The statue of Sorrento’s most famous son,
the Renaissance poet, Torquato Tasso,
stands at the bosky edge of the piazza
named for him, where, each year, crowds gather
for Giro D’Italia’s pelotons,
spinning like the seasons and the tides.
In doublet and hose, he muses, gazing
ambiguously at the Isle of Capri
across the startlingly blue Gulf of Naples.
Displayed in the Museo Correale
– a patrician villa, privately owned –
are early editions of his work,
including the seminal epic poem
‘La Gerusalemme Liberata’:
a Hollywood version of the First Crusades,
where Christians trounce Muslims in the final reel,
and the guy more or less gets his gal.
Its ambition and modernity
influenced Milton in his project
‘To justify the ways of God to man’.
We walk, through the museum’s formal gardens
along sheltered paths bordered by plane trees,
to the ornate Belvedere terrace,
and glimpse Vesuvius dormant, vast.
The refuse collectors are on strike. It has
something to do with the local Mafia.
Black bags are piled neatly out of sight
behind the cathedral. In the side chapel
of St James the Just – the martyred leader
of the early church in Jerusalem –
are tiny replicas in hammered tin of body parts,
wherever the sickness is the saint might cure.
Down a back street we pass a craftsman’s workshop.
Above the carpenter’s bench, in shadow.
is a photogravure of Il Duce.
In the narrow garden of our hotel –
in the town’s geometrical Greek heart –
a blackbird sings each evening, until the nuns,
in the tower of the closed convent next door,
begin to chant the Evening Prayer: ‘O God,
come to our aid’. The poet’s patron
committed him to an asylum
run by nuns in Ferrara. He was,
we would think now, bipolar. He died
two days before he was due to receive
a medal for his poetry from the Pope.
In the room next door to us is a couple
from somewhere Scandinavian – pale-faced,
and frequently drunk. Their empties
roll across the tiled floors through the night.
The terrace of the Villa Comunale
is a belvedere for all citizens
to gaze, beneath the shade trees, upon the sea
the Ancient Romans saw, and the Greeks.
Over the parapet and many metres
down is the rocky shore. One of Tasso’s
brief odes – this one to the dawn – begins,
‘Ecco mormorar l’onde
E tremolar le fronde…
Here the waves murmur
and the palms tremble…’
By David Selzer
