiful young girls who had to be very docile, sexily casting down their eyes when he happened to visit. He and his government neglected the city's infrastructure and hardly bothered to encourage trade. Most visitors believed the lazzaroni too idle to work, but the more astute realized that the city was utterly lacking in manufacturing industry. The poor were ruined by terrible unemployment, and the rich lost themselves in leisure.

Neapolitans devoted their energies to socializing. During the "universaljubilee" of the camevak, the royal family threw galas almost every night, and the San Carlo theater hosted a weekly masquerade teeming with shepherdesses, princesses, nuns, and oriental queens. On one day, nobles drove along the main street pelting one another and the spectators with balls of bread and plums frosted over with sugar. Ferdinand led the bombardment, gleefully ambushing his long-suffering ministers and ambassadors with sticky fruit.6 The most famous event in carnevale was the repellent Cocagna festival. Over a few days, workers made a giant mountain of bread, grain, cakes, pasta, fruit, and vegetables, and used rope to tether freshly killed cattle and live birds and lambs to the mass, prettifying it with fountains of wine, grottoes made of fish, and rolling pastures of vegetables. Guards held off the looters. Then, when the nobles were all assembled to watch, the guards left the mountain to the hungry crowds. In the ensuing bloody frenzy, birds were torn away from their posts so ferociously that only their wings were left behind, and the people fought and crushed one another, with some even stabbed in the tumult.7 The rich spectators then returned to their palaces to enjoy a sumptuous dinner, their hunger piqued by the sight of poor women fighting over a loaf of bread. Some were sickened, but the majority enjoyed Cocagna, telling themselves that the royal family was generously allowing their subjects to satisfy their brutal desires.

The author Laurence Sterne was entranced by Sir William's life of nothing but parties, operas, and masquerades. Drink flowed, everybody gambled, parties broke up at around five in the morning, thousands danced in the streets on a Sunday night, and even respectable families caroused late into the night. "If a young man is wild, and must run after women and bad company, this should be done abroad," proclaimed Dr. Johnson, and Naples was seen as the perfect place for womanizing. James Boswell admitted he chased girls unrestrainedly, his "blood inflamed by the burning climate."8 Every gentleman who arrived in the city aimed to have an affair with one of its legendary demimondaines or even a singer or dancer from the opera.

The English were the most eager participants in the Neapolitan parties. There were not quite the three thousand English that Stendhal later complained filled every available hotel (he had to search for five hours for a room), but there were hundreds, wandering with guides around Pompeii, bartering for vases, and fanning themselves in their carriages.9 As Sir William grumbled, "Go where you please on the continent, you are sure to find some straggling English tourists."10 Emma's countrymen packed hotels such as the Ville de Londres, which comforted with a stodgy full English breakfast those daring souls returning from Vesuvius.11 As one contented traveler reported, "Everybody else here might be English, and Naples has more the air of London than any place I have seen on the Continent."12 Theaters even ran plays to please the English about the political scuffles between the Whig and Tory MPs.13 But few amusements could drag the English from their main passion: shopping. Excited by the dozens of shops piled high with everything from fine art to tacky reproductions, they stuffed their bags with jewelry and souvenirs from the new excavations