nd convey it to Amalfi. All Italian towns that respect
themselves offer the allurement of an entombed saint and if,
occasionally, the same identical saint does duty for more than one city,
who is to decide the local genuineness of the claim? Nothing in all
Italy is so curious as is this town of staircases instead of streets; of
houses perched on the angles of impossible eyries suggesting that, as
the Venetians go about in gondolas, so the Amalfians must have airships,
or the wings of Icarus, with which to circle in air from their dwellings
to the beach.

The precipitous gorges and dark ravines have on their crests low
parapets of stone walls over which the visitor lingers and leans
watching the bluest of seas lying fair under the bluest of skies. The
main road,--there is only one,--descending from the hill to the water's
edge, makes its progress through a tunnel.

The old Amalfi, with its palaces, its arches and colonnades, lies under
the sea. Just as the Pensione Caterina with its rose walks and terraces
slipped into the sea in December of 1899, when two guests and several
fishermen lost their lives, so the ancient Amalfi fell, its cliffs
swallowed up in the waters below.

"Hidden from all mortal eyes,
Deep the sunken city lies;
Silent streets and vacant halls,
Ruined roofs and towers and walls;
Even cities have their graves!"

When, on a May evening, the white moonlight falls in cascades of silver
sheen over terraces and sea, with Amalfi all alabaster and pearl like a
dream city in the ethereal air; when the stars hang low in the skies and
the fairy lights of the fishermen's boats twinkle far out at sea; when
the summer silence is suddenly thrilled by the melody of Neapolitan
songs on the air, as if it were a veritable _chant d'amour_ of
sirens,--then does one believe in the buried city. These rich baritone
voices are surely those of some singers of the buried ages. They are
floating across the centuries since Amalfi had its pride and place among
the great centres of activity. Atrani, Amalfi's twin city, lies in the
adjoining defile of the mountains which arch above them. The strange old
houses are all dazzlingly white, transfigured under the moon to an
unearthly loveliness.

The tragedy of the ruin of Amalfi is related by Petrarca, who was then
living in Naples. It was in 1343 that a terrible cataclysm--an
earthquake accompanied by a tempest--caused the destruction and the
submergence of t