On heights at either end of the Piano di Sorrento, and commanding it, stood two religious houses:  the Convent of the Carnaldoli to the northeast, on the crest of the hill above Meta; the Carthusian Monastery of the Deserto, to the southwest, three miles above Sorrento.  The longer I stay here, the more respect I have for the taste of the monks of the Middle Ages.  They invariably secured the best places for themselves.  They seized all the strategic points; they appropriated all the commanding heights; they knew where the sun would best strike the grapevines; they perched themselves wherever there was a royal view.  When I see how unerringly they did select and occupy the eligible places, I think they were moved by a sort of inspiration.  In those days, when the Church took the first choice in everything, the temptation to a Christian life must have been strong.

The monastery at the Deserto was suppressed by the French of the first republic, and has long been in a ruinous condition.  Its buildings crown the apex of the highest elevation in this part of the promontory:  from its roof the fathers paternally looked down upon the churches and chapels and nunneries which thickly studded all this region; so that I fancy the air must have been full of the sound of bells, and of incense perpetually ascending.  They looked also upon St. Agata under the hill, with a church bigger than itself; upon more distinct Massa, with its chapels and cathedral and overlooking feudal tower; upon Torca, the Greek Theorica, with its Temple of Apollo, the scene yet of an annual religious festival, to which the peasants of Sorrento go as their ancestors did to the shrine of the heathen god; upon olive and orange orchards, and winding paths and wayside shrines innumerable.  A sweet and peaceful scene in the foreground, it must have been, and a whole horizon of enchantment beyond the sunny peninsula over which it lorded:  the Mediterranean, with poetic Capri, and Ischia, and all the classic shore from Cape Misenum, Baiae, and Naples, round to Vesuvius; all the sparkling Bay of Naples; and on the other side the Bay of Salerno, covered with the fleets of the commerce of Amalfi, then a republican city of fifty thousand people; and Grecian Paestum on the marshy shore, even then a ruin, its deserted porches and columns monuments of an architecture never equaled elsewhere in Italy.  Upon this charming perch, the old Carthusian monks took the summer breezes and the winter sun, pruned their olives, and trimmed their grapevines, and said prayers for the poor sinners toiling in the valleys below.

The monastery is a desolate old shed now.  We left our donkeys to eat thistles in front, while we climbed up some dilapidated steps, and entered the crumbling hall.  The present occupants are half a dozen monks, and fine fellows too, who have an orphan school of some twenty lads.  We were invited to witness their noonday prayers.  The flat-roofed rear buildings extend round an oblong, quadrangular