by Mary Shelley
After lingering some time in this favourite grotto of the Nereids, which they have, since the creation till the present time, kept sacred from our intrusion, we returned to Capri, and hired donkeys for our ascent to the palace of Tiberius, which is situated on the summit of one of the mountain-peaks of the island. We had several guides; the woman that accompanied me attracted me by her extreme beauty. She had that noble contour of countenance that I so particularly admire; a beauty at once full of dignity and expression. The sun burnt bright above, and the way was fatiguing. We clambered up through vineyards that clothe the mountains’ sides, and podere, or small farms, sown with grain, and prolific in the huge prickly pear, which grow as giants. We reached at last the remains of the palace of Tiberius; a part of the walls and many portions of mosaic pavement remain, as well as the relics of a way down to the sea, of very solid yet elaborate workmanship. The view from the summit, where a portion of the ruins has been turned into a little church, is more grand than anything I ever saw. The Bay of Naples on one side; that of Salerno on the other; with the coast on which Pæstum is situated, bounding the eastern horizon. There is a peculiarity in the way in which the steep promontories of the southern Italian coast abut into the sea, and in the hues of ocean, as it embraces the rocky shores, which those who have not visited the South cannot conceive; which I never saw till I came here, but which satisfies the mind that this is beauty; that here, God has let fall upon earth the mantle of glory which otherwise is gathered up among the angels!
We had brought provisions with us, and dined on the sort of platform at the summit; and here, in one of the ruined chambers, where the mosaic pavement is entire, the peasants danced the Tarantella. On mainland, this dance is forbidden, at least, for the two sexes to dance it together; — why, I cannot guess: as far as we saw, it is more decent than the waltz. The couples set and turn round each other, but without touching even each other’s hands, for these are occupied by the castanets. Two or three of the women were handsome; but none so attractive as the woman who was my guide.
As we descended, I talked to her. The wretched lot of these poor people is very sad. In England we see and read of the squalid condition of the poor; and when it is contrasted with the luxury of the rich, we feel deeply, “That there is something rotten in the state.” But while we are aware that our climate fearfully increases the sufferings of the poor, we know that to keep-out cold and hunger is costly, and the suffering does not appear so causeless and arbitrary as in this fairy island; here, where the sun in all his splendour kisses earth, which, well cultivated and fertile, yields plenty; and where, moreover, the sea is abundant in fish; the heart rebels yet more vehemently against the hungry poverty of the hard-working peasants. Fish and meat they never touch: all that is caught of the former is taken to Naples. Maccaroni they get on festivals: at other times, they live on vegetables — nothing so wholesome as the potato — the prickly pear chiefly. The better off among them indulge now and then in polenta, the flour of Indian corn made into porridge. They have no milk; weak sour wine, or water, is their drink. One result of this bad fare is the mortality among the children. My Juno-looking guide had had four children: one only survived. Poor little fellow! he ran beside his mother; and she looked on him with anxious fondness, for his complexion and figure all spoke disease.
To suffer is a different thing under this sky. They have bad food, they work hard; but Nature is their friend; they are not pinched with cold nor racked by rheumatic pains. Thus my poor woman, in whom I grew interested, had nothing morose — scarcely anything plaintive — about her. “Sono sempre allegra” she said. “I am gay — we ought to be gay.”
“Siamo come Dio vuole.”
“We live as God pleases, and must not complain. My heart aches when I remember my poor children now in Paradise; I cry when I think of them; and that little fellow,” and she cast an anxious, maternal glance on him—” he is not well” (heaven knows, he was not). “Ma, allegra, Signora”—”the Virgin will help us;” and she began, in a sweet voice, to sing a plaintive hymn to the Virgin. Poor people! their religion is hung round with falsehood; but it is a great, a real comfort, to them. Sickness and all evil comes from God, and must be borne, therefore, with patience; and the great duty is to be gay under all, and to serve God with a cheerful, as well as a pure, heart. I should have liked to have tried, at least, to have done some real good to this woman, whose countenance, and voice, and conversation, gave her distinction. Nothing could be more simple and unpretending than her talk; but it had a stamp of heart, joined to that touch of the imaginative, peculiar to the Italian peasantry.
English tourists get very angry at the perpetual demands made on their purses during their excursions. “Dammi qualche co’,” salutes our ear too often. But, poor people, who can wonder! I have told you how they fare. At Sorrento oranges are the staple of the place — that and hewn stones; the poor man who has a mule considers himself comparatively well off; he and his mule carrying oranges and stones, support his family. They often work all night, lading the boats going to Naples with oranges, and by day they labour at the quarries. The nobles do not reside on their estates, and there is no help for the poor; there are many convents, but none among them are charitably disposed, so that, except the archbishop, there is not a single individual or community that turns a pitying eye on the ill-paid, over-worked labourers of the soil; while the abundant riches that flow from this soil and from their ceaseless industry, are drained away to Naples. The people are particularly handsome; even the old are good-looking: they say there is something in the soil and air particularly good for health and comeliness. I have seen no hags. Old women, with happy-looking faces, graced by the placid picturesque beauty of age, sit at their doors spinning.
No one can talk to them without perceiving latent; under ignorance and superstition, great natural abilities, and that heartfelt piety which springs (as our higher virtues do,) from the imagination which warms and colours their faith. Poor people! how I long for a fairy wand which would make them proprietors of the earth which they till, but must not reap. How sad a thing is human society: yet it is comforting, even where we find the laws by which it is said to be held together — but which ought rather to be likened to an iron yoke, pressing it down and depriving it of its native strength and elasticity — yet, I say, it warms my heart when I find the individuals that compose a population, poor, humble, ignorant, misguided, yet endowed with some of the brightest gifts of our nature, and bearing in their faces the stamp of intelligence and feeling. I never lived among a people I liked so well as these Sorrentines. I hope I am not deceived: but Mr. Cooper, who sojourned here a few months, and Mrs. Starke, who lived here for years, evidently regard them with more liking and esteem than the poorer classes usually inspire.
JUNE 15TH.
Our way of life is regular enough, as in hot countries it always must be. The mornings are cool and pleasant: my bed-room window, with a balcony, looks on the northern mountains; and the first opening of my eyes is upon orange gardens, shadowy groves, and green mountain-tops, with peeps of the sea between. At noon, when the sea-breeze rises, my friends sail; sometimes, when the breeze is not too stiff, I join them, and we stretch out till the whole of Capri opens on us. When I am not there they venture further, and they bathe: the sea is so inviting, that they spend an hour or two in the water. We dine (and our cook being good and the viands excellent, we dine well) at two. At four or five we either betake ourselves to the boat, and cross the bay to the Temple of Neptune, which is at the point of the first headland — or the mules come to the door, and we take various rides; or, if we at times repeat the same, its beauty always seems new. We are shut out from walks in the immediate vicinity — as to trudge between high stone walls is not pleasant; but in our excursions we find plenty of occasion to clamber up and down the steep mountain-paths. The hills are bright with the broom in full flower, and the myrtle begins to show its stars among its bright-pointed leaves. On the plains, which are often found near
the summits of the hills — the rocky crags rising higher round as a hedge and shelter, wheat is sown, and flourishes.
One of our favourite rides is to the other side of the promontory, where a natural arch once stood, resembling the Presbisch Thor of the Saxon Switzerland; it is now broken and ruined. Once, going there, my Mends thought that they could easily reach the sands beneath and bathe, or find a boat to take them to the rocks of the Syrens; but after a rough precipitous descent of some length, they found the way grow on them: they were apparently as far off as ever from the sea, and they returned.
I spend the evenings on our terrace. The nights here are wonderful; and I am never weary of observing the loveliness of the skies. Twenty-four o’clock, a moveable hour which is fixed for half an hour after sunset, never, in this climate, falls later than half-past eight. By that time it is night; but the extreme purity of the atmosphere gives to darkness a sort of brilliancy, such as a black shining object has. The sea is dark and bright at the same time; the high coast around does not assume that gigantic, misty appearance, hills do in the North during dusk, but they stand out as well defined as by day. If there be a moon, we see it floating in mid-air. We perceive at once that it is not a shining shape, plastered, as it were, against the sky; but a ball which, all bright, or partly dusky, hangs pendant. Its light is painfully bright; the extreme glittering whiteness fatigues the eye more than daylight. In the North, we often repine that we have not two moons, so always to enjoy the use of our eyes in the absence of the sun; in the South, the interlunar nights are an agreeable change, at times almost a relief. By the moonlight we can perceive the smoke ascend from the crater of Vesuvius; if she desert the night, a lambent flame shoots up at intervals. I may have wearied you by my various accounts of the evening hours which, to a lover of nature, are so enchanting. In other places a sense of tenderness, a softening influence, has fallen on my heart at that time; but here, the glory of absolute immeasurable beauty mantles all things at all times.
JUNE 20.
— Yet not so. Lo! a scirocco comes to blot the scene. Nothing can be stranger than this scirocco: at its first breath, the sea grows dull, leaden, slate-coloured — all its transparency is gone. The view of the opposite shore is hidden in mist. The near mountains wear a deeper green, but have lost all brightness and cast wierd shadows on the dull waters. This wind coming from the south-east is with us a land wind. It rolls huge waves on the beach of Naples; but beneath our cliffs the sea is calm — such a calm! — it looks so treacherous, that even if you did not hear of the true state of things, you would hesitate to trust yourself to it. At a short distance from the shore the wind plays wild pranks; here and there it seizes the water as a whirlwind, and you see circles emerge from a centre, spread round and fade away. P — went out in his boat about a hundred yards from our cavern; even there, though in apparent calm, the skiff was whirled round, and nothing but letting go the sheet on the instant prevented her from being capsized.
The heat is excessive. Every one appears to be seized with feverish illness: nobody wishes to eat or move. The early setting and late rising of the sun in this high latitude, making the nights long, gives the earth and atmosphere time to cool; and it is thus that the heat of summer is often not so oppressive as in the North; otherwise it would be intolerable. Imagine our Dresden length of day with a Neapolitan temperature: no one could bear it and live. But our nights are cool; our early mornings even chill, and thus nature is refreshed: only, this does not occur during the periods of scirocco; then, night and day, the heat lies like a heavy garment round our limbs. Fortunately, three days is its utmost, one or two its usual, extent; it vanishes as it came, no one knows how. Nature and our human spirits come forth as after an eclipse; the world revived looks up and resumes its natural healthy appearance.
June 23.
We have visited Pompeii. A greater extent of the city has been dug out and laid open since I was there before, so that it has now much more the appearance of a town of the dead. You may ramble about and lose yourself in the many streets. Bulwer, too, has peopled its silence. I have been reading his book, and I have felt on visiting the place much more as if really it had been once full of stirring life, now that he has attributed names and possessors to its houses, passengers to its streets. Such is the power of the imagination. It can not only give “a local habitation and a name” to the airy creations of the fancy and the abstract ideas of the mind, but it can put a soul into stones, and hang the vivid interest of our passions and our hopes upon objects otherwise vacant of name or sympathy. Not indeed that Pompeii could be such, but the account of its “Last Days” has cast over it a more familiar garb, and peopled its desert streets with associations that greatly add to their interest.
LETTER XXIII.
Excursion to Amalfi.
July 10TH.
I HAVE always had a great desire to penetrate into the south of Italy, which I believe to be the most beautiful country in the world; joining the rich aspect of culture to the graces of nature,
“In all her wildness, all her majesty,
As in that elder time, ere man was made.”
If I were a man, I know of no enterprise that would please my imagination more than seeking, in this district, for the traces of lost wealth, science, and civilisation. These blessings flourished in this neighbourhood at two distinct periods, apparently widely separated from each other; yet, if examined, we might find that the link had never been broken. Magna Grecia was the mother of many philosophers, and the richest portion of ancient Italy; and there is nothing violent in the supposition, that Amalfi, hemmed in by mountains, and Salerno, almost equally sheltered, should have preserved and extended, rather than originated, the trade and science which rendered them famous at a time when, all around, every effort of human enterprise was merged in offensive and defensive wars.
Amalfi was the first republic of modem Italy.
As the power of the Roman Empire waxed weak, and the transplanting of the seat of empire to Constantinople, placed Italy in the novel position of a distant neglected province, frequently invaded by barbarians, the fabric of national government fell to pieces, while municipal communities remained.
Two of these, from their happy position on the sea, and the great traffic there carried on by means of the Mediterranean, were eminently prosperous.
One in the north, Venice, acquired power, and preserved its independence for centuries; the other in the south, Amalfi, was swallowed up by the kingdom of Naples, after having been pillaged by the Pisans in 1137 — for thus early did municipal rivalry, the bane of Italy, begin to divide and ravage the peninsula. It seems to me that sound knowledge of the results of political institutions might be gathered from studying the state of society in a town whose citizens were, when free, intelligent and courageous — whose maritime laws, instituted at a time (the ninth century) when Europe was sunk in barbarism, has served as a basis for every subsequent commercial code — who covered the sea with their ships — who almost discovered the mariner’s compass. What are they now?
Their intelligence, their capacities, I am sure remain; their affections also must warm their hearts as kindly; must we not seek in their political history for the causes wherefore superstition and vice have replaced ardour for science and the virtues of industrious and brave citizens?
Though I could not fulfil in any way a favourite design of visiting Calabria, yet we have crept on as far as Amalfi. It had been my idea to spend a month in this town, when I could have told you more of the present state of its inhabitants. I was not able to do this; so, can only mention the impression made by the visit of a day.
We had secured a boat to be ready for us at the Marinella, on the other side of the promontory, and set out on mules for the Scaricatojo, the name given to the descent from the mountain that overhangs the eastern sea. We reached the height which we had often before visited, whence a view is commanded of the two seas. To the west the Bay of Naples, landlocked, as we looked on it, by the islands of
Ischia and Procida, and the promontory of Misenum; while, more to the north, the shining edifices of the city of Naples are distinctly visible, and in the depth of the bay, Vesuvius rises up immediately from the shore. On the other side, the eye plunged down from the height of the myrtle-clothed mountain on which we stood, to the sea far below, gleaming at the foot of the precipices — vexing itself against the rocks of the Syrens: eastward, the coast that runs in a long line to the south; the lowlands on which Pæstum is situated, with the back-ground of lofty mountains, was this day — as it almost always is — hidden in mist.
