Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/391

Rh and architectural forms, especially so at Amalfi. Here we were obliged to be carried on shore by our sailors. We found good quarters at the Hotel Luna, formerly a Convent, on the outside of the town, near the shore. The people in the house struck us as being so peculiar that we suspected them of being a kind of men of the moon. In the evening they entertained us with Neapolitan songs, excellently sung, and a tarantella excellently danced, the whole being given in the beautiful ancient court of the Convent, surrounded by a marble balustrade, finely sculptured. The people are musical, gay, childlike, but altogether too keen after carlini and grani. We are here evidently not in the moon.

Amalfi, with its white churches and houses, lies upon lofty rock-terraces, on the shore of the Bay of Salerno. One clambers up amidst valleys of luxuriant vegetation. The former powerful city, with its population of fifty thousand souls, and which alone ruled the trade with the East, is now an unimportant town of three thousand inhabitants, a few manufactories of macaroni and paper, together with a great number of beggars. These swarmed like flies, both outside and inside the Cathedral, the sole but splendid remains of the ancient grandeur of Amalfi. There is in the beautiful crypt-chapel a statue of St. Andrew the Apostle, who is said to be buried here, which one can never forget. He is represented as standing, or rather walking, proclaiming the gospel, his hand pointing to the Holy Scriptures. He is represented as aged, and his, countenance bears the traces of weariness and suffering, but at the same time of an