Among the many charms of Capri must be counted the number and interest of its Roman remains. The whole island is in fact a vast Roman wreck. Hill-side and valley are filled with a mass of _débris_ that brings home to one in a way which no detailed description can do the scale of the buildings with which it was crowded. At either landing-place huge substructures stretch away beneath the waves, the relics of moles, of arsenals, and of docks; a network of roads may still be traced which linked together the ruins of Imperial villas; every garden is watered from Roman cisterns; dig where he will, the excavator is rewarded by the discovery of vases, of urns, of fragments of sculpture, of mosaic pavements, of precious marbles. Every peasant has a handful of Roman coins to part with for a few soldi. The churches of the island and the royal palaces of the mainland are full of costly columns which have been removed from the ruins of Capri; and the Museum of Naples is largely indebted for its treasures of statuary to the researches made here at the close of the last century. The main archæological interest of the island however lies not in fragments or "finds" such as these but in the huge masses of ruin which lie scattered so thickly over it. The Pharos which guided the Alexandrian corn-ships to Puteoli stands shattered on one of its headlands. The waves dash idly against an enormous fragment of the sea-baths of Tiberius. His palace-citadel still looks from the summit of a mighty cliff across the Straits of Sorrento. The Stairs of Anacapri, which in the absence of any other date to which it is possible to assign them, we are forced to refer to the same period of construction, hewn as they were to the height of a thousand feet in the solid rock, vied in boldness with almost any achievement of Roman engineering. The smallness of the space--for the lower part of the island within which these relics are crowded is little more than a mile and a half either way--adds to the sense of wonder which the size and number of these creations excite. All that remains too, it must be remembered, is the work of but a few years. There is no ground for believing that anything of importance was added after the death of Tiberius or begun before the old age of Augustus.