On the Shores of the Mediterranean by Eric Newby

invisible cords in a pale blue heaven.
    But we, with our noses pressed against the glass which separates us from these scenes, like children in a museum, can hear in the imagination as well as see everything that is going on because of the genius of those mostly unremembered men and women who constructed these scenes two hundred or more years ago: the clashing of the cymbals, the beating of the drums, the squeaking of the violin outside the tavern, the roaring of the camels, the neighing of the horses, one of which is frightened and is rearing on its hind legs, the sound of the women gossiping in the market place, the beating of the angels’ wings.
    Nothing much had changed either in the realms of death. It was still just as easy to lay on a horse-drawn funeral in Naples as it had been back in the early sixties. Hearses drawn by eight, ten or even twelve horses running in pairs and driven by a single cocchiero , coachman, were still available to convey the Neapolitans, or anyone else who fancied it, on their last journey to one of the vast citiesof the dead on the eastern outskirts. In fact the same firm, Bellomunno, still had a monopoly of this sort of funeral. There are large numbers of Bellomunnos in the Naples telephone book, all devoted to what are called Pompe Funebri , Funeral Pomps, otherwise the undertaking business, all of them belonging to the same clan, some of them having splintered off to form their own set-ups. The only branch of Bellomunno not listed is the horse-drawn section, and its stables off the Via Don Bosco, in a not-easy-to-be-found street called the Rampe del Campo, the Ramps of the Fields, are ex-directory.
    Via Don Bosco is a long, long street, straight at first, then winding and partly cobbled in its later, mountain sections, which begins in Piazza Carlo III opposite the Albergo dei Poveri, begun by Charles’s architect Ferdinando Fuga in 1751 but never completed. It then runs up through Doganella under an enormous concrete fly-over which joins Via Malta, on which the shoe market is held, to the Tangenziale, the Naples Ring Road. Via Don Bosco passes on its way the Cimitero Vecchio, the Old Cemetery, at the foot of the hill, the Cimitero Santa Maria del Pianto (of the Crying), and the sad-looking Protestant Cemetery, eventually reaching the square called Largo Santa Maria del Pianto. From here one road leads to Capodichino Airport; another, the Via del Riposo, to the Cimitero della Pietà, in which the poor are buried; and a third, Via Santa Maria del Riposo, to one of the principal entrances to the two biggest cemeteries, the Cimitero Monumentale and the Cimitero Nuovo, in both of which the dead are dried out in the tufa soil for eighteen months before being filed away in niches on an upper floor.
    It is a lugubrious part of Naples at any time and certainly not one in which to linger unaccompanied (you can get knocked on the nut just as easily in a Neapolitan cemetery as anywhere else in Naples), but one in which on almost any day in working hours,providing that business is normal, anyone interested in horses and/or horse-drawn funerals can see at least one horse-drawn hearse making its way up the long ascent to one or other of these resting places. Those ghouls who enjoy any sort of funeral or are simply interested in horseless carriages can see an almost endless procession of motor hearses of various degrees of melancholy splendour all on the same course.
    There are few places in the world, now that the Ancient Egyptian and the Imperial Chinese dynasties are no more, apart from Bali, where death is celebrated in such a memorably conspicuous fashion.
    Until long after the last war (and even now Bellomunno employees are not prepared to take an oath that such an operation could not still be organized out in the sticks) it was possible to assemble a cast of hundreds, even thousands, of professional mourners to follow the hearse, provided that those who were left alive had inherited sufficient