Letters from Italy/Chapter 17

Adriatic, Tyrrhenian, African, Ionian, Ligurian; blue, green, steely, pearly, golden, and black; dead, slumbering, booming, and foaming; so that you may not forget a single one of these changeable aspects. Do not speak, do not attempt to speak, of the play of the waves; you have squealed a little on the shore at Rimini, since you grumbled terribly like nothing on earth when wave after wave rolled at your feet and wrapped them in its iridescent foam, then there was slime and mud, and you collected mussels and thought of everything present and past. And Sorrento water, bluer than all other water in the world, and the sea at Salerno, which pierced your eyes with its merciless gleam like a flaming and gigantic sword, the water at Genoa which smells like tubs, at Ostia, streaked white, and the rainbow sea down at Girgenti, and indeed the most holy Galateino sea, for there you saw something wonderful only it was too far off; the Straits of Messina, all strewn with little lights on both shores, and the sea at Arenella, where there are golden rocks and black cows entering the water, and below Taormina, where the shore makes such a wonderful arabesque that you ​must gaze upon it for a whole hour and then not grasp it, and places which you have no power to name and where there is a medley of dreadful blue, burning heat, heartrending roar of donkeys, ripening oranges, and the rapid gliding of lizards in one almost indefinable sensation, seasoned with the odour of refuse and mint. But that is not all: there are sooty fishermen, who wade up to the waist in water dragging nets; others who tighten the sails of black boats and carry out baskets of fish, and others whom you see cutting the horizon with a bright scythe of sail, with whom you would like to be; besides harbours, from the large ones where they hammer as in a factory, the fishing harbours where putrid water washes the ribbed keels of sailing vessels, as at the charming and evil-smelling Cala of Palermo, down to the smallest, those little bays between crags, where rocks a single skiff until you are sick of it. And beyond all this count the fish in markets, little fish gleaming with rainbow colours, silvery sardines, weighty fish, regular marine bulls cut in quarters at Palermo, hideous polypi, greasy, slimy things which they eat at Naples, black eels, fish white as ladies’ arms, golden, blue and red, and awfully pretty marine vermin which stupefied you in the Naples aquarium; saffron-coloured anemones, veiled dancers, impalpable rainbow-tinted inflated cucumbers, Crookes tubes woven out of fog, through which pulsates a rainbow current, sea ​roses like I know not what, hermit crabs, those most brutal ruffians, sea tongues describing such beautiful curves, monsters and flowers, a creation—so you have everything that can be imagined in life.

But the most beautiful and wonderful of all is water, which flows in after you.