Ulysses comes to know it as the land of the sirens, which, during the Middle Ages, becomes a great maritime empire. It is located at the foot of giant Monte Cerreto, where the Duchy of Amalfi would come to take refuge for a time, as if in the chrysalis of ancestral muses. The tragedy of the Duchess of Malfi by John Webster, as well as the Realism of Henrik Ibsen and the Gesamtkunstwerk of a vilifying Richard Wagner would have echoed the fate of this mythic caryatid of pleasure over the Gulf of Salerno. Among the cliffs, the movements of thundering sources dance to the rhythm of the Swallowtail beyond the less venerable Crusades, cloisters or monasteries, exhaling the barbaric metamorphosis of so many tribes. Although now, from walking in the genesis of time, a restless gaze profiles the beguiling essence from “La Dolce Vita”.
Excavated from a promontory on the edge of a precipice, between the villages of Cetara and Vietri, providing anchovies in oil and colored ceramics, there is our beautifully tiled Inn called Cetus. In the cacophonous colors of the rainbow and arising from the eternal compass, its rowing regattas zigzag along the sea coast, driven up from the south to the north-west from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Ligurian Sea.
In its surroundings, the river Canneto runs through the valley of the mills whispering ballads of the Renaissance to the famous paper bambagina. As if to recoil from our step, the fjords sag under a bright sky, caressed by the thin mist of cool winds. We hear the hum of the bees and the penetrating aroma of the Aetna’s sfusato; and from the limoncello one squeezes gently the intoxicating magma. The peninsular bowels spit the flavor and fragrance of its dashing fruits. So intense the Amalfi Republic sows the lava within the turquoise water and the cliffs that have walled it.
We sing the Falalella in the shadows of the twilight. And then there we float on the glow off the coast of Salerno, Sorrento, Positano and Ravello, which are washed with fresh drizzle. With the ebb and flow of life, the reddened clouds look at themselves in the mirror of calm waters, trailing the bay of Salerno. Amalfi, Comune of Salerno, is framed by the Region of Campania where the shrines of Herculaneum and Paestum were erected majestically . And from the ashes to the texture of mythological times, archaeological expeditions of Pompeii of the eighteenth century exhume, among many findings, paintings from antiquity which illustrate the Roman Cycle of Mysteries as well as the conquests by Alexander the Great.
The touch of ancient hands still reverberated in the movement of our senses. Sweet was the image in the vernal sun, which would bounce from ravine to ravine, teetering from staircase to staircase down to the ancestral jetty. We anchored near the dock from where the large galleys used to be dispatched. As they once did, we are now scattered, leaving behind the vision of a sirens’ paradise.
Ricardo Morin 04/20/14
Observations On The Nature of Perception 
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