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Updated: June 2, 2025
Equipped with these jewels, he made his way across the Adriatic to the Apulian coast, and thence reached Ravello with greater wealth than he had ever hoped to obtain with his original capital at the time he set sail for Cyprus. Fortunately Ravello, though shrunk to such modest proportions nowadays, still possesses many memorials of its glorious past.
Ravello undoubtedly owes its early foundation to certain patrician families of Amalfi, which after securing their fortunes decided to leave the hot close city beside the shore, and to seek new homes in the bracing air of the hill-top above.
The pulpit of Niccola da Foggia does not materially differ from other ambones in Italy from several, for instance, in Amalfi and Ravello; while the distinctive features of Niccola Pisano's work the combination of classically studied bas-reliefs with Gothic principles of construction, the feeling for artistic unity in the composition of groups, the mastery over plastic form, and the detached allegorical figures are noticeable only by their total absence from it.
We saw the liquid blood of an Oratorian Father; a good man, but not a saint, who died two centuries ago, I think; and we saw the liquid blood of Da Ponte, the great and holy Jesuit, who, I suppose, was almost a saint. But these instances do not account for liquefaction on certain days, if this is the case. But the most strange phenomenon is what happens at Ravello, a village or town above Amalfi.
Some sculptured tombs, one of them a monument in honour of Marinella Rufolo of Ravello, who was married to a Coppola of Scala, remain in the churches to interest the curious traveller, but most visitors will find the principal charm of this dilapidated little city in its lofty striking situation beneath the frowning mass of Monte Cerrato.
Finding at Ravello, near Amain, a pulpit sculptured in 1272 by Niccola di Bartolommeo da Foggia, they suggest that a school of stone-carvers may have flourished at Foggia, and that Niccola Pisano, in spite of his signing himself Pisanus on the Baptistery pulpit, may have been an Apulian trained in that school.
That their name was still familiar in Italian society in the fourteenth century is evident from the circumstances that Boccaccio puts a story, no doubt founded on fact, into the mouth of the fair Lauretta, which deals with the adventures of one Landolfo Rufolo of Ravello, “who, not content with his great store, but anxious to make it double, was near losing all he had, and his life also.” The novel proceeds to relate how this member of a wealthy and respected family turned corsair, after losing all his capital in a mercantile speculation in Cyprus; how he, in his turn, was robbed of his ill-gotten gains on the high seas by some thievish merchants of Genoa; and how Landolfo, after passing through a variety of more or less improbable adventures, was finally rescued from drowning off the coast of Corfu by a servant-maid who, whilst washing dishes by the sea-shore, chanced to espy the unconscious merchant drifting towards the beach with his arms clasped round a small wooden chest, which kept him afloat. “Moved by compassion,” says the relator of the tale, “she stepped a little way into the sea, which was now calm, and seizing the half-drowned wretch by the hair of his head, drew both him and the chest to land, where with much trouble she unfolded his arms from the chest, which she set upon the head of her daughter who was with her.
"I was here thirty years ago. It hasn't changed much. Are there still those little paper-mills in the valley on the way to Ravello? They used to be very primitive." They kept up their forced conversation as they passed Lady Johnstone and the young people. Then they were silent again, as they went towards the hotel. "We'll go through the house," said Mrs. Bowring, speaking low again.
There, thanking God for bringing him safe home, he opened his sack, and examining its contents with more care than before, found the number, and fashion of the stones to be such that the sale of them at a moderate price, or even less, would leave him twice as rich as when he left Ravello.
Altogether, these Normans, dreaming through the solstitial heats in pleasaunces like Ravello, developed a nice taste in the matter of marbles, and were not particular where they came from, so long as they came from somewhere. The antiquities remained intact, at least, which was better than the subsequent system of Colonna and Frangipani, who burnt them into lime.
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