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Prologue

This is not a historical account, but an invention—honest and emotional, a reverie spun in the baroque folds of poetic prose. It is not a logical manifesto but a sensuous invocation of a place that has haunted my imagination.

Ricardo F. Morín Tortolero,

February 10, 2025, Oakland Park, Florida

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Ulysses knew it as the land of the sirens, a place that, during the Middle Ages, would rise to become a great maritime empire.     Nestled at the foot of the towering Mount Cerreto, the Duchy of Amalfi once sought refuge here, as if embraced by a chrysalis of ancestral muses.

The tragedy of The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster, the realism of Henrik Ibsen, and the Gesamtkunstwerk of the much-maligned Richard Wagner have all echoed the fate of this legendary caryatid of pleasure, perched above the Gulf of Salerno.      Amidst the cliffs, the thunderous dance of cascading mountains unfolds with grandeur; they seemed to move to the rhythm of the Podalirio butterfly to have us recall the less venerable Crusades, cloisters, and monasteries of times past.     The mountains and cliffs exhale back the residue of a barbaric metamorphosis from countless civilizations.     And yet, now, our restless gaze traces the genesis of the past as it discovers the seductive fragrance of la dolce vita.

Carved into a promontory at the edge of a precipice, between the villages of Cetara and Vietri—renowned for their anchovies in oil and multicolored ceramics—stands our magnificent hotel, the Cetus.      In the chromatic cacophony of the rainbow and its rocky outcrops, the eternal compass guides the rowing regattas that zigzag along the coastline as they navigate from south to northwest, from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Ligurian Sea.

Nearby, the Canneto River winds down through the Valley of the Mills, where the whisper of the wind carries Renaissance ballads written over the famed bambagina paper.      As if retracing our steps through time, the fjords shrink beneath a radiant sky, caressed by the delicate mist of cold winds.     We hear the hum of bees and inhale the piercing aroma of sfusato lemons from Mount Etna, while the limoncello releases its intoxicating golden essence.     The depths of the peninsula exude the taste and scent of their most captivating fruits.

So intense is the essence of the Amalfi Republic that it seems to sow lava into the turquoise waters and the cliffs that have long shielded it from collapse.     We sing the Falalella under the twilight haze, then float above the shimmering coastline of Salerno, Positano, and Ravello, as they are gently bathed in a cool drizzle.      With the ebb and flow of life, crimson clouds gaze into the mirror of the still waters and cast their glow upon the blue bay of Salerno.

Amalfi, a jewel of Salerno, is framed by the Campania region, where the majestic sanctuaries of Herculaneum and Paestum stand in solemn grandeur to salute us.     And from the ashes that wove together mythical times, the 18th-century archaeological expeditions of Pompeii unearthed, among many discoveries, ancient frescoes depict the Cycle of the Roman Mysteries, as well as the conquests of Alexander the Great.

The touch of ancient hands still reverberates through our senses.      Sweet is the vision beneath the spring sun, bouncing from ravine to valley, as it sways from stairway to cascading steps, until we reach the ancestral pier.      We had anchored there near the dock from which the great galleys once set sail to unknown lands.      They, like my beloved and I, drifted away from it and left behind the vision of the sirens’ paradise.

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Ricardo F. Morín, February 7, 2025, Oakland Park, Fl