contact: Jeff Matthews

Letter from Anacapri, September 2011.

Sept. 21—First Day of Autumn

The island of Capri is off the east end of the Gulf of Naples. We are high enough in the town of Anacapri on the western side of the island so that facing over some 17 miles (30 km) across the bay you see Ischia and Procida distinctly as two separate islands off the other end of the gulf. (Even Vivara, Procida’s own little satellite isle, is quite distinct.) You don’t see that separation from many places in the bay. If you’re at sea-level (on a sail boat, for example) and farther than four or five miles away from those islands and looking at them, the bottoms are cut off by the horizon; unless you already know, you can’t really tell the difference between separate bits of land and a single low-lying strip broken up in places by the optical trick of the horizon. (Note: If you are six-feet tall and standing on the beach, your line of sight out to sea will hit the horizon —the curve of the earth— in about four miles; a crusty old merchant seaman told me that! So if you are good at math and you know the circumference of the earth, you should be able to calculate how tall you are! Then again, I may have watched too many episodes of NUMB3RS. p.s. I just tried this; I am 12 feet tall. Back to the drawing board!) Thus, even from the modest height of the town of Anacapri—just under 300 meters/900 feet—you actually see Ischia and Procida set in the sea with the horizon behind. Then you see the two-mile strait between Procida and Monte di Procida on the mainland, then all of the western end of the Gulf of Naples and the Bay of Pozzuoli, then to the east past the city and finally Vesuvius before your view runs into our neighboring hotel, the Cesare Augusto. They have a good view, too.

Even Caesar Augustus gets no respect these days

My wife chose this hotel because she remembers staying here with her parents when she was a little girl. I hoped we would be at the place down the road where we stayed a couple of years ago. They had a collection of old science books, totally neglected and falling apart and jammed askew into the shelves. That is my justification for ‘saving’ a volume by Alfred Russel Wallace, the ‘other’ Darwin. It was called The Wonderful Century—written in 1898, when the future seemed predictable. The book was a glowing view of science and the future. It contained this passage:

The flowing tide is with us. We have great poets, great writers , great thinkers, to cheer and guide us; and an ever-increasing band of earnest workers to spread the light and help on the good time coming. And as this century has witnessed a material and intellectual advance wholly unprecedented in the history of human progress, so the Coming Century will reap the full fruition of that advance, in a moral and social upheaval of an equally new and unprecedented kind, and equally great in amount.

Wallace died in 1913, one year before the beginning of the Great War.

We had a good dinner; we paid too much but were surrounded by beautiful people. It was one of those places, quite common on Capri, that displays photos on the walls of all the famous people who have dined there. (I offered them a picture of Yours Truly! They said they’d get back to me.)

I really want to get a swim in tomorrow; today the high daytime temperature was probably 25+ C. (high 70s, F.) although it cooled off quickly later in the afternoon. I also have to find the trail of small English forts along the western side of the island and take some photos. (They are alternately called “French forts” in some sources. They were both. See the link immediately above and also the section farther down on this page.)

Sept 22—I took a swim at the lighthouse. It’s at Punta Carena, the furthest south-western point on the island of Capri. The octagonal tower was built in 1866; the focal plane (an imaginary line extending straight out from the center of the lens) is 73 meters (240 ft) above the surface of the water. It is one of the most important lighthouses in the Tyrrhenian Sea in terms of the number of passing ships that rely on it. It is a rotating lamp with a period of 3 seconds that can be seen at a distance of 25 nautical miles/46 km. Since 2005 the lighthouse keeper has been Carlo D’Oriano, a former petty officer in the Italian navy. He loves the sea and solitude; clearly the right man at the right job! He is due to retire soon, and, alas, the job, itself, may not last much longer. Lighthouses are being increasingly automated around the world, and the figure of the lone sentinel watching over “those in peril on the sea” is fated to vanish.

While I was standing around, a most singular thing occurred (sorry, I’ve been rereading Sherlock Holmes on my e-reader!): there was a very low fly-over of single-engine two-seater Italian air force training planes, all the same color (red). There were about 15 of them and for a second it looked like a scene from Pearl Harbor. I saw the evil smirks on the pilots’ faces as they looked down and mocked us. I shook my fist at them and shouted “You nefarious oriental fiends!” even though they were really nefarious occidental fiends. They high-tailed it for home when they heard that “chuka-chuka-chuka!” .50 caliber sound I imitate so well with my voice. I have to find out exactly what that was all about.

The water temperature was perfect. I also found the beginning (from the southwest lighthouse end) of the trail that leads by the forts. It looks very do-able. I might try tomorrow. They tell me that it’s a 2-to-3-hour hike over to the other end near the Blue Grotto.

This western side of the island is still rural in many parts. It’s a pleasant break from the tourists, although there are still plenty of them around even in late September near the center of the town of Anacapri (and, obviously, in the town of Capri, itself). There are long strings of them following their group leader who waves aloft some sort of stick with a number or tour group logo on it so that stragglers can home in on it and not wander over a cliff, or, even worse, wander near a place where they might NOT spend money! The wandering, trampling hordes are precisely what you don’t like about famous places —even if you, yourself, are part of the horde. As much as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke loved this island (particularly Anacapri), he got wound up about the tourist noise and glitter. He said that the town of Capri, itself, looked like a bad movie set built by German tourists. “..The signs of their stupid admiration...are so showy and tenacious that even the terrible storms that from time to time grip the island cannot cancel them...”.

Our friend and life-long resident of Anacapri, Gabriela, is going to come over and pick us up in a couple of hours and take us back to the old homestead for some old homestead cooking! She's a marvelous cook! She and her husband have a huge garden/vineyard; happily, there is still room on the island for those. She is just back from a pilgrimage to some place in ex-Yugoslavia (I’m not sure which one of the new “Yugo-Lands”—I think Montenegro; welcome back to the political geography of WWI). She came over on the boat from Naples last night almost as soon as she got back, full of energy and new vitality. She had been at a place where they (or someone or many someones have seen the Blessed Virgin). I stopped judging the miracles of others a long time ago. She missed the miracle of San Gennaro, though —the annual liquefaction of some blood in a vial in the Naples Cathedral. Recently the Italian senate declared the traditional holiday (Sept. 19) defunct and ‘floated’ it to the following Sunday. Gennaro had his miracle on the traditional day anyway (just a few days ago), essentially telling the senators to go jump in the lake (the one of fire and brimstone, one hopes). Again, I don’t judge miracles.

In addition to the Little Forts ceramic descriptions (such as the one in the photo, right) that I intend to search out, Rubino has one that intrigues me of what the Palazzo a Mare might have looked like at the time of Tiberius (image detail, below). That is the seaside stretch of the island facing Naples, below the heights of Anacapri about halfway between the main Marina and the Blue Grotto. Remnants of this Roman villa have been found, so the artist’s reconstruction is at least plausible. I found Rubino at his studio. He is a native of Anacapri and is gracious and garrulous. I asked if he had used a source for his version of the spectacular Roman buildings along the sea. He laughed and said, “Imagination! But that’s the way it should look.” Agreed. I really do wish they would build it all back to look exactly as he has recreated it —plus high-speed internet connection, of course. I may be nostalgic, but I’m not a Luddite.

I went to Villa Damecuta in the afternoon. There are descriptions at the entrance of what little remains of this, one of Tiberius’ 12 villas on Capri. There really isn’t too much to see, certainly not on the order of the Villa Tiberius at the other end of the island. It’s not just the ravages of time, either; the Villa Damecuta has undergone more recent episodes of intentional alteration in the name of some cause or other and, as well, has been plundered over the centuries either by farmers looking for stone for their own buildings or by amateur archaeologists such as William Hamilton looking for loot to send home to the British Museum. The text near the entrance says:

The villa, which was constructed in the Iulius-Claudius age, was damaged and abandoned following the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. A watchtower was built in Medieval times and towards the end of the 18th century Bourbon fortifications were added. The villa occupied an extremely vast area and is supposed to originally have had a passageway to the sea. The part which can be seen was excavated by Amedeo Maiuri between 1937-1948 and includes a guest area and a private residence. The line of top floor rooms and the structures of the bottom floors, built against the rockface, have been preserved.