uman monster Pier-Luigi Farnese, duke of Parma, heir of
Pope Paul the Third, of whose demoniacal cruelty and treachery the racy
pages of Cellini's Memoirs give so vivid an account, and whose repulsive
face has grown familiar to us from Titian's famous portraits in the
gallery of Naples. It was the evil Pier-Luigi's descendant and
heiress-general of the family, Elizabeth Farnese, Queen of Spain, who
conveyed the beautiful villa and woods of Quisisana to the Bourbon kings,
and here the Neapolitan royal family for several generations sought health
(as the name of the place implies) and repose upon the breezy heights that
lie so conveniently near to the great city in full view to the west.
Nowadays the old royal villa, deserted by crowned heads since Ferdinand's
days and fallen from its high estate to its present use of a hotel and
pension, forms with its park the chief attraction of Castellamare, where
English travellers are wont to congregate in winter, and Neapolitan and
Greek seekers of pleasure or drinkers of medicinal waters resort in the
hot summer months. The Southerners who come here for their _villeggiatura_
certainly enjoy a better time than the winter visitors, for the bulky form
of Monte Sant' Angelo intercepts much of the sunshine, thereby rendering
the place damp and chilly in the cold season of the year. Nominally it is
the mineral springs that attract the Neapolitan folk, wherein they have a
fine choice of health-giving beverages, varying from the _acqua ferrata_,
a mild chalybeate that is found useful as a tonic, to the powerful _acqua
del Muraglione_, that is warranted to reduce the stoutest mortal to a mere
shadow of his former self in a trice. But though the waters may be
occasionally sipped of a morning and wry faces made, it is in reality the
warm sea-bathing on the shore, where people spend hours pickling in tepid
salt water, and also the cool rides or walks amongst the shady alleys of
sweet chestnut and ilex woods of Quisisana and Monte Coppola, which draw
hither in summer the elegant world of Naples, and even of Athens, to visit
Castellamare. The leafy groves on the zephyr-swept hill sides, once sacred
to the pleasures of Bourbon tyrants, now ring with peals of noisy
laughter, with gallant compliments, and with the harsh shouting of the
_ciucciari_, the leaders of the poor over-driven donkeys. Unhappy patient
beasts! usually covered with raws and galls, that are urged forward at a
gallop by the remors