Casamicciola is a village on the north side of the island, in its
centre, where the visitors to the mineral baths of Ischia chiefly
congregate. One of its old-established inns is called La Piccola
Sentinella. The first sight on entrance is an open gallery, with a pink
wall on which bloom magnificent cactuses, sprays of thick-clustering
scarlet and magenta flowers. This is a rambling house, built in
successive stages against a hill, with terraces and verandahs opening
on unexpected gardens to the back and front. Beneath its long irregular
facade there spreads a wilderness of orange-trees and honeysuckles and
roses, verbenas, geraniums and mignonette, snapdragons, gazenias and
stocks, exceeding bright and fragrant, with the green slopes of Monte
Epomeo for a background and Vesuvius for far distance. There are
wonderful bits of detail in this garden. One dark, thick-foliaged olive,
I remember, leaning from the tufa over a lizard-haunted wall, feathered
waist-high in huge acanthus-leaves. The whole rich orchard ground of
Casamicciola is dominated by Monte Epomeo, the extinct volcano which may
be called the _raison d'etre_ of Ischia; for this island is nothing but
a mountain lifted by the energy of fire from the sea-basement. Its
fantastic peaks and ridges, sulphur-coloured, dusty grey, and tawny,
with brushwood in young leaf upon the cloven flanks, form a singular
pendant to the austere but more artistically modelled limestone crags of
Capri. Not two islands that I know, within so short a space of sea,
offer two pictures so different in style and quality of loveliness. The
inhabitants are equally distinct in type. Here, in spite of what De
Musset wrote somewhat affectedly about the peasant girls--
Ischia! c'est la qu'on a des yeux,
C'est la qu'un corsage amoureux
Serre la hanche.
Sur un bas rouge bien tire
Brille, sous le jupon dore,
La mule blanche--
in spite of these lines I did not find the Ischia women eminent, as
those of Capri are, for beauty. But the young men have fine, loose,
faun-like figures, and faces that would be strikingly handsome but for
too long and prominent noses. They are a singular race, graceful in
movement.
Evening is divine in Ischia. From the topmost garden terrace of the inn
one looks across the sea toward Terracina, Gaeta, and those descending
mountain buttresses, the Phlegraean plains and the distant snows of the
Abruzzi. Rain-washed and luminous, the sunset sky held Hesper trembling
in a solid green of beryl. Fireflies flashed among the orange blossoms.
Far away in the obscurity of eastern twilight glared the smouldering
cone of Vesuvius--a crimson blot upon the darkness--a Cyclop's eye,
bloodshot and menacing.
The company in the Piccola Sentinella, young and old, were decrepit,
with an odd, rheumatic, shrivelled look upon them. The dining-room
reminded me, as certain rooms are apt to do, of a ship's saloon. I felt
as though I had got into the cabin of the _Flying Dutchman_, and that
all these people had been sitting there at meat a hundred years, through
storm and shine, for ever driving onward over immense waves in an
enchanted calm.