United States or Republic of the Congo ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He took up the box with the mask in it, and beckoning to Nanina to follow him, led the way to Fabio's chamber. About six months after the events already related, Signor Andrea D'Arbino and the Cavaliere Finello happened to be staying with a friend, in a seaside villa on the Castellamare shore of the bay of Naples. Most of their time was pleasantly occupied on the sea, in fishing and sailing.
It's ten miles from Castellamare, the nearest railway-station, but the drive along the edge of the bay, on a road cut into the cliffs hundreds of feet up, makes you feel like heaven. Vesuvius is quite near too, only that was no good, for the mater wouldn't let me go there, which was a most aggravating shame, and a terrible waste of opportunity, which I told her she would regret ever after.
There lies Naples, the voluptuous syren, reclining carelessly on the seashore; there, Portici, Castellamare, and Sorrento, the very names of which awaken in the imagination a thousand thoughts of poetry and love; there are Pausilippo, Baiae, Puozzoli, and those vast plains, where the ancients fancied their Elysium, sacred solitudes which one might suppose peopled by the men of former days, where the earth echoes under foot like an empty grave, and the air has unknown sounds and strange melodies.
It was very quaint and delightful to get into the funny, low, rattling cart, and go jogging off, while the feminine sight-seers fanned themselves in the windows of the ladies' waiting-room, and grumbled, and the poor masculine travellers bartered in poor Italian, with their certain-to-conquer enemies, those triumphant swindlers, the drivers of the conveyances between Sorrento and Castellamare.
These little valleys and bays are warm nooks for the olive and the orange; and all the precipices and sunny slopes are terraced nearly to the top. This promontory of rocks is far from being barren. From Castellamare, driving along a winding, rockcut road by the bay, one of the most charming in southern Italy, a distance of seven miles, we reach the Punta di Scutolo.
In greater numbers would you find them on the hills near Rome, at the modern Tivoli or Palestrina, on the Alban heights near what are now Frascati, Albano, or Genzano, along the shore at Antium, Terracina, Baiae, Naples, Herculaneum, Pompeii, Castellamare, and Sorrento.
Opposite, but very far off across the sea, shone the tiny flames of the houses of Portici, of Torre del Greco, of Torre Annunziata, of Castellamare. Against the gathering darkness Vesuvius belched slowly soft clouds of rose-colored vapor, which went up like a menace into the dim vault of the sky. The sea was without waves.
This is all effaced from my mind; nothing remains but impressions of obscure porches with glimpses of bright courts filled with glossy oranges and spring verdure, of esplanades with children playing on them and nets drying, and happy idlers snuffing the breeze and contemplating the capricious heaving of the tossing sea. On leaving Castellamare the road forms a corniche winding along the bank.
A cynical German, who was taken by them some years ago on the road to Castellamare, a few miles above here, and held for ransom, declared that they were the most honest fellows he had seen in Italy; but I never could see that he intended the remark as any compliment to them.
Forgotten, or for the most part unused, by the traveller who is the slave of the railway, it has not the reputation of its only rivals, the Corniche road from Nice to Mentone, the lovely highway from Castellamare to Sorrento, or the road between Vietri and Amalfi, where the strange fantastic peaks lead you at last to the solitary and beautiful desert of Paestum, where Greece seems to await you entrenched in silence among the wild-flowers.
Word Of The Day