Salvator Rosa studied the scenery of La Cava—the country between Pompeii and Salerno, on the road to Pæstum. It is a series of natively abrupt glens, but gemmed with cottages and hanging gardens, through which the wildness of every feature is as apparent as those of a savage through his trinkets. I was going to Pæstum with an agreeable party, and we came out upon the bluffs overhanging Salerno and the sea, an hour before sunset.
We darted down upon the little city lying in the bend of the bay, like a bird’s descent upon her nest. The road is cut through the side of the precipice, and runs to the bottom with a single sweep. We were to pass the night here, and go to Pæstum the next morning, see the ruins, and return here to sleep once more before returning to Naples.
We were five or six miles from Salerno before sunrise, and entering upon the dreary wastes of Calabria. The people we passed on the road were dressed in skins with the wool outside, and the country looked abandoned by nature itself, scarce a flourishing tree or a healthy plant within the range of the sight. We turned from the main road after a while, crossed a ruinous bridge, and tracked a broad, waste, gloomy plain, till my eyes ached with its barrenness. In an hour more, three stately temples began to rise in the distance, increasing in grandeur as we approached. A cluster of ruined tombs on the right—a grass-grown and broken city wall, through a rent of which passed the road—and we stood among them, in the desert, amid temples of inimitable beauty!
There seemed to be a general feeling in the party that silence and solitude were the spirits of the place. We separated and rambled about alone. The grand temple of Neptune stands in the centre. A temple in the midst of the sea could scarce seem more strangely placed. I stood on the high base of the altar within and looked out between the columns on every side. The Mediterranean slept in a broad sheet of silver on the west, and on every other side lay the bare, houseless desert, stretching away to the naked mountains on the south and east, with a barrenness that made the heart ache, while it filled the imagination with its singleness and grandeur. I descended to look at the columns. They were eaten through and through with snails and worms, and all of the same rich yellow so admirably represented in the cork models. But their size, and their noble proportion as they stand, cannot be represented. They seem the conception and the work of giant minds and hands. One’s soul rises among them.
We walked round the ruins for hours. A little towards the sea, lie the traces of an amphitheatre, filled with fragments of statuary, and parts of immense friezes and columns. We all assembled at last in the great temple, and sat down on the immense steps towards the east in the shadow of the pediment, speculating on the wonderful fabric above us, till we were summoned to start on our return. To think that these very temples were visited as venerable antiquities in the time of Christ! What events have these worm-eaten columns outlived! What moths of an hour, in comparison, are we?
It is difficult to conceive how three such magnificent structures, so near the sea, the remains of a great city, should have been lost for ages. A landscape-painter, searching for the picturesque, came suddenly upon them fifty years ago, and astonished the world with his discovery! It adds to their interest now.
We turned our horses’ heads towards Naples. What an extraordinary succession of objects were embraced in the fifty miles between—Pæstum, Pompeii, Vesuvius, Herculaneum!—and, added to these, the thousand classic associations of the lovely coast along Sorrento! The value of life deepens incalculably with the privileges of travel.
Written on board the frigate “United States.”—We set sail from Elba on the 3rd of June. The inhabitants, all of whom, I presume, had been on board of the ships, were standing along the walls and looking from the embrasures of the fortress to see us off. It was a clear summer’s morning, without much wind, and we crept slowly off from the point, gazing up at the windows of Napoleon’s house as we passed under, and laying on our course for the shore of Italy. We soon got into the fresher breeze of the open sea, and the low white line of villages on the Tuscan coast appeared more distant, till, with a glass, we could see the people at the windows watching our progress. Fishing-boats were drawn up on shore, and the idle sailors were leaning in the half shadow which they afforded; but with the almost total absence of trees, and the glaring white of the walls, we were content to be out upon the cool sea, passing town after town unvisited. Island after island was approached and left during the day; barren rocks with only a lighthouse to redeem their nakedness: and in the evening at sunset we were in sight at Ischia, the towering isle in the bosom of the bay of Naples. The band had been called as usual at seven, and were playing a delightful waltz upon the quarter-deck; the sea was even, and just crisped by the breeze from the Italian shore; the sailors were leaning on the guns listening; the officers clustered in their various places; and the murmur of the foam before the prow was just audible in the lighter passages of the music. Above and in the west glowed the eternal but untiring teints of the summer sky of the Mediterranean, a gradually fading gold from the edge of the sea to the zenith, and the early star soon twinkled through it, and the air dampened to a reviving freshness. I do not know that a mere scene like this, without incident, will interest a reader, but it was so delightful to myself, that I have described it for the mere pleasure of dwelling on it. The desert stillness and loneliness of the sea, the silent motion of the ship, and the delightful music swelling beyond the bulwarks and dying upon the wind, were such singularly combined circumstances! It was a moving paradise in the waste of the ocean.