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Updated: June 10, 2025
The Strada di Roma is the Broadway of Naples, a fine, busy street, more than a mile in length and lined with elegant business stores, cafés, hotels, and public offices. The famous Riviera di Chiaja, or Quay, is also a noble street running along the shore of the bay, lined on one side by an almost endless array of palaces, and on the other by the long park separating it from the sea.
On the Riviera di Chiaja side the electric tramcars run close to the railings. Between the garden and the sea is the fashionable drive, a broad road bordered by a low wall, beyond which the Mediterranean splashes with gentle murmurs when the weather is fine.
He finds that Naples, independently of its suburbs, consists of three streets where every body goes, and five hundred streets where nobody goes. The three streets are, the Chiaja, the Toledo, and the Forcella; the five hundred others are nameless a labyrinth of houses, which might be compared to that of Crete, deducting the Minotaur, and adding the Lazzaroni.
There is no time yet to see about chaperon. When it comes eleven hour, I say, 'The theatre is ceased; and I go to bed. Then this morning I know no person; I say, 'Very well, I go and see Leo; he will understand; it is how I meet him in the Chiaja, and he says, 'Good-morning, Nina; shall we go for a little walk out to Pozzuoli' it is just the same."
I had engaged a house at Chiaja on the edge of the sea. Opposite me I had the island of Capri, and this situation delighted me. Hardly had I arrived when Count Skavronska, the Russian Ambassador at Naples, whose house was next to mine, sent one of his runners to find out how I was, and at the same time had a very choice dinner brought me.
The electric tram and the rail-road have in fact killed Pozzuoli as a winter resort, more’s the pity, for it is not only a spot of singular interest in itself but its climate is certainly superior to that of Naples, for the great headland which shuts off the city from the Phlegrean Fields serves also to act as a buffer against the icy tramontana that sweeps along the Chiaja in winter and early spring.
Then came a story which amazed me, and riveted the ears of every creature there. That story I reproduce from the columns of the 'Giorno. Advocate: Where did you go next? Witness: To the Caffe d' Italia to await my friend. Advocate: How long did you stay? Witness: Only half-an-hour. I felt suddenly unwell, and walked again on the Chiaja. Advocate: Did you see your friend again? Witness: Yes.
The case is not different with Shakespeare, that marvelous Spanish-Moorish-Saxon synthesis of taste, over whom an ancient Athenian of the circle of AEschylus would have half-killed himself with laughter or irritation: but we accept precisely this wild motleyness, this medley of the most delicate, the most coarse, and the most artificial, with a secret confidence and cordiality; we enjoy it as a refinement of art reserved expressly for us, and allow ourselves to be as little disturbed by the repulsive fumes and the proximity of the English populace in which Shakespeare's art and taste lives, as perhaps on the Chiaja of Naples, where, with all our senses awake, we go our way, enchanted and voluntarily, in spite of the drain-odour of the lower quarters of the town.
"Let us go on," said Freya. "Accompany me a little ways. We shall talk together and then you can leave me.... Perhaps we shall separate greater friends than ever." They strolled in silence all the length of the Via Partenope until they reached the gardens along the beach of Chiaja, losing sight of the hotel. Ferragut wished to renew the conversation, but could not begin it.
To complete the strongly individualized scene, there are the graceful palms, orange-trees, and fountains of the park, amid abundant marble statuary, and flowering shrubs, with the sea, Capri, and Vesuvius for a background, which together make up the view of the Chiaja at twilight.
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