Capri

  

 

 

On a tour centered on Sorrento my wife and I took a one day excursion to the beautiful Isle of Capri but sadly failed to venture to the Blue Grotto.

 

The great excursion from Sorrento must always be that  to Capri, only an hour away by steamer. Starting in the morning at ten when the boat comes in from Naples, a whole day may be spent on the island and the return made at four o’clock; but no one who gives thus but a few hours to Capri can really expect to see anything with pleasure, not even the Blue Grotto.

 

Capri stands but three miles from Capo Campanella, and, as Pliny knew, is about eleven miles in circuit. It is, like the mountain range here to the south of the bay of Naples, of which it is indeed a part, formed wholly of limestone, a great precipitous limestone rock rising abruptly out of the sea, and in many places to a considerable height, especially in the western part, now called Anacapri... 

 

Many are the other ruins upon this island and innumerable are its delights, and especially its glorious views over the sea and the mainland; but the most famous spectacle upon the island, even more famous than the Villa San Michele, is the Blue Grotto, usually visited from the steamer, and therefore as good as not seen at all, for it requires time to enjoy it, and that is just what the steamer will not spare.

 

The best way to visit this beautiful cavern and to avoid disappointment, a disappointment most often due to hurry and a noisy crowd, is to engage a boat at the Marina any tranquil afternoon and to row past the Baths of Tiberius, whose vast ruins may still be seen from the sea, to the Blue Grotto, a journey of something under an hour. The arch by which one enters the cavern is scarcely three feet high, and it is therefore necessary to lie down in the boat as it passes through the low and narrow opening into this cave of marvels. At first nothing remarkable will appear, but little by little, as the eyes accustom themselves to the light, the wonderful colour of the grotto will be seem, and after about a quarter of an hour the whole cave will assume an exquisite sapphire blue, especially if the entrance is blocked by another boat. The grotto is about 160 feet by 100 feet, and at its loftiest some 40 feet. To the right is a platform leading to a broken stairway and tunnel in the rock, which of old led up to the villa of Tiberius above, or so they say.

 

This grotto, which is worth some trouble to see in leisurely fashion, is, however, the only one worth a visit upon the island. It makes a delightful giro, all of a summer morning, to voyage in a small boat quite round Capri; but the Green Grotto, the Red Grotto, and the White Grotto are merely ordinary caves, and require the imagination to fill them with the various colours of which they boast in their names. He is wise who lets them go and gives himself up to the delights of the voyage, which, it is needless to say, can be extended in what direction you will, to Amalfi or to Ischia, with perfect confidence and safety, so the weather be fair and settled; for the sailors of Capri are famous, and know the bay as none other do on the mainland. And what more delicious way of spending the summer days can there be than in such voyages as these between dawn and ten o’clock between afternoon and midnight?  

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958.Preface. Pp. 200-204.

Sorrento

  

 

 

Edward Hutton praised the beautiful views along winding roads along the southern Italian coast, and praised the ancient cliffside town of Sorrento which today seems to be largely populated by Englishmen.

   

But undoubtedly the greatest delight which Castellammare has to bestow upon the traveller is the coast road to Sorrento, of which she holds the key. There are in all Europe but three other routes corniches with which this can be compared—that between Nice and Mentone upon the French Riviera, that between Genova and Sestri upon the Riviera di Levante, and that, really a continuation of this from Castellammare to Sorrento, the road from Sorrento to Amalfi and on to Vietri. Each of these has its own peculiar charm and delight, and one is inclined to declare each in turn the most beautiful; but knowing them all, I think at least this may be said, that for variety and astonishment, for beauty of colour and old romance, those of the South surpass altogether those of the Rivieras. Nothing could well be more different from the road between Positano and Vietri than this between Castellammare and Sorrento, and here at any rate one mist give the apple to the former. …

 

The city of Sorrento, the city of S. Antonino, and its bishop, is one of the most curiously situated towns in Europe. It stands upon a great platform 300 feet or more over the sea out of which the great cliffs stand up sheer with only the narrowest  of beaches… The town is wholly delightful and full of the happiness of busy people strawplaiting, lace-making, or carving the olive wood here so plentifully provided. The whole place is a garden enclosed, Saracen in appearance with its white houses and flat roofs and shining cupolas, and especially in this that every garden is enclosed within a white wall, every orange grove is hidden, and so completely that but for the overpowering scent of orange blossom which fills all the by-ways you would not suspect the gardens you cannot see. Certainly there is something secret—how shall I say?—something sacred and withdrawn about Sorrento, so that you are not surprised to learn that of old, with its territory, all this piana was consecrated to Minerva, whose especial sanctuary was the great and famous temple set upon the promontory, which bore her name, Minervae Promontorium, and which we today call the Punta della Campanella…

 

Today Sorrento owes everything to its surroundings, which are so full of delight that a whole summer spent here cannot exhaust them. …the picturesque remains called the Bagno della Regina Giovanna, an ancient arched piscina, afford one of the noblest views of the great bay with Vesuvius rising beyond the blue sea. Thence eastward one may wander along the cliffs or up to the Deserto, the old Franciscan convent, whence there is another glorious view embracing the two bays of Naples and of Salerno, with Capri and in the background Monte Sant’ Angelo.

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958.  Pp. 195-199.

Pompeii

 

 

 

Edward Hutton devoted a chapter to Pompeii and Herculaneum, two small Roman towns destroyed by an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. He paid particular attention to Pompeii, a "Roman pleasure resort" whose magnificent wall paintings were preserved under volcanic ash until modern times.

Photo courtesy of David Orme

Nothing, I think, to be seen anywhere else in Europe is at once so monstrously dreary and so moving as this strange city of Pompeii with its broken houses and narrow, paved lanes, which once boasted some 20,000 inhabitants. It is, of course, a great misfortune for us of the modern world that Pompeii was not overwhelmed by Vesuvius in A.D. 62 before she was overthrown by an earthquake, rather than in A.D. 79, when the final catastrophe actually happened. What we see is not the ruin of the town that Cicero loved, but the town half rebuilt by the ruined inhabitants in the Roman style, upon the old site, and largely with the old remains. It is, partly for this reason, then, very disappointing. And yet what else in all Europe can be compared with it?...

One is altogether overwhelmed by these magnificent paintings. They seem to suggest that Pompeii must have been something more than a third-rate provincial town, or that a provincial town in antiquity must have been very different  from a provincial town in modern Europe. That is certainly so. Bourgeois life in Pompeii, the houses attest it , was at once more private and more public than we know today. Those paintings, so light, so airy, so exquisite in their grace and their gaiety, suggest a civilization and a culture far above anything known in the middle-class, commercial town of the medieval or modern world….

Yet they knew how to live in their happy slave State, in their sunny town with its ample theatre and ampitheatre, its games, gladiatorial shows, its light-hearted paintings, its delightful bronzes, its airy homes and beautiful temples. Here are the very ways up which Cicero passed, the ruts of the wagon wheels still deep in the stones—those narrow ways, across which you may leap without effort from side to side. Here stands the two public edifices, the temple and the brothel. Here in these little houses, sometimes just drawn as it were from the grave, the frescoes still fresh on the walls, the little sculptures in their place beside the fountain, and about the atrium even flowers—here they lived. And if you go out by the Herculanean gate you may see their tombs all beside the way, a long avenue, where lie the ancestors of those who saw the catastrophe. And if you have the courage to creep into that new museum by the gate you may see the images of those who suffered it, who fled too late from the amphitheatre by the Porta di Sarno, who returned for their gold or their treasure, to look for their children or to find a friend, or who never left home upon that tragic day when the mountain bellowed with thunder and the darkness and vileness  of the heart of the earth rose suddenly and descended upon this place in the face of the sun. There they lie, the young matron beside the slave, the master by the daughter, close together…. Ah, why should our curiosity demand so horrible an outrage as this?

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958.Preface. Pp. 181, 191-193. 

Vesuvius

 

 

 

For Edward Hutton Mt. Vesuvius was best viewed from afar.

 

If upon the west of Naples lies the wonder of the Phlegraean fields in the paradise of the bay of Pozzuoli, to the east there stands a marvel at once more astonishing and not less beautiful—I mean the great burning mountain of Vesuvius, with the exception of Etna, the greatest of the active volcanoes in Europe. Vesuvius, indeed, fills the mind and the imagination in Naples of native and stranger alike; it dominates and gives its character to the whole of this corner of Campania, and there is no moment of the day or night but men lift their eyes to it in fear or wonder. Goethe has spoken of it as “a peak of hell rising out of paradise”, but at least we must admit that it is the most beautiful thing therein, the one thing of which we can never have enough, whose image remains always in our minds, and lends to this great bay its unique interest, and more than half its strange beauty. Without Vesuvius, Naples—the bay of Naples—would lose its identity, would become almost as any other gulf upon the Tyrrhene Sea, and the proverb which sums up the absolutely unique splendour of this place would lose all its meaning, and appear as a mere empty boast signifying nothing nut vanity.

 

This being so, to visit Vesuvius, to ascend the cone, and gaze down into the restless crater, which continually delights and threatens Naples and all her villages with beauty and terror, would seem to be encumbent upon the traveller, and yet I think no one has ever made that journey without weariness and some disappointment. Vesuvius is best appreciated from afar, from Naples itself, from the forum of Pompeii, or the baths of Queen Giovanna at Sorrento. Thence it appears of so marvellous and strange a beauty, a great purple smoking pyramid in the sun, breathing fire in the darkness, exquisite at all times alike in form and colour, that nothing else in Europe, I think, is to be compared with it, for nothing else that we know is at once so beautiful and so evil, so suggestive of those half-realized forces latent within the body of the earth, which we have always regarded as malign, whose action is always catastrophic and tragical for us and our world,  the expression of the hatred and the ill-will of the spirit of evil, of chaos, towards God, and the beauty He has made for His and our delight. To visit Vesuvius, as one did till yesterday, and after driving for hours through the dingiest suburbs of Naples, through the dreariest of the old lava fields, to arrive at the foot of the funicular railway, which took one within a few hundred feet of the top, was to lose all one’s sense of wonder, in the mere vulgarity of the surroundings, the crowd of touts and tourists, the insatiable guides, hawkers, singers, beggars, and general rascaldom, which has always infested this mountain, and for all the ease of the autostrada it is not much less tiring today.

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958. Pp. 171-2.