I did not see clothes-wringer, vertical broiler, or Dover egg-beater, but I make no doubt they were there, tucked away in corners I had not time and strength to explore, behind a sewing-machine and telephone-apparatus.
We have not—as yet—reproduced in America the so-termed nearly extinct volcano of Solfatara. It is near the road from Naples to Baiæ.
I am tempted to lay down my pen in sheer discouragement at the thought of what we saw in that drive of twelve hours, and how little space I ought, in consistency with the plan of this work, to devote to it. Baia was the Newport of Neapolis and other cities of Southern Italy, under the consuls and emperors. Many rich Romans had summer-seats there, and it had, likewise, a national reputation as the abode of philosophers and authors.
“I grant the charms of Baiæ,” Bulwer puts into Glaucus’ mouth. “But I love not the pedants who resort there, and who seem to weigh out their pleasures by the drachm.”
The route thither lies through, or above the grotto of Posilipo, a tunnel built, some assert, by order of Nero—the only commendable deed recorded of him. On the principle, “To him that hath shall be given,” others choose to ascribe the work to Augustus. It is certain that the grotto existed in Nero’s time, as his contemporaries mention its gloom and straitness. The tomb of Virgil is hidden among the vineyards on the hill to the left as one leaves the tunnel, going from Naples. The tomb beside which Petrarch planted a laurel! One of its remote successors still flourishes—somewhat—at the door of the structure which belongs to the class of Columbaria. A good-sized chamber has three windows and a concave ceiling. Around the walls are pigeon-holes for cinerary urns. There was a larger cavity between this room and a rear wall, in which tradition insists Virgil was interred in compliance with his often-expressed desire. Antiquarians and historians have squabbled over the spot until plain people, with straightforward ways of thought, question if Virgil ever lived at Posilipo, or elsewhere than in the imagination of his countrymen. It is recorded that an urn, sealing up his ashes, was here about the middle of the fourteenth century, and that, running around the lip, was the epitaph known to every classic smatterer, beginning—
“Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere.”
Neither urn nor epitaph remains. A later inscription commences, “Qui cineres?” Most visitors “give it up.” But Petrarch was here once, and King Robert of Sicily, who helped Laura’s lover plant the laurel. And Virgil—or his ashes—may have been. We generally gave the departed the benefit of the doubt in such circumstances.
A mile aside from the Baiæ road is the Grotto del Cane, distinguished for dogs and mephitic vapors, which, as Henry Bergh’s country-people, we declined to enter.
Pozzuoli—Puteoli, when Paul landed there, after his shipwreck—is a dirty, sleepy little town, in general complexion so dingy, and in expression so down-hearted, the visitor is inclined to suspect that its self-disgust had something to do with the gradual sinking of its foundations for the last three hundred years. The steps by which St. Paul gained the pier are dimly visible under the waters lapping lazily above them. Nothing seems alive but the breeze, fragrant of sea-brine, and shaking the blue surface of the bay into wavering lines and bars of shaded green, purple, and silver, that were worth seeing if Puteoli was not.
We alighted at the Temple of Serapis, restored by Marcus Aurelius and Septimus Severus. The site has shared the fate of Pozzuoli, having been lowered by a succession of volcanic shocks a dozen feet below its former level. The Egyptian deity was magnificently enthroned before the decline of paganism, and this sea-side country, upon a pedestal in a circular temple, enclosed by a portico of Corinthian columns—African marble—sixteen in number. The pillars have been removed to the royal palace at Caserta, and the salt ooze lies, sullen and green, over their bases. The quadrangle of the temple had once its guard of forty-eight granite columns, and a porch supported by six of marble, three of which are left standing. It is a mournful ruin, the water lying deep in the sunken centre and in pools over the highest part of the uneven pavement, and is not made cheerful by the incongruous addition of bath-houses on one side. Salt springs, some of them hot, broke through the crust at the latest eruption—that which threw up Monte Nuovo in 1538.