garden; the town rising up the hills from the bay forms a verdant amphitheatre; all around the city the scenery of mountain, valley, and plain is magnificent and the fertility incredible. One can hardly understand how in this country, where in the summer rain does not fall for months together, the verdure remains so luxuriant and fresh, whereas in the comparatively damp and northern climates of France and England the verdure loses its freshness before mid-summer. The explanation of this phenomenon is the lightness of the volcanic soil, which permits the vines, for instance, to strike their roots as deep as thirty or forty feet into the earth. It is indeed a blessed land,—sol beato, as the song says,—and one never tires of admiring the orange- and the lemon-trees weighed down with their golden and yellow fruit, the fig-trees black with figs, the groves of olives and pomegranates, of mulberries, and of all kinds of fruit-trees, bearing with an abundance which we rarely see in the North. Here, too, the vines grow as Virgil describes them,—hanging in festoons from tree to tree. The whole country around the Bay of Naples is a truly patriarchal land, rich in wine and oil, a land of peaceful happiness, with overhead a cloudless sky, and before you the vast blue gulf dotted with beautiful islands. Mere conscious existence in this sunny climate is sufficient joy; here only can one thoroughly realize the meaning of the untranslatable phrase "dolce far niente."
But if one can struggle against the material seductions of the Bay of Naples, and if one gives play to one's historical curiosity, what a field of observation and interest! With what delight one visits Pozzuoli, Baja, Cumæ, the banks of the Acheron, the Champs-Elysées, Avernus, the grotto of the Sibyl, the whole landscape of the sixth book of the "Æneid"! Now, alas! the gulf of Baja and the amphitheatre of the hill, so renowned among the Romans as the most voluptuous place in Italy, is like those aged beauties whose ruined visages still retain beneath the wrinkles traces of their former charms: it is a hill covered with wood and modest houses reflected in a sea that is always clear and calm. At Baja, thanks, to the volcanic warmth of the soil, cold and winter are almost unknown. But what a delicious spot it must have been in the Roman times, when the hill was covered with beautiful country-houses and gardens, with terraces running along the shore, with temples, columns, porticoes, statues, monuments, villas constructed right in the sea when there was no longer any room left to build on the land! What excellent good company one found at Baja in the days of Cicero, Horace, Pompey, Mæcenas, Catullus! What excellent suppers Lucullus had served near Cape Misenum! What a fine spectacle those polished and luxurious Roman gentlemen had in those golden gondolas, adorned now with colored streamers, now with lanterns, in that sea covered with roses, in those barques full of fair women, in those moonlight concerts on the tranquil sea, in all that luxury which Seneca has so vividly described and so sourly blamed! But, to tell the truth and not to play the charlatan with the reader, I must avow that the pleasure of visiting most of these places famous in old times exists more in idea than in reality, and, as the President de Brosses says in his "Lettres familières," written from Italy in 1739 and 1740, "a good portion of the articles above mentioned in this my faithful narrative would prove to be a little flat for any one who could not read the gazettes of the time of Caligula, but, on the other hand, they are agreeable by reminiscence and acquire an infinite charm from the men who are no longer there." Furthermore, Addison, taking Silius Italicus and Virgil as his guides, has left a faithful and curious description of all this coast.
