Constantinople is so delightfully dirty and old.  Mrs. Jimmie sniffs at me because I can stop the peasants who lead their cows through the streets of Naples, and because I can drink a glass of warm milk; Mrs. Jimmie wants hers strained.  But if I can eat “Turkish Delight” in Constantinople, buying it in the bazaars, seeing it cut off the huge sticky mass with rusty lamp-scissors, perhaps dropped on the dirt-floor, and in a moment of abstraction polished off on the Turk’s trousers and rolled in soft sugar to wrap the real in the ideal—­if I can cope with that problem, surely a trifle like drinking unstrained milk, with the consoling satisfaction of stopping the carriage in an adorable spot, with the blue waters of the bay curling up on its shore down below on the right, and a sheer cliff covered with moss and clinging vines and surmounted by a superb villa on the left, is nothing.  For to eat or to drink amid such romantic surroundings, even if it were unstrained milk, was an experience not to be despised.

Yet here are two cities situated like amphitheatres upon the convex curve of two ideally beautiful harbors.  How do you compare them?  Each according to your own temper and humor.  You have seen hundreds of colored photographs both of Naples and Constantinople.  But of the two you will find only Naples exactly like the pictures.  Everybody agrees about Naples.  People disagree delightfully about Constantinople.  Some can never get beyond the dirt and smells and thievery.  Some never get used to the delicious thrills of surprise which every turn and every corner and every vista and every night and every morning hold for the beauty-lover.  Nothing could be more heterodox, more bizarre, more unconventional than Constantinople scenes.  Nothing could be more orthodox than the views of Naples.  To be sure, poets have written reams of poetry about it, travellers have sent home pages of rhapsodies about it, tourists have conscientiously “done” the town, with their heads cocked on one side and their forefingers on a paragraph in Baedeker; but just because of this, because everybody on earth who ever has been to Naples—­man or woman, Jew or Gentile, black or white, bond or free—­has wept and gurgled and had hysteria over its mild and placid beauty, is one reason why I find it somewhat tame.  Italian scenery seems to me laid out by a landscape-gardener.  Its beauty is absolutely conventional.  Nobody will blame you if you admire it.  To rave over it is like going to church—­it is the proper thing to do.  People will raise their eyebrows if you don’t, and watch what you eat, and speculate on your ancestry, and wonder about your politics.