t and an iron strength of will to the attainment of the highest
honour the Church could bestow. It was in the hey-day of his power that
the English pope entered Ravello and sang Mass in the Cathedral in the
presence of all the noble citizens of the place, for in the previous year
he had crushed for ever the dangerous heresy of Arnold of Brescia, by
boldly sentencing that ardent reformer to be burnt at the stake in Rome
and his ashes cast into the Tiber. The Pontiff during his visit sojourned
in the Palazzo Rufolo, the beautiful Saracenic building that is still
standing intact after so many centuries, and by a curious coincidence is
now the property of the well-known English family of Reid. Nor was Pope
Adrian the only sovereign who honoured Ravello by his presence, for
Charles of Anjou, brother of St Louis of France and the murderer of poor
Conradin, and King Robert the Wise also received the hospitality of the
Rufolo family within these walls. The whole existing town in fact is
eloquent of the long extinct but by no means forgotten Rufoli, who may
fairly be reckoned among the more enlightened of the petty tyrants of
medieval Italy. That their name was still familiar in Italian society in
the fourteenth century is evident from the circumstances that Boccaccio
puts a story, no doubt founded on fact, into the mouth of the fair
Lauretta, which deals with the adventures of one Landolfo Rufolo of
Ravello, "who, not content with his great store, but anxious to make it
double, was near losing all he had, and his life also." The novel proceeds
to relate how this member of a wealthy and respected family turned
corsair, after losing all his capital in a mercantile speculation in
Cyprus; how he, in his turn, was robbed of his ill-gotten gains on the
high seas by some thievish merchants of Genoa; and how Landolfo, after
passing through a variety of more or less improbable adventures, was
finally rescued from drowning off the coast of Corfu by a servant-maid
who, whilst washing dishes by the sea-shore, chanced to espy the
unconscious merchant drifting towards the beach with his arms clasped
round a small wooden chest, which kept him afloat. "Moved by compassion,"
says the relator of the tale, "she stepped a little way into the sea,
which was now calm, and seizing the half-drowned wretch by the hair of his
head, drew both him and the chest to land, where with much trouble she
unfolded his arms from the chest, which she set upon the head