t as it seems under one's hand yet really a few miles
off, its northern side falling in brown slopes dotted with white villas
to the orange gardens of Sorrento, its southern rushing steeply down to
the hidden bays of Amalfi and Salerno. To the right the distant line of
Apennines, broken by the shadowy dip that marks the plain of Paestum,
runs southward in a dim succession of capes and headlands; to the left
the sunny bow of the Bay of Naples gleams clear and distinct through
the brilliant air till Procida and Ischia lead the eye round again to
the cliff of Anacapri with the busy little Marina at its feet. A tiny
chapel in charge of a hermit now crowns the plateau which forms the
highest point of the Villa Jovis; on three sides of the height the cliff
falls in a sheer descent of more than a thousand feet to the sea, on the
fourth the terrace walls are formed of fragments of brick and marble
which recall the hanging gardens that swept downwards to the plain. The
Villa itself lies partly hewn out of the sides of the steep rock, partly
supported by a vast series of substructures whose arched vaults served
as water-reservoirs and baths for the service of the house.

In strength of site and in the character of its defences the palace was
strictly what Pliny calls it, "Tiberii principis arx," but this was no
special characteristic of the Villa Jovis. "Scias non villas esse sed
castra," said Seneca of the luxurious villas on the coast of Baiae; it
was as if the soldier element of the Roman nature broke out even amidst
the patrician's idlest repose in the choice of a military site and the
warlike strength of the buildings he erected on it. Within however life
seems to have been luxurious enough. The ruins of a theatre, whose
ground-plan remains perfect, show that Tiberius combined more elegant
relaxations with the coarse revels which are laid to his charge. Each
passage is paved with mosaic, the walls still retain in patches their
coloured stucco, and here and there in the small chambers we find traces
of the designs which adorned them. It is however rather by the vast
extent and huge size of the substructures than by the remains of the
house itself that we can estimate the grandeur of the Villa Jovis; for
here, as at the Baths near the Marina, the ruins have served as quarries
for chapels and forts and every farmhouse in the neighbourhood. The
Baths stand only second in grandeur to the Villa itself. The fall of the
cliff has tor