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Updated: May 12, 2025
Within a week the islands in the immediate neighborhood of Naples Procida, Ischia, Capri, and the Ponzas had again hoisted the royal ensign. On the 22d of April the French evacuated the city, with the exception of the Castle of St. Elmo, in which they left a garrison of five hundred men.
Carefully tilled and densely populated, the island produces a large proportion of the fruit, vegetables, and olive oil, that are sold in the Naples market, and as it possesses no remains of antiquity, no medieval churches, no works of art, and but few beauties of nature to recommend it for inspection, Procida is rarely visited by strangers.
The islands of Ischia and Procida, which form part of this chain of land, might, from the inspection of the map, be allowed as having once formed a continuation of the land from the continent of Italy, even without the testimony of natural history, that traces this connection from the materials of those masses which now are separated.
Above the terraces, the eye reaches the fine outline of the hill; and, to the east, the bare precipice of rock, softened by the purple light; and turning still to the left, as the boat lazily swings, I have Vesuvius, the graceful dip into the plain, and the rise to the heights of Naples, Nisida, the shining houses of Pozzuoli, Cape Misenum, Procida, and rough Ischia.
Such is the curious legend concerning the origin of the Tarantella, which is still danced with something of the old spirit by the holiday-making crowds of Naples, though it is at the festa of San Michele, the patron of Procida, that the Tarantella can now be seen to best advantage.
Although the poet calls the island lofty, it is remarkably flat considering its volcanic origin, for Procida and Ischia were undoubtedly one in remote ages, as the learned Strabo rightly conjectured.
"In the first place, there is almost invariably a fat greasy monk seated in the middle, forming the centre of a sort of coil of human creatures. On one of his knees is some robust rosy-cheeked nurse from Aversa or Nettuno; on the other, a handsome peasant woman from Bauci or Procida. On either side of him, between the wheels and the body of the vehicle, stand the husbands of these two ladies.
Several of his victims had been his prison companions, and "the murders of this Ergastolo" had exceeded fifty in a single year. It was true that at the massacre at Procida the sick had not been slain in the prisons, yet prisoners who hid under beds were dragged forth and shot in cold blood by the soldiery after order had been restored.
The Pope, therefore, absolved her of the perjury she had committed by marrying Giovanni Sforza in spite of her engagement to Don Gasparo, and while he now, for the first time, declared her formal betrothal to the Count of Procida to have been dissolved, he gave her permission to marry any man whom she might select.
It lies in amphitheatre form on the shore of the classic bay, which is shut in from the sea by the island of Capri, extending in part across its entrance to the southeast, while to the northwest loom up the beautiful islands of Procida and Ischia, so full of sad and historic associations.
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