United States or French Southern Territories ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
March ought by Caprese experience to be the difficult month; but "Marzo e pazzo," say the loungers in the little piazza, and sometimes even the "madness" of March takes the form of a delicious lunacy of unbroken sunshine.
Giotto and Mantegna were shepherd boys, it is true; but Michelangelo was the son of a small official of ancient family in the provinces, the mayor of the little city of Chiusi e Caprese; Lionardo da Vinci's father was a moderately well-to-do land-holder; Raphael's was a successful painter, and certainly not in want.
When the store is complete, the ceremonial of a Caprese betrothal begins with "the embassy," as it is termed, of his mother to the parents of the future bride.
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.
Far away stretch blue Apennines, ridge melting into ridge above Perugia in the distance. Gigantic oaks begin to clothe the stony hillsides, and little by little a fertile mountain district of chestnut-woods and vineyards expands before our eyes, equal in charm to those aërial hills and vales above Pontremoli. Caprese has no central commune or head-village.
Even supposing that Lodovico Buonarroti travelled from Florence by Arezzo to Caprese, many miles of rough mountain-roads must have been traversed by her on horseback.
Thus far the infant stream has no history: its legends and chronicles do not begin so early. But a few miles farther, on a tiny branch called the Singerna, are the vestiges of what was once a place of some importance Caprese, where Michael Angelo was born exactly four hundred years ago. His father was for a twelvemonth governor of this place and Chiusi, five miles off (not Lars Porsenna's Clusium, which is to the south, but Clusium Novum), and brought his wife with him to inhabit the palazzo communale. During his regency the painter of the "Last Judgment," the sculptor of "Night and Morning," the architect of St. Peter's cupola, first saw the light. Here the history of the Tiber begins here men first mingled blood with its unsullied waves. On another little tributary is Anghiara, where in 1440 a terrible battle was fought between the Milanese troops, under command of the gallant free-lance Piccinino, and the Floren-tines, led by Giovanni Paolo (commonly called Giampaolo) Orsini; and a little farther, on the main stream, Citt
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 Pæstum; 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.
Mary of the Angels, for the instruction of his brethren, and some excursions he made to Mount Alvernia and to some other places, where new dwellings were made over to him. His route was always marked by the fruits of his preaching, and by the splendor of his miracles. Passing by Montaigu, above the Valley of Caprese, before a Church of St.
I can never think of him, even now, reclining in his bunk, and with short breaths panting out his maledictions, but I am reminded of that misanthrope upon the throne of the world the diabolical Tiberius at Caprese; who even in his self-exile, imbittered by bodily pangs, and unspeakable mental terrors only known to the damned on earth, yet did not give over his blasphemies but endeavored to drag down with him to his own perdition, all who came within the evil spell of his power.
Word Of The Day