Sigelgaita’s bust is an almost unique example of the marble portraiture of the Thirteenth Century—if indeed it truly be a work of that time, for so noble, so lifelike is this head with its rolled hair, its princely coronet and long earrings, so like is it to the head of the Capuan Juno, that one half suspects it of being from a Roman hand—those masters of marmoral records of character—and that it was seized upon by Sigelgaita to serve as a memorial of herself.
Bernardo Battinelli, a notary of Ravello, writing in 1540 relates an anecdote which shows what esteem was inspired by this marble portrait long after its original was dust:
“I remember in the aforesaid month and year, the Spanish Viceroy Don Pietro di Toledo sent for the marble bust, which is placed in the Cathedral and much honest resistance was made, so that the first time he that came returned empty-handed, but shortly after he came back, and it was necessary to send it to Naples in his keeping, and having sent the magnifico Giovanni Frezza, who was in Naples, and Ambrose Flomano from this place to his Excellency, after much ado, by the favour of the glorious Virgin Mary, and by virtue of these messengers from thence after a few days the head was returned.”
In the year 1851 the palace of these splendid Rufoli, which in the time of Roger of Sicily had housed ninety knights with their men at arms, had fallen to tragical decay. A great landslide in the Fifteenth Century destroyed the harbour of Amalfi; hid its great quays and warehouses, its broad streets and roaring markets beneath the sea, and reduced it from a powerful Republic, the rival of Venice and Genoa, to a mere fishing village. A little later the plague followed, and decimated the now poverty-stricken inhabitants of Ravello, and then the great nobles began to drift away to Naples, came more and more rarely to visit their Calabrian seats, and these gradually sank in the course of time into ruin and decay. Fortunately in the year before mentioned a rich English traveller, making the still fashionable “grand tour,” happened into Ravello, saw the possibilities of this crumbling castle set upon one of the most beautiful sites in the world, and promptly purchased it from its indifferent Neapolitan owner. He, much absorbed in the opera dancers and the small intrigues of the city, was secretly and scornfully amused that a mad Englishman should be willing to part with so much good hard money in exchange for ivied towers and gaping arches in a remote country town.
The Englishman mended the arches, strengthened the towers, gathered up from among the weeds the delicate sculptures and twisted columns, destroyed nothing, preserved and restored with a reverent hand, and made for himself one of the loveliest homes in all Italy. It was in that charming garden, swung high upon a spur of the glorious coast, that Jane and Peripatetica contracted that passion for Ravello which haunted them with a homesickness for it all through Sicily. For never again did they find anywhere such views, such shadowed green ways of ilex and cypress, such ivy-mantled towers, such roses, such sheets of daffodils and blue hyacinths. They dreamed there through the long day, regretting that their luggage had been sent on to Sicily by water, and—forgetting quite their quest of Persephone—that they were therefore unable to linger in the sweet precincts of the Pantaleone wines and cooking, devoting weeks to exploring the neighbouring hills, and to unearthing more pulpits and more Jonahs in the nearby churches.
In the dusk they lingered by the Fountain of Strange Beasts, in the dusk they wandered afoot down the cork-screwed paths up which they had so furiously and smellily mounted. Berliet hooted contemptuously behind them as he crawled after, jeering as at “scare-cats,” who dared mount, but shrank from descending these abrupt curves and tiptilted inclines except in the safety of their own low-heeled shoes.
At Amalfi they plunged once again into the noisy tourist belt—the va et vient, the chatter, the screaming flutter of the passenger pigeons of the Italian spring. And yet there was peace in the tiny white cells in which they hung over the sheer steep, while the light died nacreously along the West. There was quiet in certain tiny hidden courts and terraces under the icy moonlight, and Jane said in one of these—her utterance somewhat interrupted by the chattering of her teeth, for Italian spring nights are as cold as Italian spring days are warm—Jane said:
“What idiotic assertions are made in our time about ancient Europe having no love for, no eye for, Nature’s beauty! Did you ever come across a mediæval monastery, a Greek or Roman temple that was not placed with an unerring perception of just the one point at which it would look best, just at the one point at which everything would look best from it?”
“Of course I never did,” Peripatetica admitted with sympathetic conviction. “We get that absurd impression of their indifference from the fact that our forebears were not nearly so fond of talking about their emotions as we. They had a trust in their fellow man’s comprehension that we have lost. We always imagine that no one can know things unless we tell them, and tell them with all our t’s carefully crossed and our i’s elaborately dotted. The old literatures are always illustrating that same confidence in other people’s imaginations, stating facts with what to our modern diffuseness appears the baldest simplicity, and yet somehow conveying all their subtlest meanings. Our ancestors happily were not ‘inebriated with the exuberance of their own verbosity.’... And now, Jane, bring that congealed nose of yours in out of the open air. The moon isn’t going on a vacation. She will be doing her old romance and beauty business at the same old stand long after we are dead and buried, not to mention to-morrow night.”
Berliet was all his old self the next day, and they swooped and soared, slid and climbed toward Pæstum, every turn around every spur showing some new beauty, some new effect. Gradually the coast sank and sank toward the sea; the snow-caps moved further back into the horizon; grew more and more mere white clouds above, more and more mere vapoury amethyst below, and at last they shot at a right angle into a wide level plain, and commenced to experience thrills. For the guide-books were full, one and all, of weird tales of Pæstum which lay, so they said, far back in a country as cursed and horrible as the dreadful land of the Dark Tower. About it, they declared, stretched leprous marshes of stagnant ooze choked with fat reeds, where fierce buffalo wallowed in the slime. The contadini passed through its deadly miasma in shuddering haste, gazing large-eyed upon a dare-devil Englishman who had once had the courage to pass a night there in order to gratify a bold, fantastic desire to see the temples by moonlight. It was such a strange, tremendous story, that of the Greek Poseidonia, later the Roman Pæstum.