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Prologue

This is not a historical account, but an invention, honest and emotional, a dream woven into 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,

March 12, 2026, 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.   Protected at the foot of the imposing Mount Cerreto, the Duchy of Amalfi found refuge here, as if enveloped in the embrace of a chrysalis of ancestral muses.

The tragedy “The Duchess of Malfi” by John Webster, the realism of Henrik Ibsen, and the Gesamtkunstwerk of the much maligned Richard Wagner have echoed in the destiny of this legendary caryatid of pleasure perched above the Gulf of Salerno.  Among the cliffs the thunderous dance of cascading mountains unfolds with magnificence.  They seem to move to the rhythm of the Podalirio butterfly, recalling the less venerable Crusades, the cloisters, and the monasteries of earlier centuries.  The mountains and the sea stacks still exhale the residue of a barbaric metamorphosis carved by innumerable civilizations.  And yet today our restless gaze traces the origins of the past while discovering the seductive fragrance of la dolce vita.

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

Nearby the Canneto River descends through the Valley of the Mills, where the whisper of the wind carries Renaissance ballads written upon the famed bambagina paper.  As though we were turning back time, the fjords fold beneath a radiant sky touched by the delicate mist of cold winds.  We hear the hum of bees and breathe the piercing aroma of sfusato lemons from Mount Etna, while limoncello releases its intoxicating golden essence.  The depths of the peninsula exhale the taste and fragrance of its most captivating fruits.

So intense is the essence of the Amalfi Republic that it seems to sow lava into the turquoise waters and upon the promontories that for centuries protected it from collapse.  We sing the Falalella beneath the twilight haze and drift along the shimmering coastline of Salerno, Positano, and Ravello, gently bathed by a cool drizzle.  With the sway of life, crimson clouds mirror themselves in still waters, casting their glow upon the blue bay of Salerno.

Amalfi, jewel of Salerno, is framed by the region of Campania, where the majestic sanctuaries of Herculaneum and Paestum rise solemnly to greet us.  From the ashes that once wove mythical times, the archaeological expeditions of eighteenth century Pompeii revealed, among many discoveries, ancient frescoes depicting the Cycle of the Roman Mysteries as well as the conquests of Alexander the Great.

The touch of ancestral hands still resonates through our senses.  Sweet is the vision beneath the spring sun. It leaps from ravine to valley and swaying like a cascading stair until it reaches the ancient pier.  There we had anchored, near the dock from which the great galleys once departed toward unknown lands.  They, like my beloved and I, have departed as well, leaving behind the vision of the paradise of the sirens.

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Ricardo F. Morín, March 12, 2026, Oakland Park, Fl