Part 22

Nothing is done in the way of public hygiene, and one sees women washing linen in water which is nothing more or less than an open drain. There is no street-lighting whatever; a proposal on the part of a North Italian firm to draw electric power from the Neto was scornfully rejected; one single tawdry lamp, which was bought some years ago “as a sample” in a moment of municipal recklessness, was lighted three times in as many years, and on the very day when it was least necessary—to wit, on midsummer eve, which happens to be the festival of their patron saint (St. John). “It now hangs”—so I wrote some years ago—“at a dangerous angle, and I