City By The Bay St. Lo Drive

It is hard to picture East Baltimore as rural, Italian-like countryside, but you can get a sense of the rolling hills and long-gone trees from Clifton Mansion, the former summer home of Johns Hopkins. Built atop 266 acres, its panoramic views of the Inner Harbor, downtown, and TV Hill make the busy thoroughfares of Harford and Belair roads below disappear. The undulating natural topography—buried beneath dense, century-old row-house-laden streets—suddenly becomes visible.

“It is one of the highest peaks in the city,” says John Ciekot, special projects director for the Clifton Mansion rehabilitation project, as he leads a mini-tour of the home, which includes an ongoing restoration of an 1851 Bay of Naples mural. “Horses and carriages would’ve rolled up the toll roads here to the private entrance.”

Hopkins acquired the property, originally owned by Captain Henry Thompson, in 1841, several years after the War of 1812 horse artillery and militia commander passed away. Baltimore’s most famous benefactor soon transformed the Captain’s stately Georgian mansion into an Italianate villa, complete with a new porte cochère (a covered entrance large enough for carriages to discharge their passengers) and an 80foot tower. The entrance hall features richly stained arch window frames, a marble floor, ornate hand-painted walls and ceilings, a black walnut staircase—and the centerpiece, a mural of Naples, its great bay, the nearby countryside, and Mount Vesuvius.

The painting was discovered in 1993 when Civic Works, the nonprofit job training and community-service organization, began leasing the long-neglected property.

‘The mural was painted over probably a dozen times,” says Ciekot (pictured above with Thomas Moore of Thomas Moore Studios, which is overseeing the artistic renovations.) “Whatever bureaucratic beige, yellow, brown, or green was in that year.”

Gillian Quinn, who is leading the restoration of the mural, says period artists often painted the scene after a Vesuvius eruption, which made the bay sky glow.