On to Pompeii in the clear sunset, falling very lightly upon mountains,
islands, little ports, and indentations of the bay.
From the railway station we walked above half a mile to the Albergo del
Sole under a lucid heaven of aqua-marine colour, with Venus large in it
upon the border line between the tints of green and blue.
The Albergo del Sole is worth commemorating. We stepped, without the
intervention of courtyard or entrance hall, straight from the little inn
garden into an open, vaulted room. This was divided into two
compartments by a stout column supporting round arches. Wooden gates
furnished a kind of fence between the atrium and what an old Pompeian
would have styled the triclinium. For in the further part a table was
laid for supper and lighted with suspended lamps. And here a party of
artists and students drank and talked and smoked. A great live peacock,
half asleep and winking his eyes, sat perched upon a heavy wardrobe
watching them. The outer chamber, where we waited in arm-chairs of ample
girth, had its _loggia_ windows and doors open to the air. There were
singing-birds in cages; and plants of rosemary, iris, and arundo sprang
carelessly from holes in the floor. A huge vase filled to overflowing
with oranges and lemons, the very symbol of generous prodigality, stood
in the midst, and several dogs were lounging round. The outer twilight,
blending with the dim sheen of the lamps, softened this pretty scene to
picturesqueness. Altogether it was a strange and unexpected place. Much
experienced as the nineteenth-century nomad may be in inns, he will
rarely receive a more powerful and refreshing impression, entering one
at evenfall, than here.
There was no room for us in the inn. We were sent, attended by a boy
with a lantern, through fields of dew-drenched barley and folded
poppies, to a farmhouse overshadowed by four spreading pines.
Exceedingly soft and grey, with rose-tinted weft of steam upon its
summit, stood Vesuvius above us in the twilight. Something in the recent
impression of the dimly-lighted supper-room, and in the idyllic
simplicity of this lantern-litten journey through the barley, suggested,
by one of those inexplicable stirrings of association which affect tired
senses, a dim, dreamy thought of Palestine and Bible stories. The
feeling of the _cenacolo_ blent here with feelings of Ruth's cornfields,
and the white square houses with their flat roofs enforced the illusion.
Here we slept in the middle of a _contadino_ colony. Some of the folk
had made way for us; and by the wheezing, coughing, and snoring of
several sorts and ages in the chamber next me, I imagine they must have
endured considerable crowding. My bed was large enough to have contained
a family. Over its head there was a little shrine, hollowed in the
thickness of the wall, with several sacred emblems and a shallow vase
of holy water. On dressers at each end of the room stood glass shrines,
occupied by finely-dressed Madonna dolls and pots of artificial flowers.
Above the doors S. Michael and S. Francis, roughly embossed in low
relief and boldly painted, gave dignity and grandeur to the walls. These
showed some sense for art in the first builders of the house. But the
taste of the inhabitants could not be praised. There were countless
gaudy prints of saints, and exactly five pictures of the Bambino, very
big, and sprawling in a field alone. A crucifix, some old bottles, a
gun, old clothes suspended from pegs, pieces of peasant pottery and
china, completed the furniture of the apartment.
But what a view it showed when Christian next morning opened the door!
From my bed I looked across the red-tiled terrace to the stone pines
with their velvet roofage and the blue-peaked hills of Stabiae.