Italian unity had torn down and reconstructed much of it, but there still remained standing various rows of little low-roofed houses with white or pink facades, green doors, and lower floors further forward than the upper ones, serving as props for galleries with wooden balustrades.

Everything there that was not of brick was of clumsy carpentry resembling the work of ship calkers.

Iron did not exist in these terrestrial constructions suggestive of the sailboat whose rooms were as dark as staterooms.
Through the windows could be seen great conch-shells upon the chests of drawers, harsh and childish oil paintings representing frigates, and multi-colored shells from distant seas.
These dwellings repeated themselves in all the ports of the Mediterranean just as though they were the work of the same hand.

As a child, Ferragut had seen them in the _Grao_ of Valencia and continually ran across them in Barcelona, in the suburbs of Marseilles, in old Nice, in the ports of the western islands, and in the sections of the African coast occupied by Maltese and Sicilians.
Over the town, lined up along the Marinela, the churches of Naples reared their domes and towers with glazed roofs, green and yellow, which appeared more like pinnacles of Oriental baths than the roofs of Christian temples.
The barefooted _lazzarone_ with his red cap no longer existed, but the crowd,--clad like the workmen of all ports--still gathered around the daubed poster that represented a crime, a miracle or a prodigious specific, listening in silence to the harangue of the narrator or charlatan.

The old popular comedians were declaiming with heroic gesticulations the epic octavos of Tasso, and harps and violins were sounding accompaniments to the latest melody that Naples had made fashionable throughout the entire world.