afford a welcome light even at midday, descends by steep gradients
from the garden above into the main piazza of the little city. Built by
the celebrated Cardinal Pietro Capuano nearly seven hundred years ago for
Cistercian monks, the monastery in the sixteenth century came into the
possession of the Capuchin Friars, those brown-robed figures that with
their bare feet and girdles of knotted white cord are such familiar and
picturesque objects in the daily crowds of every Italian town. But the
friars have been forced to abandon their airy retreat ever since the
suppression of the religious houses, which succeeded the union of the old
Neapolitan kingdom with young Italy, and their convent has long been put
to secular uses. Yet the old monastic church still exists, and
superstitious people declare that the spectral forms of ejected Capuchins
are sometimes to be seen advancing slowly up the rocky ascent in order to
revisit the sacred building that is now closed for worship. Nevertheless
the church is cared for by the members of the Vozzi family, its present
owners, who every Christmas-tide still prepare the popular _presepio_,
that curious representation of the scene in the stable at Bethlehem,
wherein a score of gaily dressed figures of painted wood represent the
Holy Family and the worshipping peasants. Little in fact has been changed
within the building itself, and the exquisite cloistered court with its
slender intertwining Saracenic columns still remains to delight alike the
artist and the antiquary. We say "still remains" advisedly; for beyond the
tiny quadrangle our eyes at once light upon a scene of hideous
devastation.

Doubtless many persons will recall the great land-slip of December 1899,
when almost without warning the whole face of the rocky headland that
shelters Amalfi on the west tore itself loose and slid with a crash like
thunder into the sea below, overwhelming in its fall the little inn known
as the "Santa Caterina" and burying in its ruins two English ladies and
several fishermen. The sinister scar still continues as a blot upon the
lovely landscape, speaking only too eloquently to all of sudden death and
destruction amidst the surrounding scenes of life and beauty. The older
portion of the Capuchin convent, by a miracle as it were, escaped the
on-rush of the land-slide, but its famous "Calvary," the large group of
the Crucifixion that appears prominently in so many pictures of Amalfi,
was completely s