Naples
South, where all French tastes were eagerly copied.
But as a rule the Italian garden is still much as Martial
sang to—where the vine gives its cool shade, the
stream its clear water, and vegetables ripen in January
unnipped by frost. Still, Italy more than any country
gives the impression of being full of deserted gardens
or enclosures, where flowers might once have been
trained before the family grounds passed into peasants’
fields. A broken statue, an empty stone vase with
shell-like border, a rusty iron sun-dial fixed upon a wall,
a low stone seat, warm in the neglected expanse where
once shadows were trained—these are often found
within a broken-down wall, or behind the twisted and
fantastic scrolls of some old iron gate, “ the gate that
leads to nowhere.”
I looked through the iron bars of such a gate near
Sorrento. There lay the empty vase ; there stood the
disused well in the midst of a perfect wilderness of
vegetation. Lemons were glittering overhead, and a
child was idly catching at the lizards’ tails in the sun.
Beyond rose a great rococo stone gate, pretentious and
neglected. Nothing did it shut in, and nothing out.
It is a curious fact that in all ruined towns, Fora, or
walls, the gate resists time the longest.
To appreciate to the best advantage the curious
position of Sorrento, between its narrow one-mile
boundary of sea and mountain, turn into one of the long
high-walled and serpentine roads that lead up into the
hills. Every road going inland is the same. Between
high green-stained walls over which orange-trees under
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