Leading out to the west, back of Posilippo, is the Strada di Piedigrotta, which is continued as the Grotto Nuovo di Posilipo, and through which runs a tramway, all kinds of animal-drawn wheeled traffic, and automobiles with open exhausts. All this comports little with the fact that the ancient tunnelled road along here was one of the marvels of engineering in the time of Augustus and that it led to Virgil’s tomb. This supposed tomb of Virgil is questioned by archæologists, but that doesn’t much matter for the rest of us. We know that Virgil himself has said that it was here that he composed the “Georgics” and the “Æneid,” and it might well have been his last resting-place too.
“Addio, mia bella Napoli! Addio!”
CHAPTER XII
THE BEAUTIFUL BAY OF NAPLES
“SEE Naples and die” is all very well for a sentiment, but when we first saw it, many years ago, it was under a grim, grey sky, and its shore front was washed by a milky-green fury of a sea.
Fortunately it is not always thus; indeed it is seldom so. On that occasion Vesuvius was invisible, and Posilippo in dim relief. What a contrast to things as they usually are! Still, Naples and its Bay are no phenomenal wonders. Suppress the point of view, the focus of Virgil, of Horace, of Tiberius and of Nero, and the view of “Alger la Blanche,” or of Marseilles and its headlands, is quite as beautiful. And the Bay of Naples is not so beautifully blue either; the Bai de la Ciotat in Maritime Province is often the same colour, and has a nearby range of jutting, jagged, foam-lashed promontories that are all that Capri is—all but the grotto.
