of scenery, but its huge mass serves as an admirable shelter to Capri
below, and it is with Capri that the ordinary visitor is alone
concerned. The first thing which strikes one is the smallness of the
place. The whole island is only some four miles long and a mile and a
half across, and, as we have seen, a good half of this space is
practically inaccessible. But it is just the diminutive size of Capri
which becomes one of its greatest charms. It would be hard in fact to
find any part of the world where so much and such varied beauty is
packed into so small a space. The visitor who lands from Naples or
Sorrento mounts steeply up the slopes of a grand amphitheatre flanked on
either side by the cliffs of St. Michael and Anacapri to the white line
of the village on the central ridge with the strange Saracenic domes of
its church lifted weirdly against the sky. Over the crest of this ridge
a counter valley falls as steeply to the south till it reaches a plateau
crowned with the grey mass of a convent, and then plunges over crag and
cliff back again to the sea. To the east of these central valleys a
steep rise of ground ends in the ruins of the Palace of Tiberius and the
great headland which fronts the headland of Sorrento. Everywhere the
forms of the scenery are on the largest and boldest scale. The great
conical Tors, Tuoro-grande and Tuoro-piccolo, the boldly scarped rock of
Castiglione with its crown of mediaeval towers, lead up the eye to the
huge cliff wall of Anacapri, where, a thousand feet above, the white
hermitage on Monte Solaro glimmers out fitfully from its screen of
cloud.
Among the broken heights to the east or in the two central valleys there
are scores of different walks and a hundred different nooks, and each
walk and nook has its own independent charm. Steeps clothed from top to
bottom in the thick greenery of the lemon or orange; sudden breaks like
that of Metromania where a blue strip of sea seems to have been
cunningly let in among the rocks; backgrounds of tumbled limestone;
slopes dusty grey with wild cactus; thickets of delightful greenery
where one lies hidden in the dense scrub of myrtle and arbutus;
olive-yards creeping thriftily up the hill-sides and over the cliffs and
down every slope and into every rock-corner where the Caprese
peasant-farmer can find footing; homesteads of grey stone with low domed
Oriental roofs on which women sit spinning, their figures etched out
against the sky; gardens where the writhed fig-trees stand barely
waiting for the foliage of the spring; nooks amidst broken boulders and
vast fingers of rock with the dark mass of the carouba flinging its
shade over them; heights from which one looks suddenly northward and
southward over a hundred miles of sea--this is Capri. The sea is
everywhere. At one turn its waters go flashing away unbroken by a single
sail towards the far-off African coast where the Caprese boatmen are
coral-fishing through the hot summer months; at another the eye ranges
over the tumbled mountain masses above Amalfi to the dim sweep of coast
where the haze hides the temples of Paestum; at another the Bay of Naples
opens suddenly before us, Vesuvius and the blue deep of Castellamare and
the white city-line along the coast seen with a strange witchery across
twenty miles of clear air.
The island is a paradise of silence for those to whom silence is a
delight. One wanders about in the vineyards without a sound save the
call of the vinedressers; one lies on the cliff and hears a thousand
feet below the dreamy wash of the sea. There is hardly the cry of a bird
to break the spell; even the girls who meet one with a smile on the
hill-side smile quietly and gravely in the Southern fashion as they pass
by. It is the stillest place that the sun shines on; but with all its
stillness it is far from being a home of boredom. There are in fact few
places in the world so full of interest. The artist finds a world of
"studies" in its rifts and cliff walls, in the sailor groups along its
beach and the Greek faces of the girls in its vineyards. The geologist
reads the secret of the past in its abruptly tilted strata, in a deposit
of volcanic ash, in the fossils and bones which Augustus set the fashion
of collecting before geology was thought of. The historian and the
archaeologist have a yet wider field. Capri is a perfect treasure-house
of Roman remains, and though in later remains the island is far poorer,
the ruins of mediaeval castles crown the heights of Castiglione and
Anacapri, and the mother church of San Costanzo with its central dome
supported on marble shafts from the ruins hard by is an early specimen
of Sicilian or Southern Italian architecture. Perhaps the most
remarkable touch of the South is seen in the low stone vaults which form
the roofs of all the older houses of Capri, and whose upper surface
serves as a terrace where the women gather in the sunshine in a way
which brings home to one oddly the recollections of Syria and
Jerusalem.
For loungers of a steadily uninquiring order however there are plenty of
amusements of a lighter sort. It is hard to spend a day more pleasantly
than in boating beneath the cliffs of Capri, bobbing for "cardinals,"
cruising round the huge masses of the Faraglioni as they rise like
giants out of the sea, dipping in and out of the little grottoes which
stud the coast. On land there are climbs around headlands and
"rock-work" for the adventurous, easy little walks with exquisite peeps
of sea and cliff for the idle, sunny little nooks where the dreamer can
lie buried in myrtle and arbutus. The life around one, simple as it is,
has the colour and picturesqueness of the South. The girl faces which
meet one on the hill-side are faces such as artists love. In the church
the little children play about among the groups of mothers with orange
kerchiefs on their heads and heavy silver rings on every finger. Strange
processions with cowled faces and crucifix and banners borne aloft sweep
into the piazza and up the church steps. Old women with Sibyl-like faces
sit spinning at their doors. Maidens with water-jars on their heads
which might have been dug up at Pompeii; priests with broad hats and
huge cloaks; sailors with blue shirts and red girdles; urchins who
almost instinctively cry for a "soldo" and break into the Tarantella if
you look at them; quiet, grave, farmer-peasants with the Phrygian cap;
coral-fishers fresh from the African coast with tales of storm and
tempest and the Madonna's help--make up group after group of Caprese
life as one looks idly on, a life not specially truthful perhaps or
moral or high-minded, but sunny and pleasant and pretty enough, and
harmonizing in its own genial way with the sunshine and beauty around.
Its rough inns, its want of English doctors, the difficulties of
communication with the mainland from which its residents are utterly cut
off in bad weather, make Capri an unsuitable resort for invalids in
spite of a climate which if inferior to that of Catania is distinctly
superior to that of either San Remo or Mentone. Those who remember the
Riviera with no little gratitude may still shrink from the memory of its
sharp transitions of temperature, the chill shade into which one plunges
from the direct heat of its sun-rays, and the bitter cold of its winter
nights. Out of the sun indeed the air of the Riviera towards Christmas
is generally keen, and a cloudy day with an east wind sweeping along
the shore will bring back unpleasant reminiscences of the England one
has left behind. Capri is no hotter perhaps in the sunshine, but it is
distinctly warmer in the shade. The wraps and shawls which are a
necessity of health at San Remo or Mentone are far less necessary in the
South. One may live frankly in the open air in a way which would hardly
be safe elsewhere, and it is just life in the open air which is most
beneficial to invalids. It is this natural warmth which tells on the
temperature of the nights. The sudden change at sunset which is the
terror of the Riviera is far less perceptible at Capri; indeed the
average night temperature is but two degrees lower than that of the day.
The air too is singularly pure and invigorating, for the village and its
hotels stand some four or five hundred feet above the sea, and there are
some fairly level and accessible walks along the hill-sides. At San
Remo, or in the eastern bay of Mentone, one purchases shelter by living
in a teacup and the only chance of exercise lies in climbing up its
sides. But it must fairly be owned that these advantages are accompanied
by some very serious drawbacks. If Capri is fairly free from the bitter
east wind of the Riviera, the Riviera is free from the stifling
scirocco of Capri. In the autumn and in the earlier part of the winter
this is sometimes almost intolerable. The wind blows straight from
Africa, hot, dusty, and oppressive in a strange and almost indescribable
way. All the peculiar clearness of the atmosphere disappears; one sees
every feature of the landscape as one would see them through a raw
autumn day in England. The presence of fine dust in the air--the dust of
the African desert to which this effect is said to be owing--may perhaps
account for the peculiar oppressiveness of the scirocco; certain it is,
that after two days of it every nerve in the body seems set ajar.
Luckily however it only lasts for three days and dies down into rain as
the wind veers round to the west.
CAPRI AND ITS ROMAN REMAINS.
II.
Among the many charms of Capri must be counted the number and interest
of its Roman remains. The whole island is in fact a vast Roman wreck.
Hill-side and valley are filled with a mass of _debris_ that brings home
to one in a way which no detailed description can do the scale of the
buildings with which it was crowded. At either landing-place huge
substructures stretch away beneath the waves, the relics of moles, of
arsenals, and of docks; a network of roads may still be traced which
linked together the ruins of Imperial villas; every garden is watered
from Roman cisterns; dig where he will, the excavator is rewarded by the
discovery of vases, of urns, of fragments of sculpture, of mosaic
pavements, of precious marbles. Every peasant has a handful of Roman
coins to part with for a few soldi. The churches of the island and the
royal palaces of the mainland are full of costly columns which have been
removed from the ruins of Capri; and the Museum of Naples is largely
indebted for its treasures of statuary to the researches made here at
the close of the last century. The main archaeological interest of the
island however lies not in fragments or "finds" such as these but in the
huge masses of ruin which lie scattered so thickly over it. The Pharos
which guided the Alexandrian corn-ships to Puteoli stands shattered on
one of its headlands. The waves dash idly against an enormous fragment
of the sea-baths of Tiberius. His palace-citadel still looks from the
summit of a mighty cliff across the Straits of Sorrento. The Stairs of
Anacapri, which in the absence of any other date to which it is possible
to assign them, we are forced to refer to the same period of
construction, hewn as they were to the height of a thousand feet in the
solid rock, vied in boldness with almost any achievement of Roman
engineering. The smallness of the space--for the lower part of the
island within which these relics are crowded is little more than a mile
and a half either way--adds to the sense of wonder which the size and
number of these creations excite. All that remains too, it must be
remembered, is the work of but a few years. There is no ground for
believing that anything of importance was added after the death of
Tiberius or begun before the old age of Augustus.
We catch glimpses indeed of the history of the island long before its
purchase by the aged Emperor. Its commanding position at the mouth of
the great Campanian bay raised it into importance at a very early
period. The Teleboes whom tradition named as its first inhabitants have
left only a trace of their existence in the verse of Vergil; but in the
great strife between the Hellenic and Tyrrhenian races for the
commercial monopoly of Southern Italy Capri, like Sorrento, was seized
as a naval station by the Etruscans, whose alliance with the Phoenicians
in their common war against the Greeks may perhaps explain the vague
legends of a Semitic settlement on the island. The Hellenic victory of
Cumae however settled the fate of Capri, as it settled the fate of the
coast; and the island fell to the lot of Neapolis when the "new city"
rose in the midst of the bay to which it has since given its name. The
most enduring trace of its Greek colonization is to be found in the
Greek type of countenance and form which endears Capri to artists; but
like the cities of the mainland it preserved its Greek manners and
speech long after it had passed with Neapolis into the grasp of Rome.
The greater proportion of its inscriptions, even when dating from the
Imperial period, are in Greek. Up to the time of Augustus however it
played in Roman story but the humble part of lighting the great
corn-fleet from Egypt through the Strait of Sorrento. Statius tells us
of the joy with which the sailors welcomed the glare of its Pharos as
they neared the land, the greeting they addressed to its cliff, while on
the other hand they poured their libations to the goddess whose white
temple gleamed from the headland of Sorrento. Its higher destinies began
with a chance visit of Augustus when age and weakness had driven him to
seek a summer retreat on the Campanian shore. A happy omen, the revival
of a withered ilex at his landing, as well as the temperate air of the
place itself so charmed the Emperor that he forced Naples to accept
Ischia in exchange for it, and chose it as his favourite refuge from the
excessive heat. Suetonius gives a pleasant gossiping picture of the old
man's life in his short holidays there, his delight in idly listening
to the prattle of his Moorish and Syrian slave-boys as they played
knuckle-bones on the beach, his enjoyment of the cool breeze which swept
through his villa even in summer or of the cool plash of water from the
fountain in the peristyle, his curiosity about the big fossil bones dug
up in the island which he sent to Rome to be placed in the galleries of
his house on the Palatine, his fun in quizzing the pedants who followed
him by Greek verses of his own making. But in the midst of his idleness
the indefatigable energy which marked the man was seen in the buildings
with which Suetonius tells us he furnished the island, and the progress
of which after his death may possibly have been the inducement which
drew his successor to its shores.
It is with the name of the second Caesar rather than of the first that
Capri is destined to be associated. While the jests and Greek verses of
Augustus are forgotten the terrible invective of Tacitus and the sarcasm
of Juvenal recall the cruelties and the terrors of Tiberius. His
retirement to Capri, although as we have seen in form but a carrying out
of the purpose of Augustus, marks a distinct stage in the developement
of the Empire. For ten years not Rome, but an obscure island off the
Campanian coast became the centre of the government of the world. The
spell of the Eternal City was suddenly broken, and it was never
thoroughly restored. If Milan, Ravenna, Nicomedia, Constantinople,
became afterwards her rivals or supplanters as the seat of empire, it
was because Capri had led the way. For the first time too, as Dean
Merivale has pointed out, the world was made to see in its bare
nakedness the fact that it had a single master. All the disguises which
Augustus had flung around his personal rule were cast aside; Senate,
Consuls, the Roman people itself, were left contemptuously behind. A
single senator, a few knights, a little group of Greek scholars, were
all that accompanied Tiberius to Capri. The figure of the Emperor stood
out bare and alone on its solitary rock. But, great as the change really
was, the skill of Tacitus has thrown over the retirement of Tiberius a
character of strangeness which, as we have said, hardly belongs to it.
What in fact distinguished it from the retirement of Augustus to the
same spot was simply the persistence of his successor in never returning
to Rome.
Capri in itself was nothing but a part of the great pleasure resort
which Roman luxury created round the shores of the Bay of Naples. From
its cliffs the Emperor could see through the pure, transparent air the
villas and watering-places which fringed the coast from Misenum to
Sorrentum, the groves and lakes of Baisae, the white line of Neapolis,
Pompeii, and Herculaneum, the blue sea dappled with the painted sails of
pleasure-boats as they wooed the summer air. The whole bay was a Roman
Brighton, and the withdrawal of Tiberius from the world was much the
same sort of withdrawal from the world as the seclusion of George IV. at
the Pavilion. Of the viler pleasures which are commonly attributed to
him in his retreat we need say nothing, for it is only by ingenious
conjectures that any of the remains at Capri have been made to confirm
them. The taste of Tiberius was as coarse as the taste of his fellow
Romans, and the scenes which were common at Baiae--the drunkards
wandering along the shore, the songs of the revellers, the
drinking-toasts of the sailors, the boats with their gaudy cargo of
noisy girls, the coarse jokes of the bathers among the rose-leaves which
strewed the water--were probably as common in the revels at Capri. But
for the more revolting details of the old man's life we have only the
scandal of Rome to rely on, and scandal was easily quickened by the veil
of solitude and secrecy which Tiberius flung around his retirement. The
tale of his cruelties, of the fisherman tortured for having climbed the
cliff which the Emperor deemed inaccessible, of criminals dashed into
the sea down the steep of the "Salto di Timberio," rest on the gossip of
Suetonius alone. But in all this mass of gossip there is little that
throws any real light on the character of the island or of the buildings
whose remains excite our interest there; we can only guess at its far
wilder condition from a story which shows us the Imperial litter fairly
brought to a standstill by the thick brushwood, and the wrath of
Tiberius venting itself in a ruthless thrashing of the centurion who
served as his guide. The story is curious because it shows that, in
spite of the rapidity with which the Imperial work had been carried on,
the island when Tiberius arrived was still in many parts hidden with
rough and impenetrable scrub, and that the wonderful series of hanging
gardens which turned almost the whole of it into a vast pleasure-ground
was mainly of his own creation.
It would of course be impossible to pass in review the numberless sites
where either chance or research has detected traces of the work of
Tiberius. "Duodecim villarum nominibus et molibus insederat," says
Tacitus; and the sites of the twelve villas may in most cases be
identified to-day, some basking in the sunshine by the shore, some
placed in sheltered nooks where the cool sea-breeze tempered the summer
heat, the grander ones crowning the summit of the hills. We can trace
the docks of the Roman island, the grottoes still paved with mosaic
which marks them as the scene of Imperial picnics, the terraces and
arbours of the hanging gardens with the rock boldly cut away to make
room for them, the system of roads which linked the villas together, the
cisterns and aqueducts which supplied water, the buildings for the
slaves of the household and for the legionaries who guarded the shore,
the cemetery for the dead, the shrines and pavilions scattered about on
the heights, and a small Mithraic temple hidden in the loveliest of the
Caprese ravines. If we restore in fancy the scene to which these ruins
belonged, fill the gardens with the fountains and statues whose
fragments lie profusely scattered about, rear again the porticoes of
marble columns, and restore the frescoes whose traces exist on the
ruined walls, we shall form some inadequate conception of the luxury
and grace which Tiberius flung around his retirement.
By a singular piece of good fortune the one great wreck which towers
above all the rest is the spot with which the Emperor himself is
historically associated. Through the nine terrible months during which
the conspiracy of Sejanus was in progress, he never left, Seutonius
tells us, the Villa Jovis; and the villa still stands on a huge
promontory, fifteen hundred feet above the sea, from which his eye could
watch every galley that brought its news of good or ill from Misenum and
from Rome. Few landscapes can compare in extent or beauty with the view
on which Tiberius looked. The promontory of Massa lies across the blue
reach of sea, almost as it seems under one's hand yet really a few miles
off, its northern side falling in brown slopes dotted with white villas
to the orange gardens of Sorrento, its southern rushing steeply down to
the hidden bays of Amalfi and Salerno. To the right the distant line of
Apennines, broken by the shadowy dip that marks the plain of Paestum,
runs southward in a dim succession of capes and headlands; to the left
the sunny bow of the Bay of Naples gleams clear and distinct through
the brilliant air till Procida and Ischia lead the eye round again to
the cliff of Anacapri with the busy little Marina at its feet. A tiny
chapel in charge of a hermit now crowns the plateau which forms the
highest point of the Villa Jovis; on three sides of the height the cliff
falls in a sheer descent of more than a thousand feet to the sea, on the
fourth the terrace walls are formed of fragments of brick and marble
which recall the hanging gardens that swept downwards to the plain. The
Villa itself lies partly hewn out of the sides of the steep rock, partly
supported by a vast series of substructures whose arched vaults served
as water-reservoirs and baths for the service of the house.
In strength of site and in the character of its defences the palace was
strictly what Pliny calls it, "Tiberii principis arx," but this was no
special characteristic of the Villa Jovis. "Scias non villas esse sed
castra," said Seneca of the luxurious villas on the coast of Baiae; it
was as if the soldier element of the Roman nature broke out even amidst
the patrician's idlest repose in the choice of a military site and the
warlike strength of the buildings he erected on it. Within however life
seems to have been luxurious enough. The ruins of a theatre, whose
ground-plan remains perfect, show that Tiberius combined more elegant
relaxations with the coarse revels which are laid to his charge. Each
passage is paved with mosaic, the walls still retain in patches their
coloured stucco, and here and there in the small chambers we find traces
of the designs which adorned them. It is however rather by the vast
extent and huge size of the substructures than by the remains of the
house itself that we can estimate the grandeur of the Villa Jovis; for
here, as at the Baths near the Marina, the ruins have served as quarries
for chapels and forts and every farmhouse in the neighbourhood. The
Baths stand only second in grandeur to the Villa itself. The fall of the
cliff has torn down fragment after fragment, but the half of an immense
calidarium still stands like an apse fronting the sea, a grand sea-wall
juts out into the waves, and at its base, like a great ship of stone in
the midst of the water, lies still unbroken after eighteen hundred years
the sea-bath itself. The roof has fallen in, the pillars are tumbled
from its front, but the high walls, though undermined by the tide, still
stand erect. On the cliff above, a Roman fortress which must have
resembled Burgh Castle in form and which has since served as a modern
fort seems to have protected the Baths and the vast series of gardens
which occupied the whole of the lower ground beneath the Stair of
Anacapri, and whose boundary wall remains in a series of some twenty
almost perfect arches.