Thursday, May 27:
Corpus Christi Day, much noise and banging, brutish affair which would shock anybody of a humanitarian or religious turn of mind. Siegfried full of it, six times to the cathedral, back and forth!
Sea trip to the grotto in two boats, really splendid, as also the return journey to the beautiful Vietri and after that the journey by rail, during which R. becomes increasingly exuberant. As we arrive, Naples exercises all its powerful and imperious magic. R. remarks that compared with this everything else looks like an idyll, and one feels here as if one were in the main center, he said "main city," of the world.
In the evening, as if to celebrate our return, Vesuvius keeps sending up its flares, so regularly that one feels an eruption is nigh.