The Villa Nardi hangs over the sea. It is built on a rock, and I know
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. I see below the archway where it
issues from the underground recesses of our establishment; and there
stands a bust, in serious expectation that some one will walk out and
saunter down among the rocks; but no one ever does. Just at the right
is a little beach, with a few old houses, and a mimic stir of life, a
little curve in the cliff, the mouth of the gorge, where the waves come
in with a lazy swash. Some fishing-boats ride there; and the shallow
water, as I look down this sunny morning, is thickly strewn with
floating peels of oranges and lemons, as if some one was brewing a
gigantic bowl of punch. And there is an uncommon stir of life; for a
schooner is shipping a cargo of oranges, and the entire population is in
a clamor. Donkeys are coming down the winding way, with a heavy basket
on either flank; stout girls are stepping lightly down with loads on
their heads; the drivers shout, the donkeys bray, the people jabber
and order each other about; and the oranges, in a continual stream, are
poured into the long, narrow vessel, rolling in with a thud, until there
is a yellow mass of them. Shouting, scolding, singing, and braying, all
come up to me a little mellowed. The disorder is not so great as on
the opera stage of San Carlo in Naples; and the effect is much more
pleasing.
This settlement, the marina, under the cliff, used to extend along the
shore; and a good road ran down there close by the water. The rock has
split off, and covered it; and perhaps the shore has sunk. They tell
me that those who dig down in the edge of the shallow water find sunken
walls, and the remains of old foundations of Roman workmanship.
People who wander there pick up bits of marble, serpentine, and
malachite,--remains of the palaces that long ago fell into the sea, and
have not left even the names of their owners and builders,-the ancient
loafers who idled away their days as everybody must in this seductive
spot. Not far from here, they point out the veritable caves of the
Sirens, who have now shut up house, and gone away, like the rest of the
nobility. If I had been a mariner in their day, I should have made no
effort to sail by and away from their soothing shore.
I went, one day, through a long, sloping arch, near the sailors' Chapel
of St. Antonino, past a pretty shrine of the Virgin, down the zigzag
path to this little marina; but it is better to be content with looking
at it from above, and imagining how delightful it would be to push off
in one of the little tubs of boats. Sometimes, at night, I hear the
fishermen coming home, singing in their lusty fashion; and I think it is
a good haven to arrive at. I never go down to search for stones on the
beach: I like to believe that there are great treasures there, which I
might find; and I know that the green and brown and spotty appearance of
the water is caused by the showing through of the pavements of courts,
and marble floors of palaces, which might vanish if I went nearer, such
a place of illusion is this.
The Villa Nardi stands in pleasant relations to Vesuvius, which is just
across the bay, and is not so useless as it has been represented; it
is our weather-sign and prophet. When the white plume on his top floats
inland, that is one sort of weather; when it streams out to sea, that is
another. But I can never tell which is which: nor in my experience does
it much matter; for it seems impossible for Sorrento to do anything but
woo us with gentle weather. But the use of Vesuvius, after all, is
to furnish us a background for the violet light at sundown, when the
villages at its foot gleam like a silver fringe. I have become convinced
of one thing: it is always best when you build a house to have it front
toward a volcano, if you can. There is just that lazy activity about a
volcano, ordinarily, that satisfies your demand for something that is
not exactly dead, and yet does not disturb you.
Sometimes when I wake in the night,--though I don't know why one ever
wakes in the night, or the daytime either here,--I hear the bell of the
convent, which is in our demesne,--a convent which is suppressed, and
where I hear, when I pass in the morning, the humming of a school. At
first I tried to count the hour; but when the bell went on to strike
seventeen, and even twenty-one o'clock, the absurdity of the thing came
over me, and I wondered whether it was some frequent call to prayer for
a feeble band of sisters remaining, some reminder of midnight penance
and vigil, or whether it was not something more ghostly than that, and
was not responded to by shades of nuns, who were wont to look out from
their narrow latticed windows upon these same gardens, as long ago as
when the beautiful Queen Joanna used to come down here to repent--if she
ever did repent--of her wanton ways in Naples.
On one side of the garden is a suppressed monastery. The narrow front
towards the sea has a secluded little balcony, where I like to fancy
the poor orphaned souls used to steal out at night for a breath of fresh
air, and perhaps to see, as I did one dark evening, Naples with its
lights like a conflagration on the horizon. Upon the tiles of the
parapet are cheerful devices, the crossbones tied with a cord, and the
like. How many heavy-hearted recluses have stood in that secluded nook,
and been tempted by the sweet, lulling sound of the waves below; how
many have paced along this narrow terrace, and felt like prisoners who
wore paths in the stone floor where they trod; and how many stupid louts
have walked there, insensible to all the charm of it!
If I pass into the Tramontano garden, it is not to escape the presence
of history, or to get into the modern world, where travelers are
arriving, and where there is the bustle and proverbial discontent of
those who travel to enjoy themselves. In the pretty garden, which is a
constant surprise of odd nooks and sunny hiding-places, with ruins, and
most luxuriant ivy, is a little cottage where, I am told in confidence,
the young king of Bavaria slept three nights not very long ago. I hope
he slept well. But more important than the sleep, or even death, of a
king, is the birth of a poet, I take it; and within this inclosure, on
the eleventh day of March, 1541, Torquato Tasso, most melancholy of men,
first saw the light; and here was born his noble sister Cornelia, the
descendants of whose union with the cavalier Spasiano still live here,
and in a manner keep the memory of the poet green with the present
generation. I am indebted to a gentleman who is of this lineage for many
favors, and for precise information as to the position in the house that
stood here of the very room in which Tasso was born. It is also minutely
given in a memoir of Tasso and his family, by Bartolommeo Capasso,
whose careful researches have disproved the slipshod statements of the
guidebooks, that the poet was born in a house which is still standing,
farther to the west, and that the room has fallen into the sea. The
descendant of the sister pointed out to me the spot on the terrace of
the Tramontano where the room itself was, when the house still stood;
and, of course, seeing is believing. The sun shone full upon it, as we
stood there; and the air was full of the scent of tropical fruit and
just-coming blossoms. One could not desire a more tranquil scene of
advent into life; and the wandering, broken-hearted author of “Jerusalem
Delivered” never found at court or palace any retreat so soothing as
that offered him here by his steadfast sister.
If I were an antiquarian, I think I should have had Tasso born at the
Villa Nardi, where I like best to stay, and where I find traces of many
pilgrims from other countries. Here, in a little corner room on the
terrace, Mrs. Stowe dreamed and wrote; and I expect, every morning, as
I take my morning sun here by the gate, Agnes of Sorrento will come down
the sweet-scented path with a basket of oranges on her head.