Identifier: spellofitaly00maso (find matches)
Title: The spell of Italy
Year: 1909 (1900s)
Authors: Mason, Caroline Atwater, 1853-1939
Subjects: Italy -- Description and travel
Publisher: Boston : L. C. Page & company
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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ith less of intoxication and more of sentiment, thanthe appeal of Southern Italy.) In a Balcony, Sorrento,Evening, May 14. We have explored the town, which is rightly calledLa Gentile, being gently pretty but uninteresting.People buy laces there, also carved wood, and wemet sturing American women purchasing to them-selves garments of the silk of Sorrento. I suppose weshall come to dress-making if we are in Italy longenough; just now it seems an impertinence. There is a statue of Tasso in the Piazza, and wefound our way to the Strada San Nicola and thehouse where Cornelia Tasso received her ill-starredbut adored brother when he fled in 1577 from Ferrarain disguise. Was ever a more piteous story than thatof this highly endowed but self-torturing misan-thrope and the baffling mystery of his relation withLeonora dEste? Thoughts of Goethe seemed tohaunt me all the morning, for I know he must havewandered through these steep streets and Angeredon these cUffs of Sorrento brooding over Tassos
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TASSO BEFORE LENORA D ESTE, BY KAULBACH. Balcony Days 69 passionate conflicts with the repression of a narrowprovincial court and an untold love for its mistress.I have always thought that Kaulbach, in his Tassobefore Leonora dEste, drew Goethes physical por-trait; I suppose no one doubts that in his TassoGoethe drew his own spiritual portrait. There is little of actual suggestion of the Age ofAugustus here in Sorrento, and yet I find as I amhere longer a sense of antiquity creeping in, becomingmore and more haunting; perhaps it is preparing usfor Rome. Always about us are memories andwhispers of the Homeric age, and of civihzationsancient, august, universal, such as make the oldestmemorials and traditions of Northern Europe seemmeagre and modern, wliile those of our own countryare things of yesterday, raw and crude, stamped withthe imprint of the local, the provincial, the tran-sient. I reaUze that on these shores of Capri, of Naples,of the ancient SmTentum, have lived for ages upona

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