lapped by clearest sea-waves, where bare-legged fishermen
mend their nets, and naked boys bask like lizards in the sun--now
towering bastions of weird rock, broken into spires and pinnacles
like those of Skye, and coloured with bright hues of red and
orange--then a ravine, where the thin thread of a mountain streamlet
seems to hang suspended upon ferny ledges in the limestone--or a
precipice defined in profile against sea and sky, with a lad, half
dressed in goat-skin, dangling his legs into vacuity and singing--or
a tract of cultivation, where the orange, apricot, and lemon trees
nestle together upon terraces with intermingled pergolas of vines.

Amalfi and Atrani lie close together in two of these ravines, the
mountains almost arching over them, and the sea washing their very
house-walls. Each has its crowning campanile; but that of Amalfi is
the stranger of the two, like a Moorish tower at the top, and
coloured with green and yellow tiles that glitter in the sunlight.
The houses are all dazzling white, plastered against the naked rock,
rising on each other's shoulders to get a glimpse of earth and
heaven, jutting out on coigns of vantage from the toppling cliff,
and pierced with staircases as dark as night at noonday. Some
frequented lanes lead through the basements of these houses; and as
the donkeys pick their way from step to step in the twilight,
bare-chested macaroni-makers crowd forth like ants to see us
strangers pass. A myriad of swallows or a swarm of mason bees might
build a town like this.

It is not easy to imagine the time when Amalfi and Atrani were one
town, with docks and arsenals and harbourage for their associated
fleets, and when these little communities were second in importance
to no naval power of Christian Europe. The Byzantine Empire lost its
hold on Italy during the eighth century; and after this time the
history of Calabria is mainly concerned with the republics of Naples
and Amalfi, their conflict with the Lombard dukes of Benevento,
their opposition to the Saracens, and their final subjugation by the
Norman conquerors of Sicily. Between the year 839 A.D., when Amalfi
freed itself from the control of Naples and the yoke of Benevento,
and the year 1131, when Roger of Hauteville incorporated the
republic in his kingdom of the Two Sicilies, this city was the
foremost naval and commercial port of Italy. The burghers of Amalfi
elected their own doge; founded the Hospital of Jerusalem, whence