—Pale clouds of almond blossoms were spread against grey terraces.... Less pale smells rose in gusty whiffs.... Narrow yellow streets crooked before them, where they picked a cautious hooting way amid Italy’s rising population complicated with goats and asses.... Then flat, muddy roads, and Berliet bumping, splashing between fields of green artichokes.... The clouds held up; thinned, and parted, showing rifts of blue.... Vesuvius pushed the mists from her brow, and purple shadows dappled her shining, dripping flanks.... Orange groves rose along the way. Flocks of brown goats tinkled past. More almond boughs leaned over walls washed a faded rose. Church bells clanked sweetly through the moist air from far-away hills. Runnels chattered out from secret channels fringed with fern. Grey olive orchards hung like clouds along the steep.... The sun was fairly out, and Italy assuming her old traditional air of professional beauty among the nations of the earth....
The Berliet climbed as nimbly as a goat toward Sorrento. The light deepened; the sea began to peacock. More and more the landscape assumed the appearance of the impossibly chromatic back drop of an opera, and as the turn was made under the orange avenue of the hotel at Sorrento everything was ready for the chorus of merry villagers, and for the prima donna to begin plucking song out of her bosom with stereotyped gestures.
It was there they began to offer the light wines of the country, as sweetly perfumed and innocent as spring violets; no more like to the astringent red inks masquerading in straw bottles in America under the same names, than they to Hercules. The seekers of Persephone drank deeply—as much as a wine-glass full—and warmed by this sweet ichor of Bacchus they bid defiance to hoodoos and pushed on to Amalfi.
Berliet swam along the Calabrian shore, lifting them lightly up the steeps, swooping purringly down the slopes,—swinging about the bold curves of the coast; rounding the tall spurs, where the sea shone, green and purple as a dove’s neck, five hundred feet below, and where orange, lemon, and olive groves climbed the narrow terraces five hundred feet above. They were following the old, old way, where the Greeks had gone, where the Romans went, where Normans rode, where Spaniards and Saracens marched; the line of the drums and tramplings of not three, but of three hundred conquests! They were following—in a motor car—the passageway of three thousand years of European history that was to lead them back beyond history itself to the old, old gods.
The way was broad and smooth, looping itself like a white ribbon along the declivity, and even Peripatetica admitted it was lovely, though she has an ineradicable tendency to swagger about the unapproachable superiority of Venezuelan scenery; probably because so few are in a position to contradict her, or because she enjoys showing off her knowledge of out-of-the-way places which most of us don’t go to. She had always sniffed at the Mediterranean as overrated in the matter of colour, and declared it pale and dull beside the green and blue fire of Biscayne Bay in Florida, but it was a nice day, and a nice sight, and Peripatetica handsomely acknowledged that after Venezuela this was the very best scenery she knew.
At Amalfi
“Where amid her mulberry trees
Sits Amalfi in the heat,
Bathing ever her white feet
In the tideless summer seas,”