Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - XXXI. The Regatta
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most beautiful place he had ever seen, and he
had seen much. He knew little of the long
history of the island but was as eager as a
schoolboy to know more.
I was just then exploring the Blue Grotto.
Twice Mastro Nicola had dragged me half
unconscious out of the famous subterranean
passage leading, according to tradition, through
the bowels of the earth up to the Tiberian villa
six hundred feet overhead on the plain of
Damecuta, maybe a corruption of Domus Augusta.
I spent whole days in the Grotto and Lord
Dufferin often used to come in his little dinghy
to pay me a visit while I was at work. After a
delicious swim in the blue waters we used to sit
for hours outside the mysterious tunnel, talking
about Tiberius and the Capri orgies. I told the
ambassador that like all the rest of Suetonius’
filthy gossip it was nonsense about the
subterranean passage through which Tiberius was
supposed to have come down to the Grotto to
play about with his boys and girls before
strangling them. The tunnel was not made by the
hand of man but by the slow infiltration of
seawater through the rock. I had crawled in it for
over eighty yards and convinced myself at the
peril of my life that it led nowhere. That the
Grotto was known to the Romans was proved
by the numerous traces of Roman masonry.
The island having sunk about sixteen feet since
then, the grotto was in those days entered through
the huge submerged vault visible through the
clear water. The small aperture through which
he had entered in his dinghy was originally a
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