As the Italians usually dress beyond their means, the dandies of Naples are very gorgeous.  If it is now, say, four o’clock in the afternoon, they are all coming down the Toledo with the streams of carriages bound for the long drive around the bay.  But our foot-passers go to walk in the beautiful Villa Reale, between this course and the sea.  The Villa is a slender strip of Paradise, a mile long; it is rapture to walk in it, and it comes, in description, to be a garden-grove, with feathery palms, Greekish temples, musical fountains, white statues of the gods, and groups of fair girls in spring silks.  If I remember aright, the sun is always setting on the bay, and you cannot tell whether this sunset is cooled by the water or the water is warmed by the golden light upon it, and upon the city, and upon all the soft mountain-heights around.

III.

Walking westward through the whole length of the Villa Reale, and keeping with the crescent shore of the bay, you come, after a while, to the Grot of Posilippo, which is not a grotto but a tunnel cut for a carriage-way under the hill.  It serves, however, the purpose of a grotto, if a grotto has any, and is of great length and dimness, and is all a-twinkle night and day with numberless lamps.  Overlooking the street which passes into it is the tomb of Virgil, and it is this you have come to see.  To reach it, you knock first at the door of a blacksmith, who calls a species of custodian, and, when this latter has opened a gate in a wall, you follow him up-stairs into a market-garden.

In one corner, and standing in a leafy and grassy shelter somewhat away from the vegetables, is the poet’s tomb, which has a kind of claim to genuineness by virtue of its improbable appearance.  It looks more like a bake-oven than even the Pompeian tombs; the masonry is antique, and is at least in skillful imitation of the fine Roman work.  The interior is a small chamber with vaulted or wagon-roof ceiling, under which a man may stand upright, and at the end next the street is a little stone commemorating the place as Virgil’s tomb, which was placed there by the Queen of France in 1840, and said by the custodian (a singularly dull ass) to be an exact copy of the original, whatever the original may have been.  This guide could tell us nothing more about it, and was too stupidly honest to pretend to know more.  The laurel planted by Petrarch at the door of the tomb, and renewed in later times by Casimir Delavigne, has been succeeded by a third laurel.  The present twig was so slender, and looked so friendless and unprotected, that even enthusiasm for the memory of two poets could not be brought to rob it of one of its few leaves; and we contented ourselves with plucking some of the grass and weeds that grew abundantly on the roof of the tomb.