[ISCHIA FROM CASTELLAMARE (SUNSET)]

[pg 295]

CHAPTER XIII

PUTEOLI AND THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS ROME

Passing along the noisy thronged street of the Chiaja and plunging thence into the chill gloomy recesses of the ancient grotto of Posilipo, we emerge at its further side into a new world, as it were, into a district where “there is scarcely a spot which is not identified with the poetical mythology of Greece, or associated with some name familiar in the history of Rome.” In truth, the headland of Posilipo presents a wonderful landmark in the history of Naples, for it forms a barrier between the busy world of to-day and the departed civilisation of the ancients: at the latter end of this tunnel, the fierce life and movement of a great commercial city; at its western exit, a tract of land teeming with recollections of the glorious past.

As our carriage emerges once more into the warmth and sunlight, we find ourselves in the miserable village of Fuorigrotta, which, by a strange coincidence, is associated with the memory of a famous Italian poet. For if the name and verses of Sannazzaro cling to Piedigrotta and the Parthenopean shore on the eastern side of the hill, the genius of Count Giacomo Leopardi sheds its melancholy radiance over the unlovely purlieus of Fuorigrotta. Here in the vestibule of the parish [pg 296]church of San Vitale, lie the ashes of that unhappy writer, the Shelley of Italian literature, who so bewailed the Austrian and Bourbon fetters that enchained his native land. Poor Leopardi! It was but eleven years before the first great movement of the Risorgimento swept over Italy in 1848 that he passed away; his poems were indeed songs before sunrise, a sunrise of which he failed to detect the far-off glimmering, so that he could only lament without hope the sad condition of his dismembered country, once the mistress and now the play-thing of the world, and the abject slave of hated Austria:

“O patria mia, vedo le mure e gli archi

E le colonne e i simulacri e l’ erme