The buds to harden, and the fruits to grow.”
A lovely and a fertile scene it is indeed, and thoroughly typical of the peculiar charm of Southern Italy, wherein the rich well-tilled lands appear in striking contrast with the near-lying stony fallows and scrub-covered wastes.
Beneath the picturesque pile of Santa Maria a [pg 102]Pozzano, perched aloft above the roadway, we pass along the edge of the sea-girt precipice, rounding the Capo d’Orlando, until we reach the pretty little town of Vico Equense, with its churches and gay-coloured villas nestling amidst groves of olive and orange trees. Vico owes its prosperity in the first instance to the patronage of “Carlo il Zoppo,” Charles the Dwarf, the lame son and heir of King Charles of Anjou, who founded a settlement and built a villa upon the site of the ancient Roman colony; and it was in the old royal demesne of the Angevins that the hand of the deformed king’s daughter, the Princess Clementia, was demanded formally in marriage by the French monarch, Philip the Bold, who sought to marry her to his third son, Charles of Valois. The match between the young prince of France and his cousin, the Neapolitan princess, appeared suitable to all concerned in every respect save one; for it was well known that the King of Naples had been lame from his birth, and it could never be deemed fit for the expected heir of France to marry any but a perfectly sound and healthy bride. Now the Queen of Naples was too proud to accede to the hints of the French ladies, who evidently were most anxious to acquaint themselves with the satisfactory condition of her daughter’s “walking members,” though she went so far as to allow the maiden to appear before them clad only in a flowing robe of gossamer silk. The possible danger of losing her opportunity to become Queen of France proved, however, beyond the ambitious young lady’s powers of endurance, and to the horror of her haughty mother and the delight of the foreign emissaries, the Princess Clementia then and there doffed her silken [pg 103]robes and appeared before all in the historic garb of Lady Godiva. A glance at the princess’s form in puris naturalibus sufficed to convince the inquisitive Frenchwomen that no hereditary taint from Il Zoppo descended to his daughter; and accordingly the betrothal of the two young people was celebrated that very evening amidst the usual revels and feastings.
The clean cheerful town on the sheer limestone crags boasts a cathedral, wherein, so the guide-book informs us, we shall find the tomb of Filangieri, the great Italian jurist. But the building contains in reality far more stirring associations than those connected with a prominent lawyer. It is but a rococo structure of the usual Italian type, and its painted series of portraits of past bishops is by no means an uncommon complement of cathedral churches in the South. But here, amidst the long rows of indifferent portraits, we note an omission, a space that is occupied, not by a likeness but by a medallion, which represents a cherub with the forefinger of his right hand laid as a seal of silence upon the lips. Here-by indeed hangs a tale, obscure perhaps, but pathetic and human to the last degree. We all remember the broad frieze filled with Doges’ faces which is carried round the great hall of the ducal palace in Venice, wherein the place assigned to the traitor, Marino Faliero, contains a black veil instead of the usual portrait. Here in little Vico Equense is to be found a somewhat similar incident, but with this important difference:—the bishop whose portrait is here omitted was the most worthy of remembrance of all his peers.
The crime of Monsignore Michele Natale, Bishop of Vico Equense, to which the silent cherub bears [pg 104]everlasting witness, was that of being a patriot and a Liberal (in the truest sense of that term) during the anxious times of the ill-fated Parthenopean Republic, that short-lived period of aristocratic government which was set up in self-defence by certain Neapolitan nobles, prelates and men of science after the abrupt departure of their cowardly King and Queen to Palermo. We all remember the terrible ending of that government: how the vile rabble-army of Cardinal Ruffo assaulted Naples; how the city capitulated to the Cardinal on the express condition that all life and property should be spared; and how Lord Nelson, refusing to recognise the terms that Ruffo himself had agreed to, and overruling the Cardinal’s protests, treated the unhappy prisoners. The Bishop of Vico Equense was one of this band of martyrs, for he suffered death under circumstances of exceptional brutality on the morning of August 20th 1799, in the piazza in front of the church of the Carmine, together with two Neapolitans of noble rank, Giuliano Colonna and Gennaro Serra, and with the poetess, Eleonora Pimentel, a Portuguese by birth but the widow of a Neapolitan officer. All went nobly to their doom amidst the execrations of the demoralised bloodthirsty mob of lazzaroni, yelling at and insulting the “Jacobins,” and kept back with no little difficulty by the royal troops from mutilating the corpses of women, bishops and princes. Monsignore Natale himself was hanged, and in his case the public executioner—“Masto Donato” as he was nick-named by the populace—gave vent to many pleasantries concerning the episcopal rank of his victim. Blindfolded and with the cord of infamy [pg 105]depending from his neck, the Bishop was led up to the fatal ladder amid deafening shouts of
“Viva la forca e Masto Donato;
Sant’ Antonio sia priato!”
On reaching the top of the gallows, the hangman made fast the rope to the cross-tree, and then an assistant (tirapiede) from below adroitly pushed the unseeing prisoner into space, catching on to his legs meanwhile, whilst “Masto Donato” himself adroitly leaped from the gallows-top upon the prelate’s shoulder. With the hangman on his back, shouting aloud how much he was enjoying his ride upon a real bishop, and with the other ruffian clinging to his heels, Monsignore Natale swayed backwards and forwards amidst yells of execration and gratified hate on that hot August morning in front of the Church of the Carmine little more than one hundred years ago. His body was left on the gallows to be insulted by the mob throughout the long sweltering day, and then, stripped of all its clothing, was finally flung with other corpses of noble men and women into a charnel-house at Sant’ Alessio al Lavinaio. Who it was that placed this quaint little memorial to the murdered prelate in his cathedral church we know not; but here the speechless yet eloquent cherub tells Natale’s sad story of brutality and injustice to all who care to listen. Happily the spell of silence is at length broken, and the true history of that hateful era of crime, cruelty, lying, and intrigue is gradually being revealed; and the enemies of the Church in Italy learn with an astonishment, which is perhaps feigned, that in that glorious army of [pg 106]martyrs of 1799 more than one ecclesiastic of high rank suffered in the ill-starred and premature cause of Neapolitan liberty.
Crossing the little river Arco, we proceed uphill through the region of vines and olives, until we have passed the Punta di Scutolo, where begins our descent into that famous tract of country, the Piano di Sorrento, a plateau above the cliffs, some four miles in length by one in breadth. Poets of antiquity and bards of the Middle Ages alike have sung the delights of the Sorrentine Plain, and have painted in glowing colours of inspired verse its race of happy peasants, its fruitful fields and orchards, its luscious vines, its excellent flocks. Galen, the cunning old physician, recommended to his nervous patients what would now be termed a “rest cure” in these favoured regions; whilst the grateful Bernardo Tasso, father of the immortal Torquato, speaks of the capital of this district as “l’Albergo della Cortesia,” and in an ecstasy of delighted appreciation, goes on to add: “l’aere e si sereno, si temperato, si salutifero, si vitale, che gli uomini che senza provar altero cielo ci vivono sono quasi immortali.” And though praise from Torquato’s courtly sire must not be taken too seriously, yet few will deny that the beautiful plain deserves many of the eulogies that have been showered upon it. At the small town of Meta, the next place of importance after Sorrento itself, the road divides at the Church of the Madonna of the Laurel: our way to Amalfi leading southward over the opposing ridge—the “Sorrentini Colles” of Ovid—whilst the other traverses the length of the plain by way of Pozzopiano and Sant’ Agnello, until it reaches Sorrento.
One prominent feature of this district has already attracted our attention; the number of deep ravines with which the whole plain is intersected. These natural clefts are marvellously lovely in their rich luxuriance of foliage, and with their precipitous sides and verdure-clad depths will recall the wonderful latomiè, the ancient stone-quarries of Syracuse. Their depths are filled with orange and lemon trees, mingled with sable spires of cypress and the tall forms of bays, which here bear jet-black berries, such as are rarely seen in our northern clime; whilst the edges of the cliffs are clothed with a serried mass of wild flowers; red valerian, crimson snap-dragon, tall blue campanulas, the dark green wild fennel, white-blossoming cistus, and a hundred other plants, gay with colour and strong with aromatic perfume.