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Updated: June 1, 2025
You govern us still with absolute authority and you govern the most miserable people on the face of the globe." "And is this a fair description of the people of England?" said Lord Valentine. "A flash of rhetoric, I presume, that would place them lower than the Portuguese or the Poles, the serfs of Russia or the Lazzaroni of Naples."
Some looked like gentlemen, others like peasants; most of them I should have taken for the lazzaroni of this Southern city, men with cloth caps, like the classic liberty-cap, or with wide-awake hats. There were one or two women of the lower classes, without bonnets, the elder ones with white caps, the younger bareheaded.
Indeed, the only hour in the day when there is any appearance of life in these streets is at noon, when the labors of the garden and the exercises of the games being suspended, many of the male inhabitants either sit about idle, or lie sleeping like Italian lazzaroni, or stand grouped together in long, light-colored surtouts with a negligent grace and natural dignity not surpassed in antique statues.
I would rather go down to Southern Italy and look at lazzaroni lie on stone walls, in red cloaks, as they do in pictures, and not be obliged to topple off the common Italian to pile the gray stone with old memories of some great dead man. Everything is ghostly in Rome. Now, there must be some excitement in Southern Italy.
"In the South the contempt for labor bred of slavery has so permeated society, that we see great, coarse, vulgar lazzaroni lying about in rags and vermin, and dependent on government rations, maintaining, as their only source of self-respect, that they never have done and never will do a stroke of useful work in all their lives.
And thus, according to the belief of the lazzaroni, that excellent Christian, P. Virgilius Maro, had stepped by mere succession and right of inheritance into his wicked old grandpapa's infernal powers and knowledge, both of which he exercised, doubtless, for centuries without blame, and for the benefit of the faithful. "Strange," &c.
There are some among these men who do not even know their own name, and who go to confess anonymous sins; not being able to tell who it is that has committed them. There is a subterranean grotto at Naples where thousands of Lazzaroni pass their lives, only going out at noon to see the sun, and sleeping the rest of the day, whilst their wives spin.
The government rather encouraged this growth of play-days, as the Italian Bourbons used to foster mendicancy, by way of keeping the people as unthrifty as possible. Lazzaroni are so much more easily managed than burghers! It is only the holy days that are successfully celebrated in Spain.
As the countenances of these gentlemen offered nothing very interesting to the multitude, whisperings arose, little by little, among the spectators, then some bold spirits ventured a jest or two upon the fattest or the baldest of the townsmen, and at last the boldest of the lazzaroni slipped between the soldiers' legs to collect the wax that was running down from the lighted tapers.
Pity the lot of the multimillionaire who has most incautiously allowed it to become known that he considers it "a disgrace for any man to die rich." Five hundred letters a day are sent to Andrew Carnegie, with suggestions concerning the best way in which he can escape disgrace. The lazzaroni of America are as bad as the same tribe in Italy, only they play for bigger stakes.
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