These little settlements under the cliff, called marinas, are worlds in themselves, picturesque at a distance, but squalid seen close at hand.They are not very different from the little fishing-stations on the Isle of Wight; but they are more sheltered, and their inhabitants sing at their work, wear bright colors, and bask in the sun a good deal, feeling no sense of responsibility for the world they did not create.To weave nets, to fish in the bay, to sell their fish at the wharves, to eat unexciting vegetables and fish, to drink moderately, to go to the chapel of St.Antonino on Sunday, not to work on fast and feast days, nor more than compelled to any day, this is life at the marinas.Their world is what they can see, and Naples is distant and almost foreign.Generation after generation is content with the same simple life.They have no more idea of the bad way the world is in than bees in their cells.
THE VILLA NARDI
The Villa Nardi hangs over the sea.It is built on a rock, and Iknow not what Roman and Greek foundations, and the remains of yet earlier peoples, traders, and traffickers, whose galleys used to rock there at the base of the cliff, where the gentle waves beat even in this winter-time with a summer swing and sound of peace.
It was at the close of a day in January that I first knew the Villa Nardi,--a warm, lovely day, at the hour when the sun was just going behind the Capo di Sorrento, in order to disrobe a little, I fancy, before plunging into the Mediterranean off the end of Capri, as is his wont about this time of year.When we turned out of the little piazza, our driver was obliged to take off one of our team of three horses driven abreast, so that we could pass through the narrow and crooked streets, or rather lanes of blank walls.With cracking whip, rattling wheels, and shouting to clear the way, we drove into the Strada di San Francisca, and to an arched gateway.This led down a straight path, between olives and orange and lemon-trees, gleaming with shining leaves and fruit of gold, with hedges of rose-trees in full bloom, to another leafy arch, through which I saw tropical trees, and a terrace with a low wall and battered busts guarding it, and beyond, the blue sea, a white sail or two slanting across the opening, and the whiteness of Naples some twenty miles away on the shore.
The noble family of the Villa did not descend into the garden to welcome us, as we should have liked; in fact, they have been absent now for a long time, so long that even their ghosts, if they ever pace the terrace-walk towards the convent, would appear strange to one who should meet them; and yet our hostess, the Tramontano, did what the ancient occupants scarcely could have done, gave us the choice of rooms in the entire house.The stranger who finds himself in this secluded paradise, at this season, is always at a loss whether to take a room on the sea, with all its changeable loveliness, but no sun, or one overlooking the garden, where the sun all day pours itself into the orange boughs, and where the birds are just beginning to get up a spring twitteration.My friend, whose capacity for taking in the luxurious repose of this region is something extraordinary, has tried, I believe, nearly every room in the house, and has at length gone up to a solitary room on the top, where, like a bird on a tree he looks all ways, and, so to say, swings in the entrancing air.But, wherever you are, you will grow into content with your situation.
At the Villa Nardi we have no sound of wheels, no noise of work or traffic, no suggestion of conflict.I am under the impression that everything that was to have been done has been done.I am, it is true, a little afraid that the Saracens will come here again, and carry off more of the nut-brown girls, who lean over the walls, and look down on us from under the boughs.I am not quite sure that a French Admiral of the Republic will not some morning anchor his three-decker in front, and open fire on us; but nothing else can happen.Naples is a thousand miles away.The boom of the saluting guns of Castel Nuovo is to us scarcely an echo of modern life.Rome does not exist.And as for London and New York) they send their people and their newspapers here, but no pulse of unrest from them disturbs our tranquillity.Hemmed in on the land side by high walls, groves, and gardens, perched upon a rock two hundred feet above the water, how much more secure from invasion is this than any fabled island of the southern sea, or any remote stream where the boats of the lotus-eaters float!
There is a little terrace and flower-plat, where we sometimes sit, and over the wall of which we like to lean, and look down the cliff to the sea.This terrace is the common ground of many exotics as well as native trees and shrubs.Here are the magnolia, the laurel, the Japanese medlar, the oleander, the pepper, the bay, the date-palm, a tree called the plumbago, another from the Cape of Good Hope, the pomegranate, the elder in full leaf, the olive, salvia, heliotrope; close by is a banana-tree.
I find a good deal of companionship in the rows of plaster busts that stand on the wall, in all attitudes of listlessness, and all stages of decay.I thought at first they were penates of the premises; but better acquaintance has convinced me that they never were gods, but the clayey representations of great men and noble dames.The stains of time are on them; some have lost a nose or an ear; and one has parted with a still more important member--his head,--an accident that might profitably have befallen his neighbor, whose curly locks and villainously low forehead proclaim him a Roman emperor.Cut in the face of the rock is a walled and winding way down to the water.