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.
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