Nea's Alley

Nea's Alley Review

While roaming the back streets, look for Nea's Alley. Nineteenth-century Irish poet Thomas Moore, who lived in St. George's during his tenure as registrar of the admiralty court, waxed poetic about both this "lime-covered alley" and a lovely woman he first encountered here: his boss's teenaged bride, Nea Tucker. Though arguably the most amorous, Moore wasn't the only writer to be inspired by Bermuda. Mark Twain wrote about it in The Innocents Abroad, and his exclamation "you go to heaven if you want to; I'd druther stay in Bermuda" remains something of a motto in these parts. Two 20th-century playwrights, Eugene O'Neill and Noel Coward, also wintered—and worked—on the island. More recently, Bermuda resident Peter Benchley took the idea for his novel The Deep from the ships lost offshore.