“Do I know? They are from my own town, it may be from our own land! the proprietor of this restaurant buys oil, fruit, and wine of my uncle, who lives at Nemi. I myself have a little property at Nemi. The oil the Signora had of me came from there. Ah! you should see Nemi, you should eat the strawberries fresh from the vines.”
That settled it; we had been promising ourselves a little Fourth of July outing somewhere in the country, so the next day we took the train for Albano and drove over to Nemi, where we are decently settled at the Trattoria Desanctis.
Nemi is an enchanting little mediæval town perched high above the edge of the Lake of Nemi called by the ancients the Mirror of Diana. Sitting in the terraced garden of the old castle of the Orsini, near our inn, you look down the steep sides of the crater of an extinct volcano, over three hundred feet, to the lake, a big sparkling sapphire, three miles in circumference, lying at the bottom of a green enamelled cup. There is no soil in the world, the landlord says, quite as rich as this volcanic soil. Every inch of the land is highly cultivated, and here, here on the sloping sides of the old volcano grow the wild and the tame strawberries of Nemi. I trust it is not necessary to tell you that the wild ones are by far the best. We clambered down a steep path jewelled with wild flowers to the very edge of Diana’s mirror. I dipped my hand in the clear cold water. It is hard to realize that where this gemlike lake now sparkles in the sunlight there was once a pit of fire, that the sides where the pleasant strawberries grow were once coated with a velvet bloom of sulphur like the crater of Vesuvius. We turned and looked up the slope; a breeze ruffled the green leaves and exposed the vines beneath, laden with myriads of strawberries, red as rubies. As the fruttajola foretold, I now understand how the little town of Nemi supplies the big city of Rome with strawberries.
The Palace of the Orsini at Nemi
From a photograph
The lake is more than one hundred feet deep and is drained by an artificial emissarium—ancient Roman, of course. The peasants say that the lake has no bottom. As there is a sort of whirlpool in the middle from the suction of the water into the emissarium, it is considered unsafe for boating or bathing. There is a story of a mad Englishman who tried to swim across and was never seen again, his body having been sucked down into the bowels of the earth—not a bad way of disposing of it. A few years ago they found the remains of a Roman state barge at the bottom of the lake. The bronze ornaments and even part of the wooden walls were intact. The barge was presumably used as a float in some imperial pageant of old Rome.
At sunset the women and girls who had been busy all day gathering fruit began to pass by our inn, bearing vast loads of fragrant strawberries on their heads. The berries are picked into flat wide baskets with handles, through which a long stick is passed, joining together the ten or twelve baskets that constitute a load. As each sun-browned wench trudged past, our eyes were rejoiced with a superb flare of scarlet, and our noses—ah! nothing in this world has ever tasted so good as the strawberries of Nemi smell.