United States or Belarus ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
We soon left behind the ominous cone of Vesuvius, reported by the best judges to be at present in so unsound a state that nothing can prevent its early fall; sunset left us near the grand precipices of Anacapri, and morning found us with Ustica on our beam, and the semicircle of mountains which enchase the gem of Palermo gradually unfolding their beauties.
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 mediæval 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.
What did you think of Sorrento? We watched the steamer across from there; we were up on the road to Anacapri, yonder. You don't look so well as when I saw you last nothing like." He waited for no reply to his questions, and talked with nervous brokenness. Seated in the carriage, he could not keep still from one moment to the next.
Capri is a perfect treasure-house of Roman remains, and though in later remains the island is far poorer, the ruins of mediæval 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.
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.
From the close of the ninth century, when the island passed out of the hands of Amalfi, it has followed the fortunes of the mainland; its ruin seems to have been completed by the raids of the Saracens from their neighbouring settlement on the coast of Lucania; and the two mediæval fortresses of Anacapri and Castiglione which bear the name of Barbarossa simply indicate that the Algerian pirate of the sixteenth century was the most dreaded of the long train of Moslem marauders who had made Capri their prey through the middle ages.
On the farther summit, above Anacapri, a precipice of two thousand feet sheer down to the water on the other side, hangs a light cloud.
She opened her lips to breathe in the salt freshness of the morning. Upon Anacapri a woolly white cloud lay lightly. The distant coast, where dreams Sorrento, was becoming clearer every moment. Often and often in the summer-time had Hermione been invaded by the radiant cheerfulness of the Bay of Naples.
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.
Before the half hour is up, there is not one of the party who does not claim to have been the person who insisted upon going forward. On the farther summit, above Anacapri, a precipice of two thousand feet sheer down to the water on the other side, hangs a light cloud.
Word Of The Day