CASTELLAMMARE: ITS WOODS, ITS FOLKLORE
AND THE TALE OF THE MADONNA OF POZZANO
"Marzo e pazzo" ("March is mad") say the Neapolitans, contemptuous of
his inconstancies. God forbid that I should try to prove the sanity of
March; but it is long odds if April is one whit the better. His moon
is in its first quarter, and still sirocco blows up out of the sea day
by day. The grey clouds drift in banks across Vesuvius and hide the
pillar of his smoke, dropping down at whiles even to the level of the
plain. From time to time it is as if the mountain stirred and shook
himself, flinging off the weight of vapour from his flanks and crest,
so that again one can see the rolling column of dense smoke, stained
and discoloured by the reflection of the fires far down within the
cone, now rosy, now a menacing dull brown which is easily
distinguishable from the watery clouds that gather in the heavens. Yet
slowly, steadily the veil of mist returns, while mine host murmurs
ruefully, "Sette Aprilanti, giorni quaranta!" But it is not the
seventh of April yet, so we may still be spared the sight of dripping
trees for forty days. An hour ago, when I ventured up the hill towards
the woods, a tattered, copper-coloured varlet of a boy looked out of
the cellar where his mother was stooping over the smoking coals in her
brass chafing-dish. "Aprile chiuove, chiuove," he bawled, as if it
were the greatest news in the world. He thinks the harvest will be
mended by the April rains; though if he and others in this region knew
whence their true harvest comes, they would humbly supplicate our Lady
of Pozzano to give fine weather to the visitors.
To be stayed at the gate of the Sorrento peninsula by doubtful weather
is by no means an unmixed misfortune. It may be that our Lady of
Pozzano sometimes employs the showers to bring hasty travellers to a
better way of thinking. Certainly many people hurry past Castellammare
to their own hurt. The town is unattractive, and may, moreover, be
reproached with wickedness, though it suffers, as is said, from the
low morality of Greek sailors, rather than from any crookedness of its
homeborn citizens. But the mountain slopes behind it are immensely
beautiful. No woods elsewhere in the peninsula are comparable to
these. No other drives show views so wide and exquisite framed in such
a setting of fresh spring foliage, nor is there upon these shores an
hotel more comfortable or more homelike than the "Quisisana," which
stands near the entrance of the woods; and this I say with confidence,
though not unaware that the judgments of travellers upon hotels are as
various as their verdicts on a pretty woman, who at one hour of the
day is ten times prettier than at another, and may now and then look
positively plain.
Castellammare possesses an excellent sea-front, which would have made
a pleasant promenade had not a selfish little tramway seized upon the
side next the shore, guarding itself by a high railing from the
intrusion of strangers in search of cool fresh air. Thus cast back on
a line of dead walls, house-fronts as mean as only a fourth-rate
Italian town can boast, one has no other amusement than gazing at the
mountains, which in truth are beautiful enough for anyone. Very steep
and high they tower above Castellammare; not brown and purple, as when
I looked up at them across the broken walls of Pompeii, but clad in
their true colours of green of every shade, dark and sombre where
ravines are chiselled out upon the slopes, or where the pines lie wet
and heavy in the morning shadow. Higher up, the flanks of the
mountains are rough with brushwood, while on the summits the clear air
blows about bare grass deepening into brown. Sometimes sloping swiftly
to the sea, but more often dropping in sheer cliffs of immense height,
this dark and shadowy mountain wall thrusts itself out across the blue
waters, while here and there a village gleams white upon some broken
hillside, or a monastery rears its red walls among the soft grey of
the olive woods. There lies Vico, on its promontory rock, showing at
this distance only the shade of its great beauty; and beyond the next
lofty headland is Sorrento, at the foot of a mountain country so
exquisite, so odorous with myrtle and with rosemary, so fragrant of
tradition and romance, that it is, as I said, a good fortune which
checks the traveller coming from the plain at the first entrance of
the hills and gives him time to realise the nature of the land which
lies before him.
It needs no long puzzling to discover whence the importance of
Castellammare has been derived in all the centuries. The port offers a
safe shelter for shipping, which of itself counts for much upon a
coast possessing few such anchorages; and it lies near the entrance
of that valley road across the neck of the Sorrento peninsula, which
is the natural route of trade between Naples and Salerno. The road is
of much historical interest, as any highway must be which has been
followed by so many generations of travellers, both illustrious and
obscure; and any man who chooses to recollect by what various masters
Salerno has been held will be able to people this ancient track with
figures as picturesque as any in the history of mankind. He will
observe, moreover, the importance of the Castle of Nocera, which
dominates this route of traders. I confess to being somewhat puzzled
as to the exact course by which the commerce of Amalfi extricated
itself from the mountains and dispersed itself over the mainland.
Doubtless the merchants of La Scala and Ravello followed the still
existing road from Ravello to Lettere, and thence to Gragnano, whence
comes the ancient punning jest, "L'Asene de Gragnano Sapevano
Lettere." This road is certainly ancient, and early in the present
century it was the usual approach to Amalfi, whither travellers were
carried in litters across the mountains. The little handbook of
Ravello, based on notes left by the late Mr. Reid, seems to account
this road more recent than the age of Ravello's commercial greatness.
Probably a recency of form rather than of course is meant; but in any
case, I cannot believe that the merchants of Amalfi sent out their
trade by a route which began for them with an ascent so very long and
arduous. Possibly they approached Gragnano by a road running up the
valley from Minori or Majori. Of course the traders of old days were
very patient of rough mountain tracks, and did not look for the wide
beaten turnpikes which we have taught ourselves to regard as essential
to commerce. Doubtless, therefore, many a team of mules from Amalfi,
laden with silks and spices from the East, came down through Lettere,
where it would scarce get by the castle of the great counts who held
that former stronghold of the Goths without paying toll or tribute for
its safety on the mountain roads. And so, passing through Gragnano and
beneath the hillsides where the palaces of ancient Stabiae lie buried,
the wearied teams would come down at last to Castellammare, where they
would need rest ere beginning the hot journey by the coast road into
Naples.
Both the roads which diverge from Castellammare, the one heading
straight across the plains towards the high valley of La Cava, the
other clinging to the fresh mountain slopes, are therefore full of
interest. Of Nocera, indeed, its castle full of memories of Pope Urban
VI., and its fine church Santa Maria Maggiore, some two miles out, any
man with ease might write a volume. But we stayed long scorching on
the plains among the buried cities; and the hill route is the more
inviting now. The weather is disposed to break. A gleam of sun
sparkles here and there upon the water. Let us see what the hillsides
have to show us.
Castellammare is a dirty and ill-odorous town. As I hurry through its
crowded streets, brushed by women hawking beans and dodging others who
are performing certain necessary acts of cleanliness at their house
doors, I occupy myself in wondering whether there is in all southern
Italy a city without smells. From Taranto to Naples I can recall none
save Pompeii. It is, doubtless, an unattainable ideal to bring
Castellammare to the state of that sweet-smelling habitation of the
dead; though it would be unwise to prophesy what the volcano may not
yet achieve on the scene of his old conquests. There are so many
things lost and forgotten upon this coast. I see that Schulz, whose
great work still remains by far the best guide through the south of
Italy, describes vast catacombs in the hillside at Castellammare. I
must admit that I do not know where these catacombs are. Schulz, who
visited them before 1860, found in them pictures not older than the
twelfth century, and resembling in many details those which are seen
in the catacombs of Naples. Certainly the old grave chambers are no
longer among the sights of this summer city. But the whole region
impresses one with the constant sense that the keenest interest and
the longest knowledge spent upon this ground which is strewn with the
dust of so many generations, will leave behind countless undiscovered
things. The world seems older here than elsewhere. And so it is, if
age be counted by lives and passions rather than by geologic courses.
As one goes on up the ascent, the narrow alleys break out into wider
spaces, and here and there a breath of mountain air steals down
between the houses, or the ripe fruit of an orange lights up a shadowy
courtyard with a flash of colour; till at last the houses fall away,
and one climbs out on a fresh hillside, where a double row of trees
gives protection from the sun. Two sharp turns of the steep road bring
one into a small village, of which the first house is the Hotel
Quisisana. But I have nothing to say to hotels at this hour of the
morning, and accordingly trudge on a little further up the hill, till
I come to the Vico San Matteo, a lane branching off along the hillside
on my right, which brings me to a shady terrace road, rising and
falling on the hillside just below the level of the woods. At this
height the air blown down from sea and mountain is sweet and pure.
The banks are glowing with crimson cyclamen and large anemones, both
lavender and purple, while the hillside on the right, dropping rapidly
towards the town, is thick-set with orchards, through whose falling
blossoms the sea shines blue and green, while across the bay Vesuvius
pours out its rosy vapour coil by coil.
It is a wide and noble view, one of those which have made
Castellammare famous in all ages, as the first slopes of the cool
wooded mountains must needs be among all the cities of the scorching
plains. In Roman days, just as in our own, men looked up from Naples
long before the grapes changed colour or the figs turned black, pining
for the sweet breezes of Monte Sant'Angelo, and the whispering woods
of Monte Coppola, where the shadows lie for half the day, and the only
sounds are made by the busy hacking of the woodcutters. There is no
caprice of fashion in this straining to the hills, but a natural
impulse as strong as that which stops a hot and weary man beside a
roadside well. Every generation of Neapolitans has come hither in the
summer; everyone will do so to the end of time. I shall go up this
evening to the Bourbon pleasure-house; and here, set before me at the
turning of the road, is the ancient castle of the Hohenstaufen, built
by the great Emperor Frederick the Second, and added to by the foe who
seized his kingdom and slew his son, yet came to take his pleasure on
the same spot.
Underneath the round towers of the crumbling ruin an old broken
staircase descends towards the town, skirting the castle wall. It is
from this ancient ladder, ruinous and long disused, that Castellammare
looks its best. The harbour lies below, and a fishing boat running in
furls its large triangular sail and drops its anchor. The long quay is
a mass of moving figures. The tinkle of hammers rings through the
quiet air. Here in the shadow of the woods time seems to pause, and
one sees the hillside, the staircase, and the old town below much as
they must have looked when Boccaccio came out hither in his hot youth,
inflamed with love for Marie of Anjou, and heard, perhaps, on some
summer night within the woods the story which he tells us of the base
passion which beset the fierce King Charles in his old age, and how he
overcame it. The tale, though possibly not true, is worth recalling,
if only because not many kingly actions are recorded of the monarch
who slew Conradin.
An exile from Florence had come to end his days among these mountains,
one Messer Neri Degli Uberti. He was rich, and bought himself an
estate a bowshot distant from the houses of the town, and on it made a
shady garden, in the midst of which he set a fishpond, clear and cool,
and stocked it well with fish. So he went on adding beauty upon beauty
to his garden, till it chanced that King Charles heard of it, when in
the hot summer days he came out to his castle by the sea for rest, and
desiring to see the pleasaunce sent a messenger to Messer Neri to say
that he would sup with him next evening. The Florentine, bred among
the merchant princes, received the King nobly; and Charles, having
seen all the beauties of the garden, sat down to sup beside the
fishpond, placing Messer Neri on one side and on the other his own
courtier, Count Guido di Monforte. The dishes were excellent, the
wines beyond praise, the garden exquisite and still. The King's worn
heart thrilled with pleasure. Cares and remorse fled away, and the
charm of the soft summer evening reigned unbroken.
At that moment two girls came into the garden, daughters of Messer
Neri, not more than fifteen. Their hair hung loose like threads of
spun gold. A garland of blue flowers crowned it, and their faces wore
the look of angels rather than of sinful humankind, so delicate and
lovely were their features. They were clad in white, and a servant
followed them carrying nets, while another had a stove and a lighted
torch. Now the King wondered when he saw these things; and as he sat
watching the girls came and did reverence to the old, grim monarch,
and then walking breast deep into the fishpond, swept the waters with
their nets in those places where they knew the fish were lurking.
Meanwhile one of the servants blew the live coals of the stove, while
his fellow took the fish; and by-and-by the girls began to toss the
fish out on the bank towards the King, and he, snatching them up with
jest and laughter, threw them back; and so they sported like gay
children till the broil was ready. Then the girls came out of the
water, their thin dresses clinging round them; and presently
returning, dressed in silk, brought to the King silver dishes heaped
up high with fruit, and then sang together some old song with pure
childlike voices, so sweet that as the weary tyrant sat and listened
it seemed to him as if some choir of angels were chanting in the
evening sky.
Now as the old King rode homeward to his castle, the gentle beauty of
these girls stole deeper and deeper into his heart, and one of them
especially, named Ginevra, stirred him into love, so that at last he
opened his heart to Count Guido, and asked him how he might gain the
girl. But the Count had the courage of a noble friend, and set the
truth before him, showing how base a deed he meditated. "This," he
said, "is not the action of a great king, but of a cowardly boy. You
plot to steal his daughter from the poor knight who did you all the
honour in his power, and brought his daughters to aid him in the task,
showing thereby how great is the faith which he has in you, and how
firmly he holds you as a true king, and not a cowardly wolf." Now
these words stung the King the more since he knew them to be true; and
he vowed he would prove before many days were over that he could
conquer his lusts, even as he had trodden down his enemies. So, not
long afterwards, he went back to Naples; and there he made splendid
marriages for both the girls, heaping them with honours, and having
seen them in the charge of noble husbands, he went sorrowfully away
into Apulia, where with great labours he overcame his passion. "Some
may say," adds Fiammetta, who told the tale on the tenth day of the
_Decameron_, "that it was a little thing for a king to give two girls
in marriage; but I call it a great thing, ay, the greatest, that a
king in love should give the woman whom he loves unto another."
Fiammetta should have known of what she spoke--none better. I wonder
why Boccaccio chose to put an impossible circumstance into this story.
If the tale be true of anyone, it cannot be one of the Uberti family
who settled in the territory and near the castle of the great Guelf
king. For the Uberti were all Ghibellines, supporters of the empire
and deadly enemies of him who slew Manfred. Not one of them ever asked
or obtained mercy from Charles, who was the butcher of their family.
Boccaccio certainly did not forget this. No Florentine could have been
ignorant even momentarily of circumstances so terrible, affecting so
great a family. No carelessness of narrative could account for the
introduction of one of the Uberti into the story. It must have been
deliberate, though I do not see the reason. It may have been that he
desired only to accentuate the magnanimity of Charles, to whose
grandson, King Robert, he owed much, and chose the circumstances,
whether true or false, which made that magnanimity most striking. I
can find no more probable explanation.
The road which goes on past the castle undulates beneath an arch of
beech trees, just unfurling their young leaves of tender green, and in
half a mile or so comes out at the ancient monastery of Pozzano, a red
building of no great intrinsic interest, but recalling the name of
Gonsalvo di Cordova, "il gran capitano," to whose piety the foundation
of the convent is frequently ascribed, though in truth there had been
an ecclesiastical foundation on the spot for three centuries before
Gonsalvo's time, and all he did was to restore it from decay. I doubt
if many people remember the great soldier now. The peasants who go up
and down the slope before the convent doors know far better the tale
of the mysterious picture of the Madonna which was found buried in a
well, but is now hung up in glory in the church.
It is worth while to stop and hear the story of this picture. Long
before the present convent was built, when the hillside at this spot
lay waste and covered with dense herbage, through which the mules
going to Sorrento forced their way with labour, the people of
Castellammare noticed a flame which sprang up night by night like a
signal fire lit to warn ships off the coast. The people looked and
trembled, for there were strange beings on the mountain, dwarfs, and
what not! No mortal man would make a fire there. So the signal blazed,
but none went near it, till at length some fishers casting their nets
in the bay, and wondering among themselves what could be the meaning
of the flame which was then burning on the hill, saw the Madonna come
to them across the sea, all clothed in light. The radiant virgin stood
looking down upon them kindly as they sat huddled in their fear, and
bade them tell their Bishop to search the ground over which the fire
hovered, for he would there find an image of herself.
The poor men took no heed of what they thought a vision of the night;
nor did they obey the Virgin when she came again. But when on the
third night the Queen of Heaven descended to this murky world, she
towered above their boat incensed and awful, denouncing against them
all the pains of hell and outer darkness if they dared neglect her
bidding. The fear-struck fishers hastened to their Bishop on the first
light of morning and told him their tale. He too had seen a celestial
vision, warning him of the coming of the sailors. There was no room
for doubt or hesitation. He put himself at the head of a long penitent
procession, went up the hill, discovered a well just where the flame
had burnt, and in the well the marvellous picture which now adorns the
church.
How came the picture there? If one could answer that question some
light would be thrown on the age of the relic. The country people when
they see any work of ancient art are disposed to say, "San Luca l'ha
pittato"! ("St. Luke painted it"), as he did the Madonna of the
Carmine in Naples; and accordingly this picture also has been ascribed
to the brush of the Evangelist. The priests themselves do not claim an
origin so sacred for their canvas, but maintain that it is an early
Greek work, buried for safety in the days when, at the bidding of the
iconoclastic Emperor, Leo the Isaurian, an attempt was made to root
out image worship from the land. I do not know whether any competent
expert has pronounced the painting to be of an age which renders the
story probable. Ecclesiastical traditions are frequently inspired
rather by piety than truth, and for my part, when I remember what
ravages the Turks committed along these coasts up to the boyhood of
men not long dead, I can find no reason for going back to the eighth
century to discover facts which may have led either priests or laymen
to bury sacred things.
In these days the Madonna of Pozzano walks no more upon the sea. Yet
she remains, in a particular degree, the protectress of all sailors;
and one may very well suspect that the priestly tale of the miraculous
light, the hidden well, and the long-forgotten picture, does but
conceal some record of kindness done to mariners which we heretics
might prize more highly. For in old days, when ships approaching
Naples may have found it hard to set their course after the light
faded, and harder still to anchor off a lee shore, a beacon fire on
the monastery roof would have been a noble aid, such as must have
saved many a tall ship and brought many a sailor home to his wife in
safety. Surely in some such facts as these lies the explanation of the
traditional attachment of the sailors to the Madonna of Pozzano. "Ave
Maria, Stella Maris!"--a star of the sea indeed, if it was the beacon
kindled by her servants by which poor mariners steered back to port.
It needs not much faith to believe some portion of this pretty story.
Incredulity is generally stupid; but he who most sincerely desires to
be wise must needs ponder when he finds that almost every town
throughout the peninsula possesses a Madonna found in some wondrous
way. At Casarlano, for example, Maria Palumbo was feeding a heifer
when she heard a voice issuing from the bushes, which said, "Maria,
tell your father to come and dig here, and he will find an image of
me." Maria, seeing no one, did not understand, but the same thing
happened on the next day and the next, while at length her
comprehension was quickened by a light box on the ear, which might
have changed into a heavy one had she waited for another day. But,
growing prudent by experience, she told her father all; and he,
knowing that it was not for him to reason concerning heavenly
monitions, went and dug in the spot indicated, and there found an
image which has been of peculiar sanctity ever since. In fact its
sensibilities were so keen, that when the Turks ravaged the country in
1538 it wept tears mingled with drops of blood.
When speaking of these Madonnas it would be wrong to omit the one most
honoured in Nocera, and in many other places round about. She is known
as "La Madonna delle Galline"--the Madonna of the cocks and hens--and
her image was found, according to one version of the tale, by the
scratching of hens in the loose soil which covered it. Her feast is on
Low Sunday, or rather on the three days of which that Sunday is the
centre; and most visitors who stay at Castellammare in the spring must
have seen some trace of the festa. The procession starts from Nocera,
and as the crowds of chanting priests and pious laity go by, every
good peasant woman looses a hen, or else a pigeon, which she has
previously stained bright purple. The purple hens perch on the base of
the Madonna's statue, made broad and large for their accommodation,
and are then collected by the master of the ceremonies, who sells them
to devout persons. In many a village from Gragnano to La Cava the
purple hens may be occasionally seen pecking in the dust, a marvel and
astonishment to English visitors, who, being unaware how much their
plumage owes to the dye-bag, are disposed to barter at a high price
for animals so certain to create sensation at the next poultry show.
At the foot of the slope which drops from Pozzano into the highway
from Castellammare to Sorrento is a little roadside shrine, set deeply
in the rock, over which pious hands have inscribed one of those
pathetically appealing calls to wayfarers which seem to penetrate so
rarely the hearts to which they are addressed--
"Non sit tibi grave
Dicere Mater ave."
"Let it not be a burden to say, Hail, Mother!" It is a gentle appeal,
a light act of devotion, yet few there are who care to claim the
blessing. The peasants, men and women, go by without an instant's
pause in their chatter, or the slightest glance towards the shrine.
They do not want even the human love which is offered to them so
simply. In Naples, on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, is another Madonna,
who has put on even more passionately the accents of a human mother
brooding over sorrow-stricken children, and all the strong feeling is
expressed in verses, of which the burden runs--
"... C'e un'allegria
Incontrar la Madonna in sulla via"--
"It is a joy to meet the Mother of mankind beside the way." In the
last verse the pleading becomes more eager, giving utterance to the
cry of a lost and frightened child seeking the protection which will
never fail it--
"... O mamma mia
Venite incontrarmi in sulla via!"
But neither does this call find a ready answer, and I think the appeal
of the verses falls more often on the hearts of strangers and aliens
in creed than on those which it seeks to comfort.
The steep slope before the convent at Pozzano was the end of the
ancient mule track from Sorrento, the same, I imagine, by which St.
Peter travelled after landing at Sorrento, as I shall tell in the next
chapter. Anyone who cares to penetrate behind the convent can trace it
still meandering up hill and down dale with a pleasant indifference to
gradients which is characteristic of highways of measureless
antiquity. Over the crest of Capo d'Orlando and many another headland
it climbs, as if its main object were to take one up into the clear,
silent air, over the sweet-smelling brushwood, where myrtle and
rosemary scent the air, and the white gum-cistus grows like a weed. No
one follows that lonely track in these days, yet it is worth while to
walk along it, if only that one may see how easy it made the
respectable, but now decadent, trade of brigandage, which in days not
yet far distant was the sweet solace of all the men and most of the
women in the towns, and yet more in the mountain villages of the
peninsula. Castellammare, placed so as to command the highway from
Naples to Salerno, as well as those coast roads which were more
frequented by wealthy tourists of all nations, was in high favour with
men who practised the gentle art of stopping travellers, and many a
heavy purse was eased of its burden upon the lonely roads. Fra Diavolo
was well known here; in fact, it was among the mountains above this
very road to Sorrento that he tried his 'prentice hand at the
profession in which he afterwards became so great a master.
The Convent of Santa Marta lies towards Vico Equense, high up in the
olive woods, in a lonely situation, guarded by its sanctity. That had
been quite enough, until Fra Diavolo came into the world, to keep safe
not only the nuns, but even their gold statue of the Madonna, which is
perhaps more wonderful, though both are sterling proofs of the
excellent and reverential morals of the people.
One Scarpi dwelt in the woods above Castellammare, with a faithful
band of followers who loved him. I fear he is forgotten now, which is
scarcely just, for he was a bold and bloodthirsty bandit. But as is
said in the _Purgatorio_ on a similar occasion--
"... Credette Cimabue nella pintura
Tener lo Campo! ed ora ha Giotto il grido."
In Brigantaggio it is just the same, and Scarpi's just celebrity is
obscured by the greater fame of Fra Diavolo.
Scarpi was torn two ways; cupidity reminded him that the golden statue
was easily obtained, piety interposed that it would be a shocking
crime. Nothing worse was set down against him than the usual tricks on
travellers, slitting their ears, and dismissing them upon occasion to
a better world. It was a pity to spoil so fair a record. But Fra
Diavolo, boy as he was when he joined Scarpi's band, possessed the
great advantage of a single heart. Cupidity was not thwarted by any
opposing force of piety, and craft came to make the weak arm strong.
He dressed himself like a novice, and going up boldly to the gate of
the convent proclaimed himself a penitent, and sought admission to the
Order. I doubt not he had an innocent face. The mother superior
welcomed him, and straightway shut him up in solitude for the usual
three days' communing with heavenly powers, which was to prepare him
for the spiritual life to which he aspired. The boy naturally wished
to make this intercourse as direct as possible, and making his way
unobserved into the chapel he seized the golden Madonna and hid her
under some straw in a cart belonging to a peasant whom some lawful
occasion had brought up to the convent. Having done this, he presented
himself before the Mother Superior, telling her reflection had
convinced him he was not fitted for a heavenly life--which was indeed
no more than the truth--and so departed with her approval.
The poor peasant driving down among the olive woods somewhat later,
all unconscious of the riches in his creaking cart, was probably at a
loss to understand why Scarpi's faithful followers should stop him,
and insist on rummaging in the straw. His emotions when he saw what
they fished out would be a fit subject for a dramatic monologue.
Horror at the sacrilege must have struggled with regret that he had
not himself thought of fumbling in the straw. Had he done so, would he
not have driven off the other way, and melted down the Madonna in his
own cottage? To be made the tool by which sinners acquire wealth is
surely bitter, and often in after life the poor man must have cursed
the fate which did not whisper in his ear what it was he carried in
the cart.
But Scarpi's bandits carried off the statue, and Fra Diavolo gained
great honour with them. This early fame he never lost. And the common
people, holding that priests and devils are, however opposite in all
their qualities, the only classes of mankind who are uniformly cunning
and successful in all they undertake, combined the titles into one
cognomen, no whit too glorious for the chieftain, who in his untutored
youth had proved greater than all the restraints which hamper greedy
men, and had laid hands on the Madonna.
So Fra Diavolo became a mighty leader, and woeful are the tales which
travellers told of him. Yet I should be unjust if I did not mention
that his most brutal outrages were sometimes capable of being
dignified by the name of politics, if not of loyalty to an exiled
king. For Ferdinand of Bourbon when he fled from his throne of Naples
at the end of the last century, skulking from revolutionary outblasts
and the coming of the French, was not so far untrue to the traditions
of his race as to despise the help of any agents, however rascally. It
might have seemed incongruous if we had found the inheritor of the
name of the constable Bourbon who led Frundsberg's Lanzknechts down on
Rome in 1527, and cast the treasures of ages as a prey to the scum of
Europe, if we had found this monarch saying to himself "Non tali
auxilio," and indulging in the luxury of scruples. But Ferdinand
despised no man who would help him; and so Fra Diavolo, the murderer
and bandit, became a secret agent of the exiled king, working hand in
hand with that even more atrocious scoundrel Mammone, whose habit it
was to dine with a newly severed human head upon the table, and whose
cold-blooded assassinations were more in number than any man could
count. So these murderous devils cut off French couriers on the
mountain roads, attacked small parties in overwhelming numbers, and
performed other gallant deeds in the service of their king, who was
not ungrateful, but rewarded them after his kind and theirs.
I can find but little in the streets of Castellammare which invites me
to linger in them. There are mineral baths just outside the town, but
Providence gave me no occasion for visiting them, and I dislike the
apparatus of ill-health. I went past the baths, therefore, and
strolled on through the crowded, evil-smelling streets till I came out
again at the foot of the hill leading to the woods of Quisisana, and
went up once more beneath the green arches of the budding leaves, till
I saw from time to time a snatch of sea above the houses and the wide
sunlit plain revealed itself stretching far and distant round the base
of the great volcano.
As I went through the little village of which I spoke before, I
noticed hanging on a wire which crosses the road a doll made in the
likeness of an old grey-haired woman, adorned with a tuft of feathers
growing somewhat bare. As it swung to and fro in the light wind it had
the aspect of a child's plaything which had fallen there by chance;
but I had seen a similar doll hanging from a balcony in Castellammare,
and knew the thing to be no toy.
Such dolls are seen commonly hanging in the air at this season in the
Sorrento peninsula. The old woman is Quaresima, or Lent, and she is
provided with as many hen's feathers as there are weeks in that period
of fasting. Every Sunday one feather is plucked out; and when the last
is gone Quaresima is torn down with rejoicing. On the first Sunday of
her exaltation a playful diversion is carried on at the cost of poor
Quaresima. A boy or girl, chosen by lot, is blindfolded and armed with
a long stick, with which he strikes in the air, groping after the
swinging figure. At last he finds it, and a sharp blow breaks a
concealed bottle, letting out a red fluid--the blood of Lent; the
ceremony is diversified by a good deal of horseplay.
I know not how ancient these superstitious ceremonies may be. Italy,
perhaps southern Italy in particular, is crowded with usages handed
down from days so old that it sometimes causes me a shudder to
remember how many ages of mankind have passed by them in procession
off the earth. The toy, the trivial folly persisting still, more than
half meaningless, century after century, while the bright eyes and
laughing lips, all that we call life, pass on like shadows when the
sun goes in. It is the doll, the grotesque Quaresima, which has life
and endures, not we, however distasteful it may be to realise it.
But if our time be shorter, and we shall see fewer springs than the
absurd Quaresima, we may at least rejoice in the beauty of this one.
For as unsettled weather brings the loveliest days, so the country has
put on its rarest beauty. The blue sky hangs like a tent overhead, the
clouds are driven back behind the mountains and lie there piled in
heavy ranks of tower and column; while through the brown trunks of the
trees and the green mist of their lower twigs I can see all the
mountains behind Nola and towards Caserta rise one above the other
into the far blue distance. For from the clouds of heaven there
dropped light on some peaks and shadows on the others, purple lights
and dark brown shadow deepening into indigo, so that some looked near
and others far away, and some were sulphurous and others green, while
all the Campagna laughed in the sunshine, and the houses white and
pink flashed on the margin of the turquoise sea.
There are lovely villas on these fringes of the wood, stately houses
with terraced gardens occupying the high slopes. The road twists
upwards by sharp inclines, catching at each turn more of the freshness
of the mountain, till at length it runs into the gateway of the old
royal villa, a refuge used when heat or pestilence made Naples
unendurable by almost every sovereign since the days of Charles the
Second of Anjou. It was once the property of that shocking scoundrel,
Pierluigi Farnese, most unsavoury and least respectable even among
Popes' children, who do so little credit to St. Peter's chair. But it
was associated more particularly with Ferdinand of Bourbon, who
rebuilt the place. He is said to have given it the name "Quisisana"
("Here one gets well"); but I think that name, or at least as much of
it as "Casa sana," is found in records much older than his time.
The villa is no longer royal, but it retains the aspect of old
splendour. In these spring days it is empty and silent, lying with
barred windows in expectation of those guests who will climb up the
hill in crowds when the figs ripen and the sultry weather comes, and
all Italy begins to dream of cool, green shades. For three summer
months the place is an hotel, the "Margherita"; but now, when I walk
round towards the wide terrace which overhangs the grass-grown
courtyard, the sound of my steps echoes through the still air, and the
red walls are eloquent of vanished royalty.
A formal air of ceremonial stiffness clings about the garden walks,
suggestive of hoops and powder, of polished courtliness, and the old,
stately manners which vanished from the earth in the crash of the
Revolution. I pass out through the gate by which the courtiers entered
the woods, and have hardly gone a hundred yards beneath the tender
green of the young beech trees when I come to a shady fountain set
round with stone seats, a pleasant spot in which the court used to
linger on hot summer days, greeting the riders who mounted at the
moss-grown block, so long disused except by peasants going to and fro
with their rough carts. There were lovely roads laid out for those
royal pleasure parties; but as I plunge further into the woods courts
and kings are driven out of my mind by a sharp whirring sound breaking
the silence of the treetops. Across an island of blue sky, in an ocean
of green boughs, a bundle of faggots was flying like a huge brown
bird. I watched it going with extraordinary speed. Hard on its heels
came another, and then a third, while by watching closely I perceived
that slanting downwards through the woods from the height of the next
mountain there ran a stout wire, to which the faggots were slung by
hooked sticks cut on those high uplands where the woodmen were
working. Presently a sharp turn of the path brought me out at the last
station of the wire. The faggots were piled high in stacks, the air
was full of the scent of fresh-sawn wood, and a fire burning by the
wayside sent up coils of thin blue smoke among the trees. Half a dozen
men were piling cut staves upon a cart; and from time to time there
was a jangling of bells as the mules tossed their heads or shivered,
and all the brass contrivances set upon the harness to keep off the
evil eye clashed together in the sunlight. Far away across dipping
woods the logs came whirring down from Monte Pendolo. All the mountain
tops are connected by these wires, and in every direction as one
wanders through the silent woods the strange and not unmusical humming
of the flying faggots is the only sound audible.
A little further wandering brings me to a glen, whose steep slopes are
brown with fallen leaves and green with budding brushwood. A stream
runs down through the ravine, and a stone bridge is flung across it.
Here the road divides, one branch going more directly to those uplands
whence the faggots start upon their journey, and by this route
bare-legged children hurry up carrying baskets of the forked sticks
by which the bundles hang. But I go onwards by the other road, winding
upwards by slow inclines, now deep in glades where large blue anemones
glow in the long grass, and bee orchids hide among the shadows, now
emerging in full sight of the wide blue gulf and the smoking volcano
which towers over it, till at last I reach the top of Monte Coppola,
where once more seats and tables set beneath the trees mark a spot at
which the Bourbon court used to revel in the mountain breezes. I lean
over the low breastwork, and enjoy the splendour of the prospect.
It is late afternoon, and the westering sun leaves the great bulk of
Monte Faito in deep shadow, casting only here and there a fleck of
warm gold light on the pines that clothe some shoulder, and throwing
into deeper shade the ravines and scars which are chiselled out of his
grey flanks. Yet even in the dark clefts there are gleams of yellow
broom or cytisus; for the cuckoo is calling all over the sunny
country, the trees are in their brightest leaf, and all the slopes of
oak and chestnut that sweep down to the margin of the bay are like a
cataract of vivid green tumbling down the mountain. Here, on the
summit, it is very still. The silence of the mountains holds the air,
and scarce a bird twitters in the gold light. The ridge of Faito, like
a gigantic buttress, cuts off all the western promontory towards
Sorrento, and falls into the sea across the peak of Ischia.
As the sun sank lower, and the warm light grew deeper and more golden,
a great bar of cloud formed across the western sky. The sun was now
above and now below it. Ischia grew shadowy, and then caught the most
delicate light imaginable, swimming like an impalpable fairy island on
a sea of darkest blue. Then, at some unseen change in the order of
the heavens, suddenly the craggy island lost its colour, and Monte
Epomeo stood out sharp and black against the flushed sky. So one saw
it for a few brief moments. But all the while a rosy glow was
spreading over Cape Miseno, it ran along the coast of Baiae, and caught
Posilipo with a delicate radiance. Then all at once Ischia sprang
again into light, quivering with every shade of rose and purple, till
the sun sank down behind its blackening peak, and the stars hung large
and luminous in a space of clear green sky.