The Lower Terrace

Ravello is a thousand feet above the sea and the hotel garden went down it in stages.

There was a top lawn with umbrella pines on it, and then a stone staircase — wide, shallow, worn in the middle the way steps go when they are four hundred years old — and at the bottom of the staircase a landing, about the size of a room, with a low balustrade and nothing beyond it at all.