Scale 1 : 950,000.

The Neapolitan Apennines terminate in the south with the ancient volcano of Monte Vultur (4,356 feet). Farther south the country gradually sinks down into a table-land intersected by deep ravines, which discharge their waters in three directions—towards the Bay of Salerno, the Bay of Taranto, and the Adriatic. The Apennines, far from bifurcating, as shown on old maps, are cut in two by the low saddle of Potenza, and on the peninsula forming the “heel” of Italy only low ridges and terraces are met with.

The peninsula of Calabria, however, is rugged and mountainous. The Apennines, near Lagonegro, again rise above the zone of forests. Monte Polino (7,656 feet) is the highest summit in Naples. The group of which it forms the {288} centre occupies the entire width of the peninsula, and along its western coast it forms a wall of cliffs even less accessible than those of Liguria. Towards the south it opens out into wooded valleys, where the inhabitants collect manna, an esteemed medicinal drug. The deep valley of the Crati separates these mountains from the Sila (5,863 feet), which is composed of granites and schists, and still retains its ancient forests, haunted by brigands. The shepherds who pasture their flocks in the clearings of these woods are said to be the descendants of the Saracens, who formerly occupied this “Country of Rosin,” by which name it was known to the Greeks.

To the south of the isolated Sila the peninsula narrows to a neck of small elevation, where raised beaches attest the successive retreats of the sea. A third mountain mass, of crystalline formation, rises to the south of this depression, its furrowed slopes clad in forests. This is the Aspromonte (6,263 feet), or “rugged mountain.” One of its spurs forms the palm-clad promontory of Spartivento, or “parting of the winds.”

Naples, like Latium, has its volcanic mountains, which form two irregular ranges, one on the continent, the other in the Tyrrhenian Sea, and are, perhaps, connected beneath the sea with the volcanic mountains of the Liparic Islands and Mount Etna. One of these is Mount Vesuvius, the most famous volcano of the world, not because of its height or the terror of its eruptions, but because its history is that of an entire population who have made its lavas their home.

Scarcely have we left the defile of Gaeta and entered upon the paradisiacal Terra di Lavoro than we come upon the first volcano, the Rocca Monfina (3,300 feet), which rises between two calcareous mountains, one of which is the Massico, whose wines have been sung by Horace. No eruption of this volcano is on record, and a village now occupies its shattered crater. To judge from the streams of lava which surround its trachytic cone, its eruptions must have been formidable. The entire Campania is covered to an unascertained depth with ashes ejected from it, and the marine shells found in them prove that the whole of this region must have been upheaved at a comparatively recent epoch.

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THE BAY OF NAPLES