Naples, Past and Present

by Arthur H. Norway

It was a great and terrible fight. Goths and Romans fought on foot. Teias the king fell after bearing himself right nobly; but the Goths fought on, and when darkness interrupted the engagement they did but pause in order to renew it with no less desperation when the light returned. When both armies were nearly wearied out the Goths sent a messenger to Narses. They perceived, they said, that God had declared against them, and that the strife was hopeless. If terms were granted they would depart from Italy. The Imperial general accepted their proposals, and the Goths, the noblest invaders who ever entered Italy, turned their backs for ever on the fertile land where they had made their homes, crossed the Alps in order, and were never heard of in Italy again. So perished, until our day, the last hope of unity for Italy, and for full thirteen centuries that unhappy land was drenched in constant blood—the prey of conquerors who could not conquer, and the sport of statesmen who never learnt to govern. For the Roman Emperor could build no state comparable to the one he had destroyed, and what Italy owes to him is forty generations of unhappiness.

In travelling through this country one is haunted by the perpetual desire to look back into past ages, and admonished almost as often that as yet one cannot do so. Indeed, one looks forward almost as often, anticipating that day when scholars will combine to assist in the excavation of all the buried regions, when every villa shall be disinterred, and the secrets hidden underneath the vineyards be exposed to the light of day again. Here on the first slopes of the hills around Castellammare lay the groups of country villas which formed ancient Stabiæ, and every man who goes this way longs to see them disinterred. For what is seen at Pompeii is but half the life of Roman days—a city stripped of its country villas and all its rustic intercourse. Pompeii stood in the heart of the country. Its citizens must have had farms upon the mountain slopes; they must have had concern in husbandry as well as trade; there must have been hourly comings and goings between the crowded streets and the sweet hillsides of Varano, where the grapes ripened and the wine-vats gathered the crushed juice, where the oil dripped slowly from the olive-presses, and the jars stood waiting for the mountain honey.

The day will come when all this great life of Roman husbandry will be disclosed to us, and we shall know it as we now know the city streets; for it is here still upon the mountain slopes, buried safe beneath the vineyards, waiting only till its vast interest is comprehended by people in sufficient numbers to provide the funds to excavate it. Stabiæ was by no means another Pompeii. It was no city, but a group of farms and country villas, and has countless things to teach us which cannot be seen or learnt beside the Sarno. The very houses were of other shapes and plans; for the Romans did not reproduce town houses in the country, but designed them for different uses, and embodied apartments which had no matches in the city. There are the residences of wealthy men, adorned with noble peristyles, mosaics, and fine statues, and side by side with them the home farms—if one may use a modern term—the chambers of the husbandmen, and the courts in which they worked. There, too, are buildings far too large for any family and differing in arrangement from any private dwelling yet discovered. The use of these great buildings can only be conjectured. Ruggiero, whose self-denying labour has collected in one monumental work all the information now obtainable upon the subject, suggests that they may have been hospitals, a supposition probable enough when we remember that the Romans must have been no less aware than we ourselves how potent a tonic is the mountain air for patients suffering from the fevers bred upon the plains. In Ruggiero's pages one may see the scanty and imperfect plans sketched out by those who dug upon the site more than a century ago. Posterity owes those hasty workers but little gratitude. They were inspired by hardly more than a mean kind of curiosity. They were treasure-seekers, pure and simple; and what they judged to be of little value they broke up with their pickaxes. Swinburne, the traveller, watched a portion of the excavations, but without intelligence, and has nothing to tell us of much interest. "When opened," he says, speaking evidently of a villa on Varano, it may be the very one in which Pliny passed the last night of his life, "the apartment presented us with the shattered walls, daubed rather than painted with gaudy colours in compartments, and some birds and animals in the cornices, but in a coarse style, as indeed are all the paintings of Stabiæ. In a corner we found the brass hinges and lock of a trunk; near them part of the contents, viz. ivory flutes in pieces, some coins, brass rings, scales, steelyards, and a very elegant silver statue of Bacchus about twelve inches high, represented with a crown of vine leaves, buskins, and the horn of plenty." With this perfunctory account we must rest content, until some millionaire shall conceive the notion of delighting all the world instead of building a palace for himself. But the camel will have gone through the needle's eye before that happens.

CHAPTER X.
CASTELLAMMARE: ITS WOODS, ITS
FOLKLORE
AND THE TALE OF THE MADONNA OF POZZANO

"Marzo è pazzo" ("March is mad") say the Neapolitans, contemptuous of his inconstancies. God forbid that I should try to prove the sanity of March; but it is long odds if April is one whit the better. His moon is in its first quarter, and still sirocco blows up out of the sea day by day. The grey clouds drift in banks across Vesuvius and hide the pillar of his smoke, dropping down at whiles even to the level of the plain. From time to time it is as if the mountain stirred and shook himself, flinging off the weight of vapour from his flanks and crest, so that again one can see the rolling column of dense smoke, stained and discoloured by the reflection of the fires far down within the cone, now rosy, now a menacing dull brown which is easily distinguishable from the watery clouds that gather in the heavens. Yet slowly, steadily the veil of mist returns, while mine host murmurs ruefully, "Sette Aprilanti, giorni quaranta!" But it is not the seventh of April yet, so we may still be spared the sight of dripping trees for forty days. An hour ago, when I ventured up the hill towards the woods, a tattered, copper-coloured varlet of a boy looked out of the cellar where his mother was stooping over the smoking coals in her brass chafing-dish. "Aprile chiuove, chiuove," he bawled, as if it were the greatest news in the world. He thinks the harvest will be mended by the April rains; though if he and others in this region knew whence their true harvest comes, they would humbly supplicate our Lady of Pozzano to give fine weather to the visitors.

To be stayed at the gate of the Sorrento peninsula by doubtful weather is by no means an unmixed misfortune. It may be that our Lady of Pozzano sometimes employs the showers to bring hasty travellers to a better way of thinking. Certainly many people hurry past Castellammare to their own hurt. The town is unattractive, and may, moreover, be reproached with wickedness, though it suffers, as is said, from the low morality of Greek sailors, rather than from any crookedness of its homeborn citizens. But the mountain slopes behind it are immensely beautiful. No woods elsewhere in the peninsula are comparable to these. No other drives show views so wide and exquisite framed in such a setting of fresh spring foliage, nor is there upon these shores an hotel more comfortable or more homelike than the "Quisisana," which stands near the entrance of the woods; and this I say with confidence, though not unaware that the judgments of travellers upon hotels are as various as their verdicts on a pretty woman, who at one hour of the day is ten times prettier than at another, and may now and then look positively plain.

Castellammare possesses an excellent sea-front, which would have made a pleasant promenade had not a selfish little tramway seized upon the side next the shore, guarding itself by a high railing from the intrusion of strangers in search of cool fresh air. Thus cast back on a line of dead walls, house-fronts as mean as only a fourth-rate Italian town can boast, one has no other amusement than gazing at the mountains, which in truth are beautiful enough for anyone. Very steep and high they tower above Castellammare; not brown and purple, as when I looked up at them across the broken walls of Pompeii, but clad in their true colours of green of every shade, dark and sombre where ravines are chiselled out upon the slopes, or where the pines lie wet and heavy in the morning shadow. Higher up, the flanks of the mountains are rough with brushwood, while on the summits the clear air blows about bare grass deepening into brown. Sometimes sloping swiftly to the sea, but more often dropping in sheer cliffs of immense height, this dark and shadowy mountain wall thrusts itself out across the blue waters, while here and there a village gleams white upon some broken hillside, or a monastery rears its red walls among the soft grey of the olive woods. There lies Vico, on its promontory rock, showing at this distance only the shade of its great beauty; and beyond the next lofty headland is Sorrento, at the foot of a mountain country so exquisite, so odorous with myrtle and with rosemary, so fragrant of tradition and romance, that it is, as I said, a good fortune which checks the traveller coming from the plain at the first entrance of the hills and gives him time to realise the nature of the land which lies before him.

It needs no long puzzling to discover whence the importance of Castellammare has been derived in all the centuries. The port offers a safe shelter for shipping, which of itself counts for much upon a coast possessing few such anchorages; and it lies near the entrance of that valley road across the neck of the Sorrento peninsula, which is the natural route of trade between Naples and Salerno. The road is of much historical interest, as any highway must be which has been followed by so many generations of travellers, both illustrious and obscure; and any man who chooses to recollect by what various masters Salerno has been held will be able to people this ancient track with figures as picturesque as any in the history of mankind. He will observe, moreover, the importance of the Castle of Nocera, which dominates this route of traders. I confess to being somewhat puzzled as to the exact course by which the commerce of Amalfi extricated itself from the mountains and dispersed itself over the mainland. Doubtless the merchants of La Scala and Ravello followed the still existing road from Ravello to Lettere, and thence to Gragnano, whence comes the ancient punning jest, "L'Asene de Gragnano Sapevano Lettere." This road is certainly ancient, and early in the present century it was the usual approach to Amalfi, whither travellers were carried in litters across the mountains. The little handbook of Ravello, based on notes left by the late Mr. Reid, seems to account this road more recent than the age of Ravello's commercial greatness. Probably a recency of form rather than of course is meant; but in any case, I cannot believe that the merchants of Amalfi sent out their trade by a route which began for them with an ascent so very long and arduous. Possibly they approached Gragnano by a road running up the valley from Minori or Majori. Of course the traders of old days were very patient of rough mountain tracks, and did not look for the wide beaten turnpikes which we have taught ourselves to regard as essential to commerce. Doubtless, therefore, many a team of mules from Amalfi, laden with silks and spices from the East, came down through Lettere, where it would scarce get by the castle of the great counts who held that former stronghold of the Goths without paying toll or tribute for its safety on the mountain roads. And so, passing through Gragnano and beneath the hillsides where the palaces of ancient Stabiæ lie buried, the wearied teams would come down at last to Castellammare, where they would need rest ere beginning the hot journey by the coast road into Naples.

Both the roads which diverge from Castellammare, the one heading straight across the plains towards the high valley of La Cava, the other clinging to the fresh mountain slopes, are therefore full of interest. Of Nocera, indeed, its castle full of memories of Pope Urban VI., and its fine church Santa Maria Maggiore, some two miles out, any man with ease might write a volume. But we stayed long scorching on the plains among the buried cities; and the hill route is the more inviting now. The weather is disposed to break. A gleam of sun sparkles here and there upon the water. Let us see what the hillsides have to show us.