An occasional faint light marks dissolute Rome’s favorite place of revelry, Baiæ the magnificent. In its heyday every house, as we read, was a palace; and it has been said that every woman who entered it a Penelope came out a Helen. Through their faded green blinds no light may be seen in the yellow stone houses of neighboring Puteoli where Paul, Timothy, and Luke took refuge in the early days of the Faith. Stolid pagan Rome had little time for them, considering that Cumæ was just around the headland, with Dædalus landing from his flight from Crete and the frantic Sibyl, at the very Jaws of Avernus, screaming her “Dies iræ! Dies illa!”
Distant Ischia appears a huge ghostly blot, mysterious and solemn. Scarce an outline can be caught of its fabled, crag-hung castle, chambered as the very nautilus and eloquent of the unhappy Vittoria Colonna. How often has Michael Angelo climbed with sighs that old stone causeway where now the fishermen mend their blackened nets! Ischia never wants for devotees, however, and already a quarter-century has sufficed to dull the horror of that July night when Casamicciola paid its quota of three thousand lives to the dread greed of the earthquake. To-day one lingers, undisturbed by such memories, amidst the pretty whitewashed cottages set in olive groves and vineyards, loiters among the picturesque straw plaiters of Lacco, or dreams to the drowsy tinkle of goat bells in the myrtle and chestnut groves on the slopes of Mont’ Epomeo.
Shadowy Capri, isle of enchantment, lies soft and dim off the Sorrento headland as we swing our little vessel toward the city. It seems only a delightful dream that a few mornings ago my déjeuner was served on a cool terrace of the Quisisana there, and that I looked down over the coffee-urn on olive groves and sloping hillsides green with famous vineyards. With joy I relive the row around its precipitous shores, the eerie swim in the elfland of the Blue Grotto, the drive down the white, dusty road from the lofty perch of Anacapri to the pebbly beaches of Marina Grande, before a fascinating, unfolding panorama of verdant lawns, fruited terraces, snowy villas, and bold cliffs crowned with fantastic ruins. Sinister Tiberius and his unspeakable companions have small place in our permanent memories of Capri; one is more apt to recall the charming blue and white Virgin in the cool grotto beside the old Stone Stairs.
A faint rim of lights on the mainland marks Sorrento, and a patch nearer the city, Castellammare; and were we nearer, the great white hotels would doubtless be found brilliant and musical. Could we but see it now, we should find the moonlit statue of Tasso in the little square vastly more tolerable than by day, and this would be a pleasant hour to spend on the old green bench before it absorbed in stirring thoughts of the “Gerusalemme Liberata” in the place where its author was born. Monte Sant’ Angelo looms above Castallammare spectre-like in night shadows, and the royal ilex groves must be taken on faith. The crested hoopoes, crowned of King Solomon, have long been asleep on the mountain-sides, but Italian Fashion, devoted to its Castellammare, having idled and rested all day in the bagni, now flirts and dances at the verandaed stabilimenti. An occasional faint breath of fragrance recalls the floral luxuriance that is so notable here—the gorgeous scarlet geraniums, snowy daturas, cactus, and aloe, festoons of smilax, and the carmine oleanders that they call “St. Joseph’s Nosegay.”
Far away to the southeastward, vague and ghostly headlands are dimming toward regions of rarest beauty—Amalfi, Majori, Cetara, Salerno. In our happy thoughts the smooth, white Corniche road lies like a delicate thread along the green mountain-sides,—those Mountains of the Blest, whose rounded brows home the nightingale, whose shoulders are terraces of fruits of the tropics and whose storied feet rest eternally on white beaches that glisten in the blue waters of a matchless bay. A memory this, compounded of pebbly, curving shores sweeping around soft, distant headlands; lustrous groves of pomegranates and oranges; picturesque fishing hamlets of little stone houses nestled away in deep, shady inlets; the patter and shuffle of barefooted women trotting steadily through the dust under great hampers of lemons; sunburned workmen singing homeward through the dusk; the shouts and laughter of bare-headed fishermen drawing their red-bottomed boats up on the shore; and the low, contented singing of your Neapolitan coachman who, as twilight falls, looks long and dreamily out to sea and no longer cracks his whip over the weary little Barbary ponies that are drawing you up the dusty heights toward the cool rose-pergola of the Cappuccini. Visitors, reluctantly departing, will never forget this land “where summer sings and never dies,” and must ever after feel with Longfellow:—
“Sweet the memory is to me
Of a land beyond the sea,
Where the waves and mountains meet,
Where, amid her mulberry-trees,
Sits Amalfi in the heat,