TRAMPING IN ITALY
There was next morning nothing to recall the dismal weather of the day
before except the deep mud of the highway and my garments, still
dripping wet when I drew them on. The vine-covered hillsides and rolling
plains below, the lizards basking on every rock and ledge, peasant women
plodding barefooted along the route gave to the land an aspect far
different from that of the valley of the Rhône. It was hard to realize
that the open fields and chilling night winds of Switzerland were not
hundreds of miles away, but just behind the flanking range.
The French and German that had so long served me must now give place to
my none too fluent Italian. In the grey old town of Domo d’Ossola I
halted at a booth to buy a box of matches.
“Avete allumette?” I demanded of the brown-visaged matron in charge.
I have always had an unconquerable feeling that the French “allumette”
ought really to be an Italian word; but my attempt to introduce it into
that language failed dismally.
“Cose sono allumette?” croaked the daughter of Italy, with such
overdrawn sarcasm that it was all too evident that she understood the
term, but did not propose to admit any knowledge of the despised
_francese_ tongue.
“Fiammiferi, voglio dire,” I replied, recalling the correct word.
“Ah! Ecco!” cried the matron, handing me a box with her blandest smile.
I quickly discovered, too, that the language of the Divine Comedy was
not the one in which to make known my simple wants. But being more
familiar with the phraseology of the famous Florentine than with the
speech of the masses, I found myself, in those first days in the
peninsula, prone to converse in poetics despite a very prosaic
temperament. As when, in the outskirts of Domo d’Ossola, I turned to a
chestnut vendor at a fork in the road, and pointing up one of the
branches, demanded:
“Ah!—er—Perme si va nella città dol—Confound it, no, I mean is this the
road to Varese?”
To which the native, to whose lips was mounting a “non capisc’” at sound
of the Dantesque phrase, answered in a twinkling:
“Di s’guro, s’gnor’, semp’ dritt!”
Across northern Italy, almost in a straight line, are scattered several
famous cities, all invaded by the broad highway that leads from the
Simplon to Venice. Most beautiful among them is Pallanza, a village
paradise on the shore of Lago Maggiore, in the lakeside groves of which
I should have tarried longer but for the recollection of how wide the
world is to the impecunious wayfarer. I fished out, therefore, from the
bin of a second-hand book dealer a ragged Baedeker in French, and, thus
armed with a more trustworthy source of information than dull-eyed
peasants, boarded the steamer that connected the broken ends of the
highway. During the short journey a band of English tourists sauntered
about on the deck above me, and my native tongue, unheard since Paris
and not to be heard again until—well, until long after, sounded almost
foreign to my ears.
Beyond Varese next morning, within sight of five snow-capped peaks of
the range I had crossed three days before, I espied from afar the white
sun-shields of two officers, armed with muskets, and marching westward.
Anticipating a quizzing, I turned aside from the sun-scorched route and
awaited their coming in a shaded spot. Strange to say, in this land
burdened with a tax on salt and an unholy visitation of soldiers and
priests, vagrants enjoy far more liberty than in France. Thus far the
indifference of the gendarmerie had been so marked that I had come to
feel neglected. Yet tramps abounded. This very freedom makes Italy a
favorite land among the _Handwerksgesellen_ of Switzerland, Germany, and
Austria, many of whom I had already met, marching southward full of
Wanderlust, or crawling homeward with bitter stories of the miseries of
the peninsula.
The _carabinieri_, spick and span of uniform, their swords rattling
egotistically on the roadway, drew near, and, stepping into the shade,
opened a conversation that needs no translation.
“Di dove siete?”
“Di America, dei Stati Uniti.”
“Di America! Ma! E dove andate?”
“A Venezia.”
“Ma! Come! A piedi?”
“Di siguro. Come volete che fare?”
“Ma! Perche andare a Venezia?”
“Sono marinaio.”
“Ah! Marinaio! Bene!” and without even calling for my papers they
strutted on along the highway.
A wonderful word is this Italian “ma.” Let not the uninitiated suppose
that the term designates a maternal ancestor. But—and that is its real
meaning—it is a useful vocable and like all useful things is greatly
overworked. If an Italian of the masses wishes to express disgust,
surprise, resignation, depression of spirits, or any one of a score of
other impressions, he has merely to say “ma” with the corresponding
accentuation and timbre and his hearers know his opinion exactly. It
takes the place of our “All right!” “Hurry up!” “Quit it!” “Let ’er go!”
“The devil he did!” “Rot!” “Dew tell!” “Cuss the luck!” “Nuff said!”
“D—n it!” and there its meanings by no means cease.
Poverty stalks abroad in Italy. Even in this richer northern section it
required no telescope to make out its gaunt and furrowed features.
Ragged children quarrelled for the possession of an apple-core thrown by
the wayside; the rolling fields were alive with barefooted women toiling
like demon-driven serfs. A sparrow could not have found sustenance
behind the gleaners. In wayside orchards men armed with grain-sacks
stripped even the trees of their leaves; for what purpose was not
evident, though the beds to which I was assigned in village inns
suggested a possible solution of the problem.
The peasant of these parts possesses three beasts of burden: a team of
gaunt white oxen—or cows—an undersized ass, and his wife. Of the three,
the last is most useful. The husbandman does not load his hay on wagons;
a few blades might fall by the wayside. He ties it carefully in small
bundles, piles them high above the baskets strapped on the backs of his
helpmeet, and drives her off to the village, often miles distant. They
are loads which the American workman would refuse to carry—so does the
Italian for that matter; but the highway is animate with what look, at a
distance, like wandering haystacks, from beneath which, on nearer
approach, peer women, or half-grown girls, whose drawn and haggard faces
might have served as models to those artists who have depicted on canvas
the beings of Dante’s hell.
A traveler, ignorant of Italian, wandering into Como at my heels on that
sweltering afternoon, would have been justified in supposing that the
advance agent of a circus had preceded him. Had he taken the trouble to
engage an interpreter, however, he would have learned that a more
serious catastrophe had befallen. The very night before a
longed-hoped-for heir to the throne of Vittore Emanuele had dropped into
his reserved seat on the neck of the Italian tax-payer. On the city
gate, on house-walls everywhere, on the very façade of the cathedral,
great, paste-sweating placards announced the casuality in flaunting
head-lines, and a greater aggregation of adjectives than would be
required in our own over-postered land to call public attention to the
merits of Chow Chow Chewing Gum, or the Yum Yum Burlesque Company. Worst
of all, the manifesto ended, not with expressions of condolence to the
proletariat, but with a command to swear at once loyalty and fealty to
“Il Principe di Piemonte.” Everywhere jostling groups were engrossed in
spelling out the proclamation; but it was quite possible to pass through
the streets of Como without being trampled under foot by its citizens in
their mad rush to carry out the royal order.
Nightfall found me in quest of a lodging in Pusiano, a lakeside village
midway between Como and Lecco. It was no easy task. The _alberghi_ of
Italy—but why generalize? They are all tarred with the same stick. The
proprietor, then, of the Pusiano hostelry, relying for his custom on
those who know every in and out of the town, had not gone to the expense
of erecting a sign. I found, after long and diligent search, the edifice
that included the public resort under its roof; but as the inn had no
door opening on the street, I was still faced with the problem of
finding the entrance. Of two dark passages and a darker stairway before
me, it was a question which was most suggestive of pitfalls set for
unwary travelers, and of dank, underground dungeons. I plunged into one
of the tunnels with my hands on the defensive; which was fortunate, for
I brought up against a stone wall. The second passage ended as abruptly.
I approached the stairway stealthily; stumbled up the stone steps, over
a stray cat and a tin pan, and into the common room of the Pusiano
inn—common because it served as kitchen, dining-room, parlor, and
office.
My wants made known, the proprietor half rose to his feet, sat down
again, and motioned me to a seat. I took a place opposite him on one of
the two benches inside the fire-place, partly because it had been
raining outside, but chiefly on account of an absence of chairs that
left me no choice in the matter. Shrouded in silence I filled my pipe.
The landlord handed me a glowing coal in his fingers and dropped back on
his bench without once subduing his stare. His wife wandered in and
placed several pots and kettles around the fire that toasted our heels.
Still not a word. I leaned back and, gazing upward, watched as much of
the smoke as could find no other vent pass up the chimney. Now and then
a drop of rain fell with a hiss on pan or kettle.
“Not nice weather,” grinned the landlord, and the ice thus broken, we
were soon engaged in animated conversation. Too animated in fact, for in
emphasizing some opinion mine host had the misfortune to kick over a
kettle of boiling macaroni and was banished from the chimney corner by a
raging spouse. Being less given to pedal gesticulation, I kept my place,
and strove to answer the questions which the exile fired at me across
the room.
By meal time several natives had dropped in, and our party at table grew
garrulous and in time so numerous that to serve us became a serious
problem to the hostess, who was neither lithe nor quick of movement. The
supper began with _una minestra_, a plate of soup containing some
species of macaroni and, as usual in these cheap alberghi, several
species of scrap-iron. Then a bit of meat was doled out, somewhat to my
surprise; for the price of this article is so high in Italy that a stew
of kidneys, liver, sheep’s head, or fat-covered entrails is often the
only offering. He who has the temerity and a heavy enough purse to order
a cutlet or a _bistecca_ in such an inn is looked upon with awe and envy
as long as he remains. I seldom had either.
Following the meat dish—it is never served with it—came a bowl of
vegetables, then a bit of fruit and a nibble of cheese for each of us.
Wine, of course, had been much in evidence; the Italian has no
conception of a meal without his national drink. The wayfarer may call
for nothing to eat but the three-cent minestra, and la signora serves it
as cheerily as a dinner at one lira; but let him refuse to order wine,
and her sympathy is forever forfeited. When drowsiness fell upon me the
hostess led the way to an airy, spacious room, its bed boasting a lace
canopy, and its coarse sheets remarkably white in view of the fact that
the Italian housewife does her work in the village brook, and never uses
hot water. Such labor is cheap in the peninsula and for all this luxury
I paid less than ten cents.
Early next day I pushed on toward Lecco. A light frost had fallen during
the night, and the peasants, alarmed at this first breath of winter, had
sent into the vineyards every man, woman, and child capable of labor.
The pickers worked feverishly. All day women plodded from the fields to
the roadside with great buckets of grapes to be dumped into hogsheads on
waiting ox-carts. Men, booted or shod with wooden clogs, jumped now and
then into the barrels and stamped the grapes down. Once full, the
receptacles were covered with strips of dirty canvas, the _contadino_
mounted his cart, turned his oxen into the highway, and fell promptly
asleep. Arrived at the village, he drew up before the chute of the
communal wine-press and shoveled his grapes into a slowly-revolving
hopper, from which, crushed to an oozy pulp, they were run into huge
vats and left to settle.
Halting for a morning lunch in the shadow of the statue of Manzoni, I
rounded that range of mountains, so strangely resembling a saw, which
shelters Lecco from the east wind, and continuing through the theater of
action of “I Promessi Sposi,” gained Bergamo by nightfall. Beyond that
city a level highway set an unchanging course across a vast,
grape-bearing plain, watered by a network of canals. The Alps retired
slowly to the northward until, at Brescia, only a phantom range wavered
in the haze of the distant horizon.
About the time of my arrival in Italy, a strike had been declared in
Milan. The Milanese motormen had refused to groom their horses or
something of the sort. Once started, the movement was rapidly growing
general and widespread. The newspapers bubbled over with it, the air
about me was surcharged with raging arraignments of capitalistic
iniquities. Strikes and lock-outs, however, were no affairs to trouble
the peace of a foot-traveler. When trains ceased to run, I marched
serenely on through clamoring groups of stranded voyagers; when the
barbers closed their shops, I decided to raise a beard. The butchers
joined the movement and I smiled with the indifference of one who had
subsisted for weeks chiefly on bread.
The bakers of northern Italy concoct this important comestible in loaves
of about the size and durability of baseballs. Serving in that capacity
there is good reason to believe that one of them would remain unscathed
at the end of a league game, though the score-book recorded many a
three-bagger and home-run. Still, hard loaves soaked in wine, or crushed
between two wayside rocks were edible, in a way; and, as long as they
were plentiful, I could not suffer for lack of food.
A few miles beyond Brescia, however, the strike became a matter of
personal importance. At each of the bakeries of a grumbling village I
was turned away with the cry of:—
“Pane non ch’è! The strike! The bakers have joined the strike and no
more bread is made!”
To satisfy that day’s appetite I was reduced to “paste,” a mushy mess of
macaroni; and at a Verona inn I was robbed of half my sleep by the
discussion of this new phase of the situation, that roared in the
kitchen until long after midnight.
I was returning across the piazza next morning, from an early view of
the picturesque bridges and the ancient Colosseum of Verona, when I fell
upon a howling mob at the gateway of the city hall. Joining the throng,
I soon gained an inner courtyard, to find what seemed to be half the
population of Verona quarreling, pushing, and scratching in a struggle
to reach the gate of a large wicket that shut off one end of the square.
Behind it, just visible above the intervening sea of heads, appeared the
top of some massive instrument, and the caps of a squad of policemen. I
inquired of an excited neighbor the cause of the squabble. He glowered
at me and howled something in reply, the only intelligible word of which
was “pane” (bread). I turned to a man behind me. He took advantage of my
movement to shove me aside and crowd into my place, at the same time
vociferating “pane!” I tried to oust the usurper. He jabbed me twice in
the ribs with his elbows, and again roared “pane.” In fact, everywhere
above the howl and blare of the multitude, one word rang out clear and
sharp—“pane! pane! pane!” Sad experiences of the day before, and the
anticipation of the long miles of highway before me, had aroused my
interest in that commodity. I dived into the human whirlpool and set out
to battle my way towards the vortex.
With all its noise and bluster, an Italian crowd does not know the
rudiments of football. Even the wretch who had dispossessed me of my
first vantage-ground was far behind when I reached the front rank and
paused to survey the scene of conflict. Inside the wicket a dozen
perspiring policemen were guarding several huge baskets of that baseball
bread already mentioned. Beyond them stood the instrument that had
attracted my attention—a pair of wooden scales that looked fully capable
of giving the avoirdupois of an ox. Still further on, an officer, whose
expression suggested that he was recording nominations of candidates to
fill the King’s seat, presided over a ponderous book, a pen the size of
a stiletto behind each ear, and one resembling a young bayonet in his
hand.
One by one the citizens of Verona shot through a small gate into the
enclosure from the surging multitude outside as from a catapult; to be
brought up with a round turn by the shouted question, “Pound or two
pounds?” Once weighed out, the desired number of loaves traveled rapidly
from hand to hand on one side of the official line; while the applicant,
struggling to keep pace with them on the other, paused before the
registering clerk to answer several pertinent personal questions,
corralled his purchase at the table of the receiving teller, and made
his escape as best he could.
Almost before I had time to study the workings of this system, the press
of humanity behind sent me spinning through the gate. “Two pounds!” I
shouted, as I swept by the scales en route for the book. Just in front
of me a gaunt creature paused and gave his residence as Florence. “No
bread for you!” roared every officer within hearing; policemen,
sergeants, and clerks, in a rousing chorus, “Only bread for Veronese!
Get out of here!” and, impelled by two official boots, the stranger
stood not on the order of his going.
That Florentine was a god-send to me. In my innocence I had already
opened my mouth to shout “Americano” to his Self-Complacency behind the
volume, and, had that fateful word escaped me, I should have gone
“paneless” through the long hours of a long day.
“Residenza?” shouted the registrar, as I entered his field of vision.
“Verona, signore.”
“Professione?”
“Calzolaio, signore.”
“Street and number.”
I remembered the name of one street and tacked on a number haphazard.
“Bene! Va!” An official hand pushed me unceremoniously towards the
teller. I dropped ten soldi, gathered up my bread, and departed by the
further wicket-gate down a flagstone alley.
Let him who has not tried it take my word that to carry two pounds of
edible baseballs in his arms is no simple task. A loaf rolled in the
gutter before I had advanced a dozen paces. The others squirmed
waywardly in my grasp. With both hands amply occupied, I was reduced to
the indignity of squatting on the pavement to fill my pockets, and even
then a witless observer would have taken me for an itinerant juggler.
Never since leaving Detroit had I posed as a philanthropist, but the
burden of bread called for drastic measures; I must either be charitable
or wasteful.
He who longs to give alms in Italy has not far to look for a recipient
of his benefaction. I glanced down the passageway, and my eyes fell on a
beggar of forlornly mournful aspect crouched in a gloomy doorway. With a
benignant smile I bestowed upon him enough of my load with which to play
the American national game among his confrères until the season closed.
The outcast wore a sign marked, “Deaf and dumb.” Either he had picked up
the wrong placard in sallying forth, or had been startled out of his
rôle by the munificence of the gift. For as long as a screeching voice
could reach me I was deluged with more blessings, to be delivered by the
Virgin Mary; Her Son; every pope, past, present, or to come; or any
saint, dead, living, or unborn, who had a few stray ones about him; than
I could possibly have found use for.
I plodded on towards Vincenza. All that day the hard-earned loaves,
which I dissolved in a glass of wine at village inns, aroused the envy
of pessimistic groups gathered to curse the strike in general and that
of the bakers in particular.
When morning broke again I summoned courage to test the third-class
accommodations of Italy, and took train from Vincenza to Padua. At
least, the ticket I purchased bore those two names, though the company
hardly lived up to the printed contract thereon. We started from
somewhere off in the woods to the west of Vincenza and, at the end of
several hours of jolting and bumping, not excused, certainly, by the
speed of the train, were set down in the center of a wheat field, which
the guards informed us, in blatant voices, was Padua. I had a faint
recollection of having heard somewhere that Padua boasted buildings and
streets, like other cities. It was possible, of course, that the source
of my information had been untrustworthy; I am nothing if not gullible.
But fixed impressions are not easily effaced, and I wandered out through
the sequestered station to whisper my absurd delusion to the first
passerby.
“Padova!” he snorted, “Ma! Di siguro! Certainly this is Padua! Follow
this road for a kilometer. Just before you come in sight of a
whitewashed pig-sty turn to the left, walk sempre dritt’, and the city
cannot escape you.”
I set out with the inner sense of having been “done” by the railway
company, but the good man’s directions proved accurate and brought me in
due time to the city gate.
The Italian stammers two excuses for this enchanting custom of banishing
his stations to the surrounding meadows. If the city admitted railways
within her walls—and every town larger than a community of goat-herds
_is_ walled—how could the officials of the octroi collect the duty on a
cabbage hidden in the fireman’s tool-box? Or in case of foreign
invasion! A regiment of Austrians ensconced under the benches of the
third-class coach might, if they survived the journey, butcher the
entire population before their presence was suspected. Besides, who
could live in peace and contentment knowing that the sacred intermural
precincts might at any moment be deluged with a train-load of cackling,
beBaedekered tour—But no, now I think of it, my informant offered only
_two_ apologies.
Those who are victims of insomnia should journey to Padua. There may be
in the length and breadth of Europe another community as conducive to
sleep, but it has thus far escaped discovery. The sun is undoubtedly hot
in Italy during the summer months. There runs a proverb in the peninsula
to the effect that only fools and the English—which of course, includes
Americans—venture forth near noonday without at least the protection of
a parasol. But having suffered no evil effects during weeks of tramping
in the country with only a cap on my head, I, for one, should hesitate
to charge entirely to climatic conditions the torpor of the Padovans.
At any rate the city was lost in slumber. The few horses dragged their
vehicles at a snail’s pace; the drivers nodded on their seats; those few
shopkeepers who had not put up their shutters and retired to the bosom
of their families could with difficulty be aroused from their siestas to
minister to the wants of yawning customers. The very dogs slept in the
gutters or under the chairs of their torpescent masters, and, to judge
from many a building that was crumbling away and falling asleep like the
inhabitants, this Morpheusatic tendency was no temporary characteristic.
However, the general somnolence permitted me to view in peace the
statues and architecture for which the drowsy city is justly renowned,
and leaving it to slumber on, I set off at noonday on the last stage of
my journey across northern Italy. The phantom range of the Alps had
disappeared. Away to the eastward stretched a land as flat and unbroken
as the sea which, tossing its drifting sands on a lee shore through the
ages, has drawn this coast further and further towards the rising sun.
Walking had been easier on the long mountain ascents behind, for a
powerful wind from off the Adriatic pressed me back like an unseen hand
at my breast. Certain as I had been of reaching Fusiano on the coast
before the day was done, twilight found me still plodding on across a
barren lowland. With the first twinkling star a faint glow appeared to
the left and afar off, giving center to the surrounding darkness.
Steadily it grew until it illuminated a distant corner of the firmament,
while the wind howled with ever-increasing force across the unpeopled
waste.
Night had long since settled down when the lapping of waves announced
that I had overtaken the retreating coast-line. A few ramshackle hovels
rose up out of the darkness, but still far out over the sea hovered the
glow in the sky—no distant conflagration, as I had supposed, but the
reflected lights of Venice. Long cherished visions of a cheering meal
and a soft couch, before my entrance into the city of the sea, vanished;
for there was no inn among the hovels of Fusiano. I took shelter in a
shanty down on the beach and awaited patiently the ten-o’clock boat.
By the appointed hour there had gathered enough of a swarthy crowd to
fill the tiny steamer that made fast with great difficulty to the crazy
wharf. On the open sea the wind was riotous, and our passage took on the
aspect of a transatlantic trip in miniature. Now and then a wave spat in
the faces of the passengers huddled aft. A ship’s officer jammed his way
among us to collect the six-cent tickets. Behind him the officials of
the Venice octroi were busily engaged in levying dues on produce from
the country. Two poor devils, gaunt as death’s heads, crouched in the
waist, guarding between them a bundle of vegetables that could be bought
a few centesimi cheaper on the mainland than in the city. The stuff
could not have satisfied the normal appetite of one man; yet in spite of
their pleadings, the pair were compelled to drop their share of soldi
into the official bag.
By and by the toss of the steamer abated somewhat. I pushed to the rail
to peer out into the night. Off the port bow appeared a stretch of
smooth water in which were reflected the myriad lights of smaller craft
and the illuminated windows of a block of houses rising sheer out of the
sea. We swung to port. A gondola, weirdly lighted up by torches on bow
and poop, glided across our bow. The houses born of the sea took on
individuality, a wide canal opened on our left and curved away between
other buildings, the splendor of their façades faintly suggested in the
light of mooring-post lamp and lantern. It was the Grand Canal. The
steamer nosed its way through a fleet of empty gondolas, tied up at a
landing stage before a marble column bearing the lion of St. Mark, and
the passengers hurried away across the cathedral square to be swallowed
up in the night.
In a city of streets and avenues there are certain signs which point the
way to the ragged section, but among the winding waterways and arcade
bridges of this strange metropolis such indications were lacking. A full
two hours I tramped at utter random, on the blisters of the highway from
Padua, only to turn up at last in an albergo within a stone’s throw of
my landing-place and the Palace of the Doges.
The squares and alleys of Venice are strewn with human wreckage. In the
rest of Italy the most penurious wretch may move from place to place in
an attempt to ameliorate his condition; but on this marshy island the
man unable to scrape together a few soldi for boat or car fare is a
prisoner. The captives are little accustomed to sleep within doors.
Lodging, obviously, must be high in a city where space is absolutely
limited; but there are “joints” where food sells more cheaply than
anywhere else on the continent.
On the evening following my arrival, I came upon one of these
establishments which rubbed shoulders with the cathedral of St. Mark.
Appetite alone certainly could not have enticed me inside, but eager to
scrape acquaintance with the submerged tenth—the fraction seems small—of
Venice, I crowded my way into the kennel. A lean and hungry multitude
surged about the counter. At one end of it was piled a stack of plates;
near them stood a box which, to all appearances, had long done service
as a coal scuttle, filled to overflowing with twisted and rust-eaten
forks and spoons. The room was foggy with the steam that rose from a
score of giant kettles containing as many species of stew, soup, and
vegetable ragoût.
Each client, conducting himself as if he had been fasting for a week
past, snatched a plate from the stack; thrust a paw into the box for a
weapon of attack, and dropping a few coppers of most unsanitary aspect
into the dish, shoved it with a savage bellow at that one of the kettles
the contents of which had taken his fancy. A fogbound server scraped the
soldi into the till, poured a ladleful of steaming slop into the
outstretched trencher, and the customer fought his way into a dingy
back-room.
[Illustration: A Venetian pauper on the Rialto bridge]
[Illustration: My gondolier on the Grand Canal]
Amid the uproar I had no time to inquire prices. I proffered six cents
to a wrinkled hag presiding over a caldron of what purported to be a
tripe and liver ragoût. She cried out in amazement, handed back four
cents, and filled my plate to the rim. I reached the back-room with half
the mess—the rest being scooped up in the coat sleeves of the famished
throng—and took my place at an already crowded table. Neither bread nor
wine was to be had in the house. On a board propped up across a corner
of the room were several cylinders of corn mush, three feet in diameter
and half as thick. A hairless creature, stripped to the waist, cut off
slabs of the cake for those who would have something to take the place
of bread. The yellow dough sold at two cents a pound, yet each order was
carefully weighed, and purchaser and server watched the scales jealously
during the operation. As a substitute for wine there was a jar of water,
that abominable, germ-infested water of Venice, from which each drank in
turn.
Every type of wretch which the city shelters was represented in the
emaciated gathering. Rag-pickers snarled at cathedral beggars. Street
urchins jostled bearded bootblacks. Female outcasts rubbed elbows with
those gruesome beings who pick up a few cents a day at the landing
stages. My boisterous appetite dwindled away at sight of the messes
around me and in the exploration of the mysteries of my own portion. All
at once there burst upon me the recollection that I had seen neither a
dog nor a cat during all that day in Venice, and I turned and fought my
way to the door. Behind me rose a quarrel over my unfinished portion.
Outside, on the square beside the fallen campanile, kind-hearted
tourists were feeding wholesome grain to a flock of pigeons, above which
magnificent statues looked down upon a crowd of homeless waifs huddled
under the portico of the Palace of the Doges.
I turned down to the landing stage one morning resolved on the
extravagance of a gondola excursion. The water cabmen of Venice are not
wont to solicit men in corduroys and flannel shirt. A score of them,
just recovering from a stampede on a tow-head in regulation tourist
garb, greeted my arrival with the fishy eye of indifference. When I
boldly announced my plan, they crowded around me to laugh in derision at
the laborer seeking to play the lord. For some time they refused to take
my words seriously, and even then the first skeptic to be convinced
insisted on proof of my financial solvency before he proffered his
services.
Along the Grand Canal passing gondoliers, without passengers to keep
them decorous, flung cutting jests at my propeller.
“Eh! Amico! What’s that you’ve got?”
“Ch’è un rico, colui quà, eh?”
“Sangue della Vergine, caro mio, dove hai accozzato quello?”
But once assured of his fare, the fellow lost his smirk and became all
servility, pointing out the objects of interest with a mien of owl-like
solemnity, and rebuking his fellow-craftsmen with an admonishing shake
of the head.
Fear drove me forth from Venice before I had rested the miles from Paris
out of my legs—fear that in a few days more the mosquitoes would finish
their nefarious work and devour me quite. On the Sunday evening
following the opening of the carnival, I fought my confetti-strewn way
to the station and “booked” for Bologna. I had not yet, however, learned
all the secrets of Italian railway travel. The official who snatched my
ticket at the exit to the platform and the midnight express handed it
back and pushed me away with a withering glare:
“No third-class on this train,” he growled, “wait for the slow train at
five in the morning.”
How any particular one of the trains of Italy could be discriminated
against by being called slow was hard to comprehend. Perhaps I
misunderstood the gateman. He may have said “the more slower train.” At
any rate, I was left to stretch out on a truck and await the laggard
dawn.
Under a declining sun our funereal caravan crawled into Bologna, and I
struck out along the ancient highway to Florence. Between the two cities
stretches an almost unbroken series of mountain ranges, a
poverty-stricken territory given over to grazing and wine-production,
and little known to tourists, for the railway sweeps in a great
half-circle around the northern end of the barrier. A few miles from the
university town the highway began a winding ascent in Simplon-like
solitude, save where a vineyard clung to a wrinkled hillside. At such
spots tall, cone-shaped buckets of some two bushels’ capacity stood at
the roadside, some filled with grapes, others with the floating pulp
left by the crushers.
What species of crusher was used I did not learn until nearly nightfall.
Then, suddenly rounding a jutting boulder, I stepped into a group of
four women, their skirts tied tightly around their loins, slowly
treading up and down in as many buckets of grapes. One of them, a young
woman by no means unattractive, sprang out of the bucket with a startled
gasp, let fall her skirts over legs purple with grape-juice far above
the knees, and fled to the vineyard. Her companions, too young or too
old to find immodesty in the situation, gazed in astonishment at the
fleeing girl and continued to stamp slowly up and down.
Darkness overtook me in the solitude of an upper range, far from either
hut or hamlet. A half hour later, a mountain storm burst upon me.
An interminable period I had plunged on when my eyes were gradually
drawn to a faint light flickering through the downpour. I splashed
forward and banged on a door beside an illuminated window. The portal
was quickly opened from within, and I fell into a tiny wine-shop
occupied by three tipplers. They stared stupidly for some time, while
the water ran away from me in rivulets along the floor. Then the
landlord remarked with a silly grin:—
“Lei è tutto bagnato?” (You are all wet.)
“Likewise hungry,” I answered. “What’s to eat?”
“Da mangiare! Ma! Not a thing in the house.”
“The nearest inn?”
“Six miles on.”
“Suppose I must go to bed supperless, then,” I sighed, drawing my
water-soaked bundle from beneath my coat.
“Bed!” cried the landlord, “you cannot sleep here. I keep no lodging
house.”
“What!” I protested, “do you think I am going on in this deluge?”
“I keep no lodging house,” repeated the host, doggedly.
I sat down on a bench, convinced that no three Italians should evict me
without a struggle. One by one they came forward to try the efficacy of
wheedling, growling, and loud-voiced bluster. I clung stolidly to my
place. The landlord was on the verge of tears when one of the countrymen
drew me to the window and offered me lodging in his barn across the way.
I made out through the storm the dim outline of a building, and catching
up my bundle, dashed with the native across the road and into a stone
building, with no other floor, as I could feel under my feet, than
Mother Earth. An American cow would balk at the door of the house of a
mountain peasant of Italy; she would have fled bellowing at a glimpse of
the interior of the barn that loomed up as my host lighted a lantern,
and pointed out to me a heap of corn-husks in a corner behind the oxen
and asses. Fearful of losing a moment with his cronies over the wine, he
gave the lantern a shake that extinguished it and, leaving me in utter
darkness, hurried away.
I groped my way towards the heap, narrowly escaped knocking down the
last ass in the row, and was about to throw myself down on the husks
when a man’s voice at my very feet shouted a word that I did not catch.
Being in Italy I answered in Italian:
“Che avete? Voglio dormire qui.”
“Ach!” groaned the voice. “Nur ein verdammter Italiener!”
“Here friend!” I protested, in German, prodding the prostrate form with
a foot, “who are you calling verdammter?”
Before the last word had passed my lips the man in the husks sprang to
his feet with a wild shout.
“Lieber Gott!” he shrieked, clutching at my coat and dancing around me.
“Lieber Gott! Du verstehst Deutsch! You are no cursed Italian! Gott sei
dank! In three weeks I have heard no German.”
Even the asses were protesting before he ceased his shouting and settled
down to tell his troubles. He was but another of those familiar figures,
a German on his Wanderjahr, who, straying far south in the peninsula,
and losing his last copper, was struggling northward again as rapidly as
strength gained by a crust of bread or a few wayside berries each day
permitted. One needed only to touch him to know that he was thin as a
side-show skeleton. I offered him the half of a cheese I carried in a
pocket, and he snatched it with the ravenous cry of a wolf and devoured
it as we burrowed deep into the husks.
All night long the water dripped from my elbows and oozed out of my
shoes, and a bitter mountain wind swept through the unmortared building.
Morning came after little sleep, and I rose with joints so stiff that a
half hour of kneading barely put them in working order. Outside a cold
drizzle was falling, but the peasant grew surly, and, bidding farewell
to my companion of the night, I set out along the mountain highway.
Two hours beyond the barn I came upon a miserable hamlet, paused at an
even more miserable inn for a bowl of greasy water, alias soup, in which
had been drowned a lump of black bread, and plodded on in the drizzle. A
night and day of corn-husks had given me a rococo appearance that I only
half suspected before my arrival at a mountain village late in the
afternoon. It was a typical Apennine town; surrounded on all sides by
splendid scenery, but itself a crowded collection of hovels where steep,
narrow streets reeked with all the refuse of a common habitation of man
and beast. The chief enigma of Italy is to know why ostensibly sane
humans choose to house themselves in an agglomeration of stys, as near
each other as they can be stacked, the outside huts jostling and
crowding their neighbors, as if enviously waiting to catch them off
their guard, that they may push nearer to the center of the unsavory
jumble; while round about them spread great valleys and hillsides
uninhabited.
[Illustration: Going for the water. A village north of Rome]
[Illustration: Italy is one of the most cruelly priest-ridden countries
on the globe]
Wallowing through the filth of such a hamlet, I came upon a tumble-down
hostelry of oppressive squalor. About the fire-place were huddled
several slatternly, downcast mortals. I paused in the doorway, wondering
to which to address myself. The rural innkeeper of Italy will never
speak to a new arrival until he has been accosted by the latter. I once
put the matter to the test by entering an inn at five in the afternoon
and taking a seat at one of the tables. Many a side glance was cast upon
me, many a low-toned discussion raged at the back of the room, but at
nine in the evening I was still waiting for the first greeting.
Here, then, I stood for several moments on the threshold. At length, a
misshapen female, unkempt and unsoaped to all appearances since infancy,
fumbled in her apron, rose, and stumped slowly towards me holding out—a
cent! I stepped back, and the charitable lady, misunderstanding my
gesture of protest, returned to her seat, snarling in a cracked falsetto
that beggars nowadays expected francs instead of soldi.
Disgusted at this invidious reception, I pigeon-holed my appetite and
marched on. But I seemed permanently to have taken on the aspect of an
eleemosynary appeal. Two miles beyond the village I passed a ragged
road-repairer and a boy, breaking stone at the wayside. Hard by them was
a hedge, weighed down with blackberries, to which I hastened and fell to
picking my delayed dinner. The _cantoniere_ stared a moment,
open-mouthed; laid aside his sledge, and mumbled something to the boy.
The latter left his place, wandered down the road a short distance
beyond me and idled about as if awaiting someone. With a half-filled cap
I set off again. The boy edged nearer as I approached and, brushing
against me, thrust something under my arm and ran back to the
stone-pile. In my astonishment I dropped the gift on the highway. It was
a quarter-loaf of black bread left over from the ragged workman’s
dinner.
Late that night I reached a hamlet with a more energetic, if less
charitable innkeeper; and the next afternoon found me looking down upon
the vast Florentine valley, the winding Arno a bluish silver under the
declining sun. By evening I was housed in the city of Dante and Michael
Angelo.
During four days in Florence I played a sort of Jekyll and Hyde rôle,
living with the poorest self-supporting class, but spending hours each
day in cathedral and galleries. Paupers were everywhere in evidence,
fewer than in Venice, perhaps, for here they could escape. Lodgings all
but the utterly penniless could afford. I paid a half-franc daily for an
uncramped chamber within a hop, skip, and jump of the roasting-place of
Savonarola. But those ultracheap eating houses of the canal city were
lacking. Florentines on the ragged edge patronized instead a species of
traveling restaurant. As night fell, there appeared at various corners,
in the unwashed section of the city, men with push-carts laden with
boiled tripe. Around them gathered jostling throngs whose surging ceased
not for a moment until the last morsel had been sold. Each customer
seemed to possess but a single soldo, which he had carefully guarded
through the day in anticipation of the coming of the tripe-man. Never
did the huckster make a sale without a quarrel arising over the size of
the morsel; and never did the vendee retire until a second strip, about
the size of a match, had been added to the original portion to make up
what he claimed to be the just weight.
I spent an undue proportion of my fourth day in Florence viewing her
works of art; for Sunday is the poor man’s day in the museums and
galleries of Europe, there being no admission charged. When the throng
was driven forth from the Pitti palace in the late afternoon, I decided
not to return to my lodging and wandered off along the highway to Rome.
The mountain country continued, but the ranges were less lofty and more
thickly populated than to the north, and when night settled down, I was
within sight of a hilltop village.
It is doubtful if there is another nation on the globe whose people are
such general favorites as our own citizens. The American is a popular
fellow in almost every land, certainly not the least so in Italy.
Through all the peninsula there hovers about one, from that—to the
Italian—magic world of America, a glamor which is sure to arouse
interest to the highest pitch. More than that; there is, among the lower
classes, an attitude almost of deference towards the man in any way
connected with the El Dorado across the sea, as if every breast harbored
the vague hope that this favored of the gods might be moved to carry
home on his return a pocketful of his admirers.
Longing for America, however, does not imply any great amount of
knowledge thereof. In this northern section especially, where one rarely
meets a man whose remotest friend has emigrated, ignorance of the
western hemisphere is astonishing.
An average village crowd, showing some evidence of education, was
gathered in the hostelry of this first town beyond Florence. My arrival
at first aroused small interest in the groups before fire-place and
table. In ordering supper, however, I betrayed a foreign accent.
Immediately there passed between the cronies of the band sundry nods and
occult signs which they fondly believed were entirely incomprehensible
to a newcomer, but which, in reality, said as plainly as words:—
“Now where the deuce do you suppose he comes from?”
I volunteered no information. The cronies squirmed with curiosity.
Several more mysterious symbols flitted across the room, and one of the
tipplers, clearing his throat, suggested in the mildest of tones:—
“Hem—ah—you are German, perhaps?”
A _tedesco_ being no unusual sight in Italy, the listeners showed only a
moderate interest.
“No.”
The speaker rubbed his neck with a horny hand and turned an apologetic
eye on his fellows.
“Hah! You are an Austrian!” charged another, with a scowl.
“No.”
“Swiss?” suggested a third.
“No.”
Interest picked up at once. A voyager from any but these three countries
is something to attract unusual attention in wayside inns.
“Ah!” ventured a fourth member of the group, with a glance of scorn at
his more obtuse companions, “You are a Frenchman?”
“No.”
The geographical knowledge of the party was exhausted. There ensued a
long, wrinkle-browed silence. The landlady wandered in with a pot,
looked me over out of a corner of her eye, and retreated slowly. The
suspense grew unendurable. A native opened his mouth twice or thrice,
swallowed his breath with a gulp, and purred, meekly:
“Er—well—what country does the signore come from?”
“Sono americano.”
A chorus of exclamations aroused the cat dozing under the fire-place.
The hostess ran in, open-mouthed, from the back room. The landlord
dropped his pipe on the floor and emitted the Italian variation of “dew
tell!” The most phlegmatic of the party abandoned their games and
stories and crowded closely around me.
My advent seemed to two of the habitués to be providential. Some time
before, a wager had been laid between them which, till now, there had
seemed small chance of deciding. One man had wagered that the railway
trains of America run high up in the air above the houses, a tenet which
he sought to defend against all comers by an unprecedented amount of
lusty bellowing, and one which his opponent pooh-poohed with equal
vehemence. For a time I was at a loss to account for his claim that he
had read the information in a newspaper. In the course of his
vociferations, however, he mentioned “Nuova York,” and inquired if it
were not also true that its buildings were higher than the steeple of
the village church, and whether the railways were not thus built to
enable the people to get into such high houses; implying, evidently, his
conviction that Americans never come down to earth. Only then was the
source of his mental picture of an aërial railway system clear. He had
read somewhere of the New York Elevated and had applied the article to
the whole country.
Moreover “Nuova York” was synonymous with America to the entire party.
Not a man of them knew that there were two Americas, not one had ever
heard the term “United States.” America represents to the Italian of the
masses a country somewhere far away, how far or in what direction he has
no idea, where wages are higher than in Italy. Countless times I have
heard questions such as these from Italians who were not without
education:—
“Is America further away than Switzerland?”
“Did you walk all the way from America?”
“Who is king of America?”
“Why! Are you a native American? I thought Americans were black!”
Once a woman added insult to injury by inquiring in all sincerity:—
“In America you worship the sun, non è vero?”
On some rare occasions a wiser native appeared, to display his erudition
to the assembly. One evening I mildly suggested that the United States
as a whole is as large, if not larger, than Italy. My hearers were
deafening me with shouts of derision, when one of the party came to my
rescue.
“Certainly, that’s right!” he cried, “it _is_ larger. I have a brother
in Buenos Ayres and I know. America, or the Stati Uniti, as this signore
prefers to call it, has provinces just like Italy. The provinces are
Brazil, Uruguay, República Argentina, and Nuova York.”
Squelched by which crushing display of geographical erudition, the
gathering maintained a profound silence for the rest of the evening; and
the authority on America began a lecture on that topic, in the course of
which I learned many a fact concerning my native land which I had never
suspected.
One can be little surprised that the Italian fears to embark for a
country so little known. I met often with people who had set out for
America, gone as far as Genoa, and there abandoned the journey, _perché
aveva paura_. Many, indeed, journey to the seaport, never suspecting
that to reach this land of fabulous wealth they must travel on the
ocean; more than one has only the vaguest notion of what an ocean is.
When the endless expanse of water stretches out before them, all the
combined miseries of their native land and the wheedling of the most
silver-tongued steamship agent cannot induce them to trust themselves on
its billows; and in dread and fear they hurry home again.
It may be said with little danger of error, too, that the average
American knows very little of the Italian of this northern section. He
is, quite contrary to popular notions, a very kind and obliging, even
unselfish fellow, decidedly a different person from the usual immigrant
to our shores. The riffraff and off-casts of their native land, that are
spreading far and wide in our country, living in clans and bands wherein
the moving spirit seems to be he whose record at home is most
besmirched, the “dagoes” of common parlance, are no product of this
northern portion of the peninsula. We have, possibly, been too quick to
attribute to all Italians the characteristics of those undesirables with
whom we have come in contact, more than seven-eighths of whom hail from
the southern section. The Neapolitan, the Sicilian, the Sardinian, from
lands where congested districts breed characters held in as much
contempt by the Italian of the north as by our own citizens, have little
in common with the Venetian, the Florentine, and the Sienese.