The extravagant beauty of Sperlonga will never leave me. I first saw the twisted whitewashed village above the sea twenty years ago and at many moments those blue views through arches, white laundry flapping in the wind, waterfalls of magenta bougainvillea have risen unbidden in my mind. Such a place gets at the heart of the Mediterranean fantasy: Here is my place in the sun. Stone stairs curving up to a simple room, a table on a balcony, a breeze—breath of gods—a pot of rosemary and basil. A few books, and solitude all the way to the horizon.
Maybe the same people are still visiting under the trees in the small piazza. That scent of focaccia always has been wafting out the forno door, and the same (American?) girl is still playing the bohemian exile in her gauzy dress, sandals, and a hundred bangles. Maybe we haven’t changed, either. No longer the innocents abroad but still bedazzled by the charge and fierce life of the old world.
We’ve been traveling a long time this year. Today I want to stop and sit here without thinking of anything other than this air that smells of mimosa. I’m not even curious; I just want to observe the hugely pregnant woman going about her shopping and bent men huddled around a table of sports newspapers and cigarettes.
“Brimful,” I say.
“What? Oh, the cappuccino?”
“No.”
“I see what you mean.” A gift to travel with someone you don’t have to explain everything to.
THOUGH THE VILLAGE remains as it was, the development along the beach below has certainly expanded. I don’t recall many hotels and restaurants, but now they follow the strand for quite a distance. Sperlonga—from Latin spelunca, cave—always receives awards for its clean beaches. Friends tell me it’s a perfect family vacation spot, low-key and easy. We don’t go down to the beach. This is a brief stop, just to check up on paradiso. In the centro storico, there is nothing in particular to accomplish, other than enjoy grilled octopus on a high terrace, wander, sit in the sun, and read a guidebook. It’s a place to climb up streets narrow as veins and to look at how people have planted their stoops with cacti or geraniums, to notice how someone has glued seashells up the drainpipe, and how many people choose to paint their doors blue. The stone streets, polished by centuries of use, shine as though they are wet when they’re not. I buy a pair of yellow espadrilles and a sun hat.
THOSE ANCIENTS, OF course, knew just where to build lavish marble villas for their escapes from Rome. Just out of town, we find the Museo Archeologico Nazionale on the spot where Emperor Tiberius vacationed. His twenty-three-year reign was from A.D. 14 to 37. Villa di Tiberio, built along three hundred meters of coast, included a secret sea cave, magnificently decorated with sculptures and mosaics arranged around fish pools. Miraculously in 1957, ruins and many of the artworks were found during road construction.
The little museum is not to be missed. The male nudes are startlingly monumental, the marble relief of a woman and a winged creature is delicate and regal. We see Ulysses blinding the giant cyclops Polyphemus, and Zeus in the form of an eagle kidnapping Ganymede, both well-known scenes from The Odyssey. A major discovery shows the tentacled Scylla monster attacking Ulysses’s crew. Dating the statues is still problematic. Are they Greek originals of the Hellenistic middle period, or are they first-century Roman copies? Were they the actual figures from Tiberius’s grotto dining room? Whatever they prove to be, they are daunting and powerful.
HOW SMART THE citizens were to block the road when the government tried to move the newly found trove to Rome. They kept their patrimony; they got their museum. The memory of Ulysses, who roamed this coast, belongs to Sperlonga.