angle of aromatic brushwood, to Forio,
which with its white domed houses, its palm trees, and its stately
bare-footed women bearing tall pitchers on their heads gives at first
acquaintance the full impression of an Oriental city. There is little to
be seen in Forio itself, with the exception of some fine vestments of
needlework that are preserved in the sacristy of its principal church, but
no traveller should fail to visit its wonderfully picturesque Franciscan
monastery, a barbaric-looking pile of dazzling white walls and cupolas set
against a background of cobalt waters, which stands outside the town on a
rocky platform jutting into the Mediterranean and is approached by a broad
flight of marble steps adorned with most realistic figures of souls
burning in brightly painted flames of Purgatory. This point too commands a
good view of the extreme north-eastern promontory of the island, a tall
cliff known as the Punta del Imperatore in honour of the great Emperor
Charles the Fifth, beyond which visitors rarely penetrate owing to the
roughness, or rather non-existence of roads, though the southern side of
the island, which lies between this cape and the castle of Ischia, is
fully as beautiful as the northern portion just described.

The chief attraction, however, of a visit to Ischia is the ascent of Mont'
Epomeo, an easy expedition on foot to the active, and feasible to the weak
or lazy on mule-back. This extinct volcano, whose broad lofty summit is
visible from many points of the Bay of Naples, is naturally rich in
classical associations, the ancients believing that within it lay
imprisoned the giant Typhoeus, whose agonised movements were wont to cause
the frequent eruptions of the crater that eventually drove away the early
Greek settlers from this island--the Aenaria or Inarime of antiquity--and in
later times accounted for the neglect of Ischia as a winter resort by the
luxurious Romans, in spite of its near presence to fashionable Baiae. So
destructive of life and property were these convulsions of nature, that
for long periods, notwithstanding its fertile soil and its lucrative
fisheries, the island remained uninhabited, and an old tradition,
mentioned by Ovid, derives one of its ancient names, Pithecusa, from a
race of apes (_pithekoi_) that dwelt on its abandoned shores. Since the
great eruption of 1302, the effects of which can still be traced among the
large pine woods near Porto d'Ischia, the mountain has been