In the Company of Dolphins by Irwin Shaw

Author:Irwin Shaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504038447
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-05-17T04:00:00+00:00

RAVELLO

Ravello, which is a kind of purple passage of scenic splendor, outstanding even among the full rhetorical beauties of the rest of the coast, is reached by a winding road that cuts up the mountainside behind Amalfi, among miles of vineyards and lemon groves. Rich in the thirteenth century, independent until 1813, it is a small collection of splendid, Norman-influenced, bleached buildings adorned by the gardens of the Palazzo Rúfolo, which hang breathtakingly on a cliff a thousand feet above the sea. At the leading restaurant there is a pasta dish named after Puccini, and Wagner worked here. Music was in the air on the afternoon we visited it, because a concert was being given that evening as part of the yearly musical festival that is held here. In the cool interior of a half-ruined but capacious tower in the gardens a cellist was patiently practising Mahler, the conductor interrupting him again and again, his voice sounding thin and nagging as he sang to the musician to show him the way it should be done. Then the cello would start again, mellow and full, flooding the tower, echoing through the garden, right for Mahler, right for the place, right for the hot, flower-drugged, dreaming afternoon.

From Amalfi south the coast takes on a different character. There are no more great resorts whose names are known throughout the world, no more congregations of pleasure boats from whose decks float conversations in ten languages, no more crowds of tourists pouring out of buses to invade the beaches. The coast is rough and inhospitable, with ports few and far between, and the country is baked and forlorn and glorious and poor.

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