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Updated: June 12, 2025
He spreads himself abroad, he riots in abundance; above all things he must have profusion, and he wants things that are solid and strong. On the Sorrentine promontory, and on the island of Capri, the hardy husbandman and fisherman draws his subsistence from the sea and from a scant patch of ground. One may feast on a fish and a handful of olives.
"And chiefly thou, O spirit, that dust prefer, Before all temples, the upright heart and pure, Instruct me; for thou know'st!" The spot in which Carlo Giuntotardi had taken refuge is well known on the Sorrentine shore, as the water-cavern at the ruins of Queen Joan's country-house.
Students of Tasso’s immortal epic are apt to overlook the immense influence exercised on its author by his early Sorrentine days and surroundings.
The fertile lands of France cannot vie with the richness of the Sorrentine Plain, nor can any mountain on the face of the globe rival in human interest the peak of Vesuvius; Pompeii is unique, the most precious storehouse of ancient knowledge the world possesses; whilst the Bay of Baia recalls the days of Roman power and luxury more vividly to our minds than any place save the Eternal City itself.
All one could do, at the heart of the overarching crystal, and in presence of the relegated City, the far-trailing Mount, the grand Sorrentine headland, the islands incomparably stationed and related, was to wonder what may well become of the so many other elements of any poor human and social complexus, what might become of any successfully working or only struggling and floundering civilisation at all, when high Natural Elegance proceeds to take such exclusive charge and recklessly assume, as it were, <i>all</i> the responsibilities.
The ancient and unhappy city of Pompeii stood on that luckless plain, which, following the shores of the bay, comes next; and then we take up the line of the mountain promontory, which forms the Sorrentine side of the water!" "One who has had such schooling, should know better how to turn it to a good account;" said Ludlow, sternly, when the excited smuggler ceased to speak.
Stories of tortured Christians, like that of the pious Geronimo of Algiers who was tied with cords and flung into a mass of soft concrete, were common enough topics among the Sorrentine folk, all of whom lived in constant dread of a successful raid by the Barbary pirates.
Some sparkling summer morning, if you chanced to drive four-in-hand along the broad beach at Santa Barbara, inhaling, the spicy breeze from the Sandwich Islands, along the curved shore where the blue of the sea and the purple of the mountains remind you of the Sorrentine promontory, and then dashed away into the canon of Montecito, among the vineyards and orange orchards and live-oaks and palms, in vales and hills all ablaze with roses and flowers of the garden and the hothouse, which bloom the year round in the gracious sea-air, would you not, we wonder, come to yourselves in the sense of a new life where it is good form to be enthusiastic and not disgraceful to be surprised?
Here I found fragments of antique bricks, tegulae bipedales, amphoras, pottery of the lustrous Sorrentine ware Surrentina bibis? pavements of opus signinum, as well as one large Roman paving flag of the type that is found on the road between Termini and Punta Campanella.
Yet, if I were to locate the Sirens geographically, I should place the beneficent desires on this coast, and the dangerous ones on that of wicked Baiae; to which group the founder of Naples no doubt belonged. Nowhere, perhaps, can one come nearer to the beautiful myths of Greece, the springlike freshness of the idyllic and heroic age, than on this Sorrentine promontory.
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