Travel: the south - Rome

National Review, Nov 2, 1984 by Richard Brookhiser

IF YOU GO south of Rome, you are bound to see Pompeii and Capri. Also, unfortunately, Sorrento--a tourist trap with all the charm of the Jersey shore, and only two redeeming features--a commanding view of the Bay of Naples (invisible from the main drag), and a train stattion from which one can get to all the local sights in an hour or less.

Industrialized Naples squirts out a great deal of smoke, and the weather can be naturally hazy; so that, if it is not exactly true that, as Will Rogers said, San Francisco Bay makes the Bay of Naples look like the Chicago drainage canal, there come nights and days when the twinkling, distant lights are hidden and the long, low bulk of Vesuvius is lost. Beyond Sorrento, however, on the way to Salerno, the wind works harder and the air seems fresher. Halfway down this stretch of coast, near the summit of the ridge that plunges almost straight to the sea, sits Ravello, one of the prettiest spots on earth.

Tourists have been onto Ravello for a long time, and some pretty famous ones have made the long drive uphill. The Hotel Palumbo, which occupies a former palazzo overlooking its own vineyard, and which is managed by the grandson of the founder, displays in its guest book a copy of a letter from a pleased Richard Wagner. The lush Ranulfo gardens, on the grounds of another old estate, helped inspire him during the composition of Parsifal. "The gardens of Klingsor have been found!" he exclaims, in Italian, on a wall plaque commemorating the afflatus. (Did that odious genius even think of anything except in terms of himself?)

The steep and tortuous ascent, however, lifts Ravello out of the heaviest to-ing and fro-ing of the coast; and once you have arrived, there is nothing to do. Nothing, except eat the pompous grand hotel cuisine, still catering to the palates of long-dead Englishmen; walk the curling streets, narrow as hallways; watch the rusty goldfish in the occasional fountain, the lizards scurrying over the grape arbors, the bats feeding at dusk; sit in the square at night and observe the raucous families and the moonrise over the crumbling campanile; breathe the sweet, damp air.

Four miles, but a good half-hour, away lies Amalfi, overrun with tourists, but not overwhelmed--for Amalfi is a place with history and a presence that withstands invaders. Once Amalfi had a doge and contested with Genoa for the Mediterranean sea routes. But the town peaked in the tenth century, and the last millennium has been a long subsiding. Today, the grey gravelly beach abuts a promenade and a monument to the inventor of the compass. The pocket-sized square teems with shops selling crockery, not all of it hideous, and the church, whose cloister shows Saracen influences, squats over a restaurant named the Apostles' Lounge.

The Naples described in guidebooks is a foridding place, home of pickpockets and feral urchins. In reality, it may well be; it also has excellent museums. The Capodimonte is supposed to have great paintings of all kinds, including Brueghels (alas, chiuso--closed--is one of the first Italian words the tourist learns). The Archaeological Museum displays the spoils of Pompeii in a disheveled old palace, almost as sad as the catastrophe itself. And there are the presepi--wooden nativity scenes sculpted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the Christmas celebrations of noble families.

Every December, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City sets out its own collection of Neapolitan creche figures, which gives some idea of the home-town stuff. Some--for the Met spreads its Wise Men and shepherds and angles tastefully around a huge tree. But down a long corridor of the Certosa di San Martino, beyond a display of old theater posters, the little figures fill thier stages as if blocked by Cecil B. De Mille. There are shelves of odd pieces--herdsmen there, animals here, tiny plates of food (all Italian, of course). There is a miniature creche in an eggshell. The main event, the creche of the Cucinello family, fills a case twenty feet across: a little Judaea, vivid and imaginary: roistering peasants, turbaned black musicians, Roman ruins that never were. From a pale blue sky--the paint is chipped--a torrent of angles pours on the Holy Family, who are nearly lost in the happy hubbub.

At the dawn of the Christian era, when Vesuvius buried the city of Pompeii under a storm of minute cinders, it also covered the two of Herculaneum with a blanket of even finer particles of volcanic dust. For this reason, the destruction of Herculaneum, though equally total, was not nearly so violent, and when the entombed ruins began to be excavated in the eighteenth century, they emerged in a much better state of preservation.

It is a small site, about a quarter of a mile square; the present-day town looms thirty or forty feet overhead, at the current ground level. A few of the museum-quality objects have been left in place--a bust; a frieze; an indecent statue of Hercules. The chief attractions of the place, however, are the dim ghosts of daily life, the things the Herculaneans saw every day without observing: a coil of rope; a shop full of vases; the benches of the women's bath-house (they sit the same way in the Health & Racquet Club today, and probably for the same reasons). Ghosts of life; and of sudden death, for without the disaster, not one of those unprized things would have survived.