In Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1797), shortly after having escaped from her imprisonment in the monastery of San Stephano, the heroine, Ellena di Rosalba, accompanied by the hero, Vivaldi, and his garrulous servant, Paulo, travels toward Naples through the pastoral mountain scenery near Celano. In this scene between two imprisonments (the hero will shortly be confined in the prisons of the Inquisition in Rome), Ellena and Vivaldi, two characters whose aesthetic sense is a function of their genteel social status, admire the ruins of an ancient castle and the sublime and beautiful landscape. But their aesthetic sense is also determined differentially by gender. Vivaldi is typically more sensitive to the sublime, noting how the mountains appear “threatening, and horrid,” “barren and rocky,” “mighty” and dark. Ellena observes how the beautiful - that which is sweet, soft, elegant, under cultivation, and under human control - contrasts with “the awful grandeur” of the mountains (I 58). The third observer, Paulo, apparently as a natural consequence of his low birth, sees nothing in these scenes to arouse aesthetic appreciation, admiring in the prospect only the things that remind him of his native city of Naples.