From the second edition of N.G. Wilson’s From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance (pg.36):
Yet a long time was to pass before Byzantium came to be recognised as a civilisation worthy of the same kind of study as classical Greece. More typical of the immediate response to Procopius’ narrative was Bruni’s own delight and surprise when in 1442 king Alfonso of Aragon succeeded in capturing Naples by the same stratagem that Procopius reports of Belisarius, who found a hidden way into the city through the sewers.
I laughed aloud reading this and said to myself – ‘they learned from the mistake and have since made the entire city an open sewer.’ My wife later suggested that maybe Belisarius and Alfonso simply mistook the native Neapolitan charm for a sewer in the first place.
Extracts 