Sunday morning John woke up quite early and went off for a walk. I slept in for about an hour, and then decided as it was Sunday I should go to Mass at the Cathedral. As I arrived in the La Piazza del Duomo, the cathedral square, I found John sitting at a table in a cafe there. The town was bathed in a sweet yellow light.
John asked if he could join me for Mass, and I said I had no objection to this. The early Mass was held in a side chapel, and I was quite surprised by how much of the Italian I could follow. Not the sermon, of course, but most of the small congregation present did not seem to be paying much attention to this either. John stayed for the first part of the service, and after Mass was over I found him in the nave of the cathedral looking at its many artistic and historical treasures. During the heyday of the Duchy of Amalfi in the tenth and eleventh centuries, Ravello was a rich and important wool production and trading center. The bishops of had the money to commission some impressive works of art like the Byzantine-style epistle pulpit
and this grand gospel pulpit.
Not only is the mosaic work impressive, but the six lions supporting the pulpit are also astonishing — and rather charming, too!
All Italian cities have some patron saint, and for Ravello it is Saint Pantaleone the Healer. According to the story, Pantaleone was a physician who was beheaded by the Emperor Diocletian at the end of the third century.
Just as Naples as the blood of Saint Januarius, Ravello has Pantaleone’s blood. And it too is said to liquify on his feast day, July 27th. There are so many reasons to visit Ravello in the summer!
We returned to the hotel and Rebecca had left for one last Vespa ride. When she returned, we packed up and waited for the taxi to take us to Naples. And with all this magnificent scenery, why exactly was I looking at my phone? New habits are hard to break, I guess.
We took the road over the Latari mountains. Along the way we saw a bit of the old Italy.
We had a fairly long ride into Naples. There seemed to be some kind of police activity and we were stuck in traffic barely moving for about thirty minutes. Of course, as it being Naples, absolutely everybody, including a nun in a car in the next lane, had to honk endlessly. Our hotel here is one frequently recommended in guidebooks, the Art Hotel. It is located in the Gallery Umberto, a nineteenth century shopping mall that looks exactly like the Galleria in Milan. And, also like the Galleria, it is undergoing an extensive and no doubt expensive renovation. It will be stunning again when finished.
The hotel occupies one wing of the top floor. These were offices at one time. We just unpacked and decided to show Rebecca lively city that John and I had learned to love only a few days before. Except … it was Sunday and it was mid-day and there was almost nothing open and almost nobody to be seen on the streets. Rebecca, seeing only the graffiti and the trash, must have thought we were insane. We did amuse ourselves with some Fascist architecture
and we found an open pizza place by San Domenico Maggiore. Wandering around later, we found the pizza place we should have eaten, the one where the Pizza Margherita, Italy’s favorite pizza, was invented.
Returning to the hotel, we cleaned ourselves up a bit in preparation for going to the Opera. One of the coolest things about the hotel is this old-fashioned elevator you need to take to get up to the fourth floor, what Americans would call the fifth floor.
The San Carlo Opera is the oldest opera company in Europe. The original building was built in 1737, but burned to the ground in 1816. The Neopolitans, great lovers of opera, lost no time in building a new theater and the current building was dedicated in 1817. Rebecca had never had an opportunity to see a grand old European theater. She fell in love with it!
We were there to see Rossini’s La Cenerentola. This is retelling of the Cinderella story with some very strange twists. The staging by the San Carlo company seemed deliberately nineteenth century. Few, if any of the typical lighting and stage effects that are typical of modern American opera companies were employed. Indeed, the footlights were one of the dominant sources of stage light just as they would have been two hundred years ago.
The singing was astonishingly good. The Russian tenor who played Prince Ramiro had a fantastic voice!
Italians like to begin their cultural events fairly early in the evening. Our opera here began at five o’clock. This meant it was still light when the opera was over and there was opportunity for a passeggiata, a stroll. We stopped by the Plaza of the Plebiscite and then continued on the waterfront.
