My dear Henry
I think you do not write to me half often enough. I wish when the family plans are not very clearly defined, you would elucidate them & tell me whether you come to Naples <1> or not this winter, for I make out nothing. If you had been here now you would have escaped the severe weather you have been suffering from at Rome. The fine climate I find is restricted to the sea shore & a few plains bordering on it – at least in winter. I hear from constantinople <2> it is six weeks since they saw the sun last & the summer has been very cool the thermometer never having been so high as the lowest degree at which it was here during July August Sepr & part of Octr. Are you sure Jane <3> is coming at all? I dare say she is waiting to see the Iris Florentina blow in its native soil & it will be late enough this season – at Rome she will daudle [sic] out the spring to see Orchis Romana & so be too late to see anything Neapolitanum – & they are all as good & much earlier in the Botanic garden here If I was married I should be very jealous of Pyracanthus & in general of all the class Rosandica. I hear you have 4º of cold in the houses which is more than we have had out of doors in the most exposed places, eg the Bot. garden which has been considerately placed on a fine slope to the Levante which brings the frost from the Apennine [sic] because it commands a fine view of Vesuvius! as if to warm itself – If one can believe Flor. Nap. <4> this kingdom was so poor in Iris’s they had none till I. fugax was found on a wild mountn in Calabria I hope Rome is not such a cold catching place as this – here the winds are alternately so damp & sharp that it requires more care than I pretend to take of myself to keep myself well & accordingly I have been keeping my room four days to starve on macaroni all because the wind would change one day & give me a horrid cold. Most fortunately the change was from good to bad so I had enjoyed a fortnight of fine cold weather & am comparatively content to be shut up in days of rain & storm which seem as if they were to last another fortnight. In one point of view the interests of my correspondents suffer, for now I have plenty of time to write, the weather is so bad that nobody comes to tell me any thing worth writing to them. I hear, to my great annoyance, that there is some difficulty in passing the Garigliano again, for the bridge not having yet recovered the violent shock it received about 6 weeks ago, is thought too weak to stand another flood & has been divided for fear of unlucky accidents – for the floods there sometimes bring down trees & these trees chuse the unfortunate moment when a courier is passing bringing letters to me, to knock all over into the river – So I dont know when you will receive this letter. – The above report I have got from my fellow attaché who is just come back from killing boars at Fondi & was stopped some hours at the river & at last forced to walk one stage in this delightful weather. They give terrible accounts of the banditti in that quarter who come down with the woodcocks when the snow begins to lie on the mountains. They cut a mans head off one night last week. But no travellers have been attacked for some time past, & tho everybody talks of the banditti nobody seems to care the least about them. It seems to me that in the mountains of this country they may defy anybody but they brave the efforts (such as they are) of justice even in the plains now.
I wish you had been with me at Benevento There is a magnificent snow capped group of mountains called Monte Vergine between which & a vast rock called Taburno is the Valle Caudina a very pretty cultivated valley – but no more answering to the descriptions of the Furcæ Caudinæ <5> than a theatre open at one end could be like an amphitheatre with two narrow entrances which is what we ought to look for. After all the Romans had no business there to be defeated by twenty thousand Gentiles as I was gravely informed & my Cicerone <6> at Benevento on shewing me the Arch of Trajan <7> at Benevento assured me it had been very much defaced by the Samnites. – I was wrong in what I said about Iris’s they have a dozen sorts but Tenore <8> forgot all but his grand discovery the fugax. There are two friends of mine going to Rome next week whom I must introduce to you because I think you will like them one is Mr Tyndall the other Mr Chilton I shall write again by them when they go otherwise you do not get my letters under a week if any trust is to be put in dates & postmarks Pray answer this under a fortnight & let me know all your plans – no good rooms under 280 or 300 dollars a month. when I say there is a governess in the case they set down 3 or 4 more rooms for her –
Yr affte
W T H F S
Tuesday 14 Jan.
A Monsieur
Monsieur Talbot
Palazzo CevaRoma
Notes:
1. WHFT reached Naples before the end of January 1823. [See Doc. No: 01050].
2. WTHFS had been a junior diplomat immediately before being sent to Naples. [See Doc. No: 00922and Doc. No: 01466].
3. Jane Harriot Nicholl, née Talbot (1796–1874).
4. Flora Napolitana of Michele Tenore.
5. The Furculæ Caudinæ was a mountain pass where the Roman army was trapped by the Samnites [a people of the S. Apennines] in 321 BC. WTHFS and WHFT were interested in identifying the sites of events in Classical history.
6. Guide.
7. Roman emperor from AD98 to AD117, that is, several centuries after the Roman clashes with the Samnites.
8. Michel Tenore (1780–1861), Italian botanist & traveller.