CAPRI

“CAP, signor? Good day for Grott.” Thus spoke a mariner, touching his

Phrygian cap. The people here abbreviate all names. With them Massa

is Mas, Meta is Met, Capri becomes Cap, the Grotta Azzurra is reduced

familiarly to Grott, and they even curtail musical Sorrento into Serent.

Shall we go to Capri? Should we dare return to the great Republic, and

own that we had not been into the Blue Grotto? We like to climb the

steeps here, especially towards Massa, and look at Capri. I have read in

some book that it used to be always visible from Sorrento. But now the

promontory has risen, the Capo di Sorrento has thrust out its rocky spur

with its ancient Roman masonry, and the island itself has moved so far

round to the south that Sorrento, which fronts north, has lost sight of

it.

We never tire of watching it, thinking that it could not be spared from

the landscape. It lies only three miles from the curving end of the

promontory, and is about twenty miles due south of Naples. In this

atmosphere distances dwindle. The nearest land, to the northwest, is the

larger island of Ischia, distant nearly as far as Naples; yet Capri has

the effect of being anchored off the bay to guard the entrance. It is

really a rock, three miles and a half long, rising straight out of the

water, eight hundred feet high at one end, and eighteen hundred feet at

the other, with a depression between. If it had been chiseled by hand

and set there, it could not be more sharply defined. So precipitous are

its sides of rock, that there are only two fit boat-landings, the

marina on the north side, and a smaller place opposite. One of those

light-haired and freckled Englishmen, whose pluck exceeds their

discretion, rowed round the island alone in rough water, last summer,

against the advice of the boatman, and unable to make a landing, and

weary with the strife of the waves, was in considerable peril.

Sharp and clear as Capri is in outline, its contour is still most

graceful and poetic. This wonderful atmosphere softens even its

ruggedness, and drapes it with hues of enchanting beauty. Sometimes the

haze plays fantastic tricks with it,--a cloud-cap hangs on Monte Solaro,

or a mist obscures the base, and the massive summits of rock seem to

float in the air, baseless fabrics of a vision that the rising wind will

carry away perhaps. I know now what Homer means by “wandering islands.”

Shall we take a boat and sail over there, and so destroy forever another

island of the imagination? The bane of travel is the destruction of

illusions.

We like to talk about Capri, and to talk of going there. The Sorrento

people have no end of gossip about the wild island; and, simple and

primitive as they are, Capri is still more out of the world. I do not

know what enchantment there is on the island; but--whoever sets foot

there, they say, goes insane or dies a drunkard. I fancy the reason of

this is found in the fact that the Capri girls are raving beauties. I

am not sure but the monotony of being anchored off there in the bay,

the monotony of rocks and precipices that goats alone can climb, the

monotony of a temperature that scarcely ever, winter and summer, is

below 55 or above 75 Fahrenheit indoors, might drive one into lunacy.

But I incline to think it is due to the handsome Capri girls.

There are beautiful girls in Sorrento, with a beauty more than skin

deep, a glowing, hidden fire, a ripeness like that of the grape and the

peach which grows in the soft air and the sun. And they wither, like

grapes that hang upon the stem. I have never seen a handsome, scarcely

a decent-looking, old woman here. They are lank and dry, and their

bones are covered with parchment. One of these brown-cheeked girls, with

large, longing eyes, gives the stranger a start, now and then, when he

meets her in a narrow way with a basket of oranges on her head. I hope

he has the grace to go right by. Let him meditate what this vision of

beauty will be like in twenty ears.

The Capri girls are famed as magnificent beauties, but they fade like

their mainland sisters. The Saracens used to descend on their island,

and carry them off to their harems. The English, a very adventurous

people, who have no harems, have followed the Saracens. The young lords

and gentlemen have a great fondness for Capri. I hear gossip

enough about elopements, and not seldom marriages, with the island

girls,--bright girls, with the Greek mother-wit, and surpassingly

handsome; but they do not bear transportation to civilized life (any

more than some of the native wines do): they accept no intellectual

culture; and they lose their beauty as they grow old. What then? The

young English blade, who was intoxicated by beauty into an injudicious

match and might, as the proverb says, have gone insane if he could not

have made it, takes to drink now, and so fulfills the other alternative.

Alas! the fatal gift of beauty.

But I do not think Capri is so dangerous as it is represented. For

(of course we went to Capri) neither at the marina, where a crowd of

bare-legged, vociferous maidens with donkeys assailed us, nor in the

village above, did I see many girls for whom and one little isle a

person would forswear the world. But I can believe that they grow here.

One of our donkey girls was a handsome, dark-skinned, black-eyed

girl; but her little sister, a mite of a being of six years, who could

scarcely step over the small stones in the road, and was forced to lead

the donkey by her sister in order to establish another lien on us for

buona mano, was a dirty little angel in rags, and her great soft black

eyes will look somebody into the asylum or the drunkard's grave in time,

I have no doubt. There was a stout, manly, handsome little fellow of

five years, who established himself as the guide and friend of the

tallest of our party. His hat was nearly gone; he was sadly out of

repair in the rear; his short legs made the act of walking absurd; but

he trudged up the hill with a certain dignity. And there was nothing

mercenary about his attachment: he and his friend got upon very cordial

terms: they exchanged gifts of shells and copper coin, but nothing was

said about pay.

Nearly all the inhabitants, young and old, joined us in lively

procession, up the winding road of three quarters of a mile, to the

town. At the deep gate, entering between thick walls, we stopped to look

at the sea. The crowd and clamor at our landing had been so great that

we enjoyed the sight of the quiet old woman sitting here in the sun, and

the few beggars almost too lazy to stretch out their hands. Within

the gate is a large paved square, with the government offices and the

tobacco-shop on one side, and the church opposite; between them, up a

flight of broad stone steps, is the Hotel Tiberio. Our donkeys walk up

them and into the hotel. The church and hotel are six hundred years old;

the hotel was a villa belonging to Joanna II. of Naples. We climb to the

roof of the quaint old building, and sit there to drink in the strange

oriental scene. The landlord says it is like Jaffa or Jerusalem. The

landlady, an Irish woman from Devonshire, says it is six francs a day.

In what friendly intercourse the neighbors can sit on these flat roofs!

How sightly this is, and yet how sheltered! To the east is the height

where Augustus, and after him Tiberius, built palaces. To the west, up

that vertical wall, by means of five hundred steps cut in the face

of the rock, we go to reach the tableland of Anacapri, the primitive

village of that name, hidden from view here; the medieval castle of

Barbarossa, which hangs over a frightful precipice; and the height of

Monte Solaro. The island is everywhere strewn with Roman ruins, and with

faint traces of the Greeks.

Capri turns out not to be a barren rock. Broken and picturesque as it

is, it is yet covered with vegetation. There is not a foot, one might

say a point, of soil that does not bear something; and there is not a

niche in the rock, where a scrap of dirt will stay, that is not made

useful. The whole island is terraced. The most wonderful thing about

it, after all, is its masonry. You come to think, after a time, that the

island is not natural rock, but a mass of masonry. If the labor that has

been expended here, only to erect platforms for the soil to rest on,

had been given to our country, it would have built half a dozen Pacific

railways, and cut a canal through the Isthmus.

But the Blue Grotto? Oh, yes! Is it so blue? That depends upon the time

of day, the sun, the clouds, and something upon the person who enters

it. It is frightfully blue to some. We bend down in our rowboat, slide

into the narrow opening which is three feet high, and passing into the

spacious cavern, remain there for half an hour. It is, to be sure,

forty feet high, and a hundred by a hundred and fifty in extent, with

an arched roof, and clear water for a floor. The water appears to be as

deep as the roof is high, and is of a light, beautiful blue, in contrast

with the deep blue of the bay. At the entrance the water is illuminated,

and there is a pleasant, mild light within: one has there a novel

subterranean sensation; but it did not remind me of anything I have

seen in the “Arabian Nights.” I have seen pictures of it that were much

finer.

As we rowed close to the precipice in returning, I saw many similar

openings, not so deep, and perhaps only sham openings; and the

water-line was fretted to honeycomb by the eating waves. Beneath the

water-line, and revealed here and there when the waves receded, was a

line of bright red coral.