This region, which is still shaky from fires bubbling under the thin crust, through which here and there the sulphurous vapor breaks out, is one of the most sacred in the ancient world.  Here are the Lucrine Lake, the Elysian Fields, the cave of the Cumean Sibyl, and the Lake Avernus.  This entrance to the infernal regions was frozen over the day I saw it; so that the profane prophecy of skating on the bottomless pit might have been realized.  The islands of Procida and Ischia continue and complete this side of the bay, which is about twenty miles long as the boat sails.

At Castellamare the shore makes a sharp bend, and runs southwest along the side of the Sorrentine promontory.  This promontory is a high, rocky, diversified ridge, which extends out between the bays of Naples and Salerno, with its short and precipitous slope towards the latter.  Below Castellamare, the mountain range of the Great St. Angelo (an offshoot of the Apennines) runs across the peninsula, and cuts off that portion of it which we have to consider.  The most conspicuous of the three parts of this short range is over four thousand seven hundred feet above the Bay of Naples, and the highest land on it.  From Great St. Angelo to the point, the Punta di Campanella, it is, perhaps, twelve miles by balloon, but twenty by any other conveyance.  Three miles off this point lies Capri.

This promontory has a backbone of rocky ledges and hills; but it has at intervals transverse ledges and ridges, and deep valleys and chains cutting in from either side; so that it is not very passable in any direction.  These little valleys and bays are warm nooks for the olive and the orange; and all the precipices and sunny slopes are terraced nearly to the top.  This promontory of rocks is far from being barren.

From Castellamare, driving along a winding, rockcut road by the bay, —­one of the most charming in southern Italy,—­a distance of seven miles, we reach the Punta di Scutolo.  This point, and the opposite headland, the Capo di Sorrento, inclose the Piano di Sorrento, an irregular plain, three miles long, encircled by limestone hills, which protect it from the east and south winds.  In this amphitheater it lies, a mass of green foliage and white villages, fronting Naples and Vesuvius.

If nature first scooped out this nook level with the sea, and then filled it up to a depth of two hundred to three hundred feet with volcanic tufa, forming a precipice of that height along the shore, I can understand how the present state of things came about.

This plain is not all level, however.  Decided spurs push down into it from the hills; and great chasms, deep, ragged, impassable, split in the tufa, extend up into it from the sea.  At intervals, at the openings of these ravines, are little marinas, where the fishermen have their huts’ and where their boats land.  Little villages, separate from the world, abound on these marinas.  The warm volcanic soil of the sheltered plain makes it a paradise of fruits and flowers.