We landed at Casamicciola in a small boat. The patient women waiting on the quay took our trunks on their heads, the cabmen mobbed us politely, trying to wrest our hand-bags from us.
“Ercole!” cried J. “Is Ercole, he who drives a piebald horse, among you?”
“Ecco mi quà, Signor Marchese (Behold me here, Lord Marquis)!” Ercole (Hercules) scarcely looks his part. He is small and wizened, but he has the merry eyes of his brother, the mercante di campagna, while his laugh oddly recalls his lovely niece’s. From the beginning Ercole took and still keeps possession of us. “First to the Piccola Sentinella,” he announced. The piebald breasted the steep hill at a sharp pace. Ten minutes’ climb brought us to the Hotel of the Small Sentinel, a low building with a roof of light corrugated iron. Most of the hotels in southern Italy are old palaces or monasteries, heavily built of stone or stucco. Madam Dombré, the proprietress (she is an Englishwoman and makes us exceedingly comfortable), says that all the buildings put up on the island since the earthquake have been constructed under government supervision and are lightly built like the hotel. Everything here dates from the earthquake. Ercole says such a thing took place before the terremoto, or so many years after it. Mme. Dombré, whose daughter was killed by it, speaks as if it happened yesterday.
“There was a concert in the dining-room of our hotel at the time, it was on the 28th of July, 1883, mid-season, you know; the house was full. There came a dreadful rumbling noise. The house shook once, twice, sideways, and then came crashing down in a ruined heap. The pianist at the piano, the singer with the song on her lips, were dashed into Purgatory without an instant’s warning! Out of a population of thirty-five hundred, seventeen hundred of our people perished in the earthquake.”
Since that time Casamicciola has been almost deserted by foreigners who are now only just beginning to return; a few more come each year.
The morning after our arrival Ercole drove me willy-nilly to the stabilimento, as they call the baths. Somehow he had divined the heel of Achilles,—my bicycle ankle. The smiling medico agreed with him that the treatment was “indicated,” and forthwith delivered me over into the hands of Olivetta—she who once was lame and now runs like a devil. The baths are large, not so smartly appointed as some of the German establishments, such as Homburg or Ems, yet they have a certain classical flavor of architecture, pleasantly suggestive of the old Greek inhabitants who were driven away from the island (they called it Pithecusa) in the fifth century B.C. by the fearful eruptions of Mt. Epomeo. Olivetta led me to a small marble room, put me in a comfortable chair, placed the offending ankle on a bench, and bade me “abbia pazienza (have patience),” while she went to get the “fango.” In five minutes she returned, bringing a jar full of liquid gray clay very like what sculptors use.
“Guardi, questo fango viene proprio caldo dalle viscere della terra (Observe, this mud comes hot from the entrails of the earth).” The giant Typhoëus, transfixed by Zeus’s thunderbolt, lies chained under the island; the roar of the earthquake is his voice, the lava flood his tears. You may believe it or not: I do not find it difficult to accept. Poor old giant, I feel sorry for him, reduced to tending hospital fires, to warming up poultices for the gouty!
Olivetta built a sort of mould of hot clay wherein the foot was comfortably coddled for thirty minutes. She next gave it a hot douche for five minutes, then left me to meditate for another thirty minutes in a warm mineral bath which smelt of hot flat-irons.
The serious business of the day over, we were free to explore the country. Ercole and the piebald took us for a nineteen-mile drive around the island, which rises sharply from the sea to its highest point, Mt. Epomeo. The vineyards wrap Ischia from seashore to mountain peak in a shimmering screen of green. The vines hang from tree to tree, making a leafy roof overhead and green sun-pierced walls to the long alleys, where innumerable classic bunches are slowly ripening. The grapes are still small and immature, but exquisite in form and color. In October, the season of the vintage, this must be the most beautiful place on earth. Here one understands why the Roman soldiers in Britain, when they first saw the Kentish hop vines, thought they had found the nearest thing to the grape that savage northland produced. In their efforts to make wine from hops they produced the first beer made in England.
On our way home we met a pair of boys driving a donkey laden with the coarse gray pottery which has been made here since the days of the Romans. The creta (gray clay) from which it is made, looks very like the mud used at the stabilimento. We stopped to examine the mugs, the jugs, the donkey, and his astonishing garments.