Within the gate is a large paved square, with the government
offices and the tobacco-shop on one side, and the church opposite;
between them, up a flight of broad stone steps, is the Hotel Tiberio.
Our donkeys walk up them and into the hotel. The church and hotel
are six hundred years old; the hotel was a villa belonging to Joanna
II. of Naples. We climb to the roof of the quaint old building, and
sit there to drink in the strange oriental scene. The landlord says
it is like Jaffa or Jerusalem. The landlady, an Irish woman from
Devonshire, says it is six francs a day. In what friendly
intercourse the neighbors can sit on these flat roofs! How sightly
this is, and yet how sheltered! To the east is the height where
Augustus, and after him Tiberius, built palaces. To the west, up
that vertical wall, by means of five hundred steps cut in the face of
the rock, we go to reach the tableland of Anacapri, the primitive
village of that name, hidden from view here; the medieval castle of
Barbarossa, which hangs over a frightful precipice; and the height of
Monte Solaro. The island is everywhere strewn with Roman ruins, and
with faint traces of the Greeks.
Capri turns out not to be a barren rock. Broken and picturesque as
it is, it is yet covered with vegetation. There is not a foot, one
might say a point, of soil that does not bear something; and there is
not a niche in the rock, where a scrap of dirt will stay, that is not
made useful.
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