It is true that the prosperity of Amalfi did not disappear immediately after the inroad of the Pisans, for Boccaccio, writing in the fourteenth century, still speaks of the ancient territory of the destroyed Republic as “a rocky ridge beside a smiling sea, which its inhabitants call the Costa d’Amalfi; full of little cities, of gardens, of fountains, and of rich and enterprising merchants.” It was in fact reserved for relentless Nature herself to complete the work of destruction that Norman armies and Pisan fleets had more than half accomplished. We have already spoken of the terrible land-slips to which this beautiful shore is eminently subject, even at the present day, as the mass of wreckage outside the old Capuchin convent only too clearly testifies. In the year 1343, during the progress of a storm of exceptional fury, of which the poet Petrarch has left us a vivid account in one of his letters, the greater part of the devoted city was swept away by a tidal wave. The whole line of quays stretching from the headland by the Cappuccini to the point of Atrani on the east, together with churches, palaces, and warehouses, was now swallowed up by the surging waters and engulfed for ever in the depths of the sea; and thus the very element that had brought wealth, power, and prosperity to Amalfi in the past now proved the direct cause of her final calamity. With this fearful cataclysm of Nature following upon the heels of its political extinction, we can hardly wonder at the rapid decline of this “Athens of the Middle Ages,” whose population has now sunk to about one seventh part of the 50,000 citizens it once boasted in the far distant days of her maritime supremacy.