ON THE ROAD FROM CASTELLAMARE TO AMALFI.
The Loveliness of Amalfi.
Perhaps the most beautiful drive in the world is the drive from Castellamare to Amalfi. Castellamare is about an hour and a half by rail from Naples, and not far from Pompeii. It was here, indeed, that the elder Pliny lost his life in the eruption of 79 A. D., which destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum. Taking a wagonette there about the middle of the day, we followed this magnificent road nearly all the afternoon, as it wound in and out along the mountainside, with the towering cliffs on one hand and the intensely blue bay on the other, seen ever and anon through openings between the silvery olive trees which clothed all the slopes, the view backwards being terminated by the majestic uplift of Vesuvius, wearing a soft plum-colored tinge that we had never seen it have before. The soil here is wonderfully fertile, and every hillside is terraced and cultivated with the utmost care. The orange and lemon groves, with the trees trained over trellises and protected from too intense heat by straw, laid on frames above, were still blooming, though the trees were heavily laden with green and golden fruit. Every now and then little boys and girls from the villages which are perched on the rocks or cling to the hillsides would run after us, throwing nosegays into the carriage and expecting "soldi" in return. After a while the scenery became more rugged, not unlike Switzerland, with little waterfalls trickling down the cliffs, and Scotch broom and other wild plants taking the place of the vineyards and orchards on the towering rocks. And now we begin to drive through tunnels cut through the cliffs and to pass over solid stone bridges, spanning glorious ravines at a dizzy height, with the transparent sea making in far below us, and the mountains of gray rock towering skyward above us. And at last, in the soft evening light, we reached the culmination of all this wonderful beauty at Amalfi. When we stopped at the foot of the cliff on which the Cappuccini Hotel stands, overlooking the town and the sea, we found the uniformed portiere and other attendants in a little lodge or office at the bottom of a long, zigzag flight of stone steps, which leads up to the high perched hotel. But there were sedan chairs and chair-bearers to spare the ladies and the youngest of the children the long, lung-taxing climb, and we were soon comfortably installed in the most romantically situated hotel I have ever seen. It was a Cappucin monastery once, and the cloisters are still there, but the cells are now used as bed-rooms. From the windows and balconies, and from the long and lovely arcade, covered with grape vines and lined with the most beautiful marguerites, lilies, roses and geraniums, the guests look down upon the picturesque little city, the boats drawn up on the beach, the burnished Mediterranean, and the opaline islands in the offing. And how we Protestants did sleep in the comfortably furnished cells of those ousted monks! Amalfi is the place I wish to come to if I am ever again in Italy.
The Ruins of Pompeii.
When we tore ourselves away from Amalfi, we drove on around by Salerno, another feast of beauty, and took the train at La Cava for Pompeii. For days we had been reading, or re-reading, Bulwer's Last Days of Pompeii with breathless interest, or plodding through the dryer, but hardly more accurate, details of the guide book—we had been to the museum at Naples, where the mural paintings and other disentombed relics of the city are shown, and we had stood on the crater of the volcano that wrought its destruction—so that we came to the exhumed ruins with as thorough preparation as we had found it possible to make. But what description can prepare one for the impression of that appalling catastrophe which one receives when he stands in the midst of the ruins themselves, and sees how sudden and terrible the overthrow was?
COLONNADE OF THE HOTEL CAPPUCCINI, AMALFI.