IN THE ROMAN ZONE
From the Sabine Mountains to the sea, south to Frosinone and north to
Siena is that section of the peninsula which, it seems to me, is so
greatly affected by life and conditions in Rome as to be set off
properly as the Roman zone. It includes the greater portion of the
provinces of Romagna Lazio, or Latium and Umbria, and the lower portion
of Tuscany.
The greatest positive influence in Italy to-day is the Church; the
greatest potentiality, the army and the military party; the greatest
question, the condition of the peasantry of Italia Meridionale; the
greatest danger to the nation as a nation, the bitterness between the
people of the great and prosperous provinces of the north and the less
favored ones of the south.
As the centre of the world-wide Catholic Church, of the political and
military interests of the kingdom, of art, education and literature,
modern Rome is a city of institutions, and her citizens are parasites in
precisely the same way that a majority of the population of Washington
is parasitical. I have not at hand the figures to show which city has
the greater proportion of industries, but I think there is little
difference.
All through the region are quarries from which are taken the material
consumed in the thousands of studios that produce the enormous volume of
copies of noted pieces of statuary and the slenderer stream of new
creations which pours out of Rome and disperses to other parts of the
Continent, Great Britain and the United States. The amount of art copies
bought in Rome by American tourists each season is very large, much
larger than is generally known, and forms the most important source of
revenue to the people of the Roman zone, aside from the dispersion of
government funds, church funds and the compensation for the maintenance
of the hosts of tourists and art, musical and theological students. Next
in industrial importance to the stone-workers come the operations that
pertain to silk and to the making of imitation jewelry, of which latter
pursuit Rome is certainly the incomparable centre. Hundreds of shops in
Italy display Roman imitations that are nowhere excelled, and thousands
of workmen in imitation flowers, jewels, etc., are coming into the
United States, establishing themselves in the New World in their old
vocations and finding things very prosperous indeed. In the vicinity of
the tenement house in which we lived on Houston Street, down West
Broadway and elsewhere in New York, are scores of establishments engaged
in this very business, and all the workmen are Italians, from the zone
of Rome for the most part. All over the United States the industry of
designing, cutting and establishing marble and granite pieces of all
sorts for cemeteries is rapidly passing into the hands of Italians, and
in questioning many of them, in various parts of the country, as to
their native provinces, they have replied uniformly, the Roman Campania
or Tuscany.
The silk-weavers and hat-makers have centred in New Jersey, and in
Newark vie with the Jews, while in Paterson they have the lists more
nearly to themselves. In Italy the class of workmen so engaged forms a
ready field for the operations of socialistic and anarchistic agitators;
and though the fruit of their labors is rendered comparatively harmless
in Italy owing to the vigilance of the police and secret service, in the
United States, where there is freedom of speech, the fuller harvest is
reaped and the greatest danger exists.
Back of these conditions lies the contempt which these people have come
to hold, in the Roman zone, for both Church and State, and the reason is
that to them both St. Peter’s and the Quirinal and all they represent
are things far more ordinary and less impressive than to the populace of
the remoter provinces. Political and religious skepticism is growing to
be as dangerously common among the poor people in and about Rome as it
was in France early last century. Many social conditions are accurately
reproduced, and there are wise patriots who dread a repetition in Italy
of what followed the 14th of July, 1789, in France.
These things really concern the people of the great northern provinces
but little. They are busy and prosperous, educated and advanced, and,
though within the boundaries of the same nation, they are very
distinctly apart.
I can easily understand the attitude of the common people in the Roman
zone toward the aristocracy. The representatives of this class were
returning in full force to Rome only about the time we left it, but we
had abundant opportunity in both Naples and Rome for getting something
near the proper measure of these idling, pleasure-seeking,
self-sufficient landholders. Having their position by right of birth,
and given every advantage of the European civilization as a result of
rent-rolls from huge inherited estates, we found them to be,
nevertheless, insolent, shallow, degenerate physically, vicious and so
thoroughly unfit as a class for the responsibilities of the rich and
high-placed that, if I had the choice between admitting to the United
States a wealthy educated Roman nobleman and a poor Calabrese contract
laborer unable to read or write, I should choose the laborer every time.
Though the numbers of the middle class are lamentably small even in
Rome, there is a greater and more deplorable paucity farther south. In
the agricultural districts a man is either a laboring tenant or a
landholder, except for those few who are village artisans, tradesmen, or
are in the liberal professions. It requires well-divided ownership of
land or diversified industries, as in the United States, to create that
sturdy enlightened and independent middle class which is the strength of
any nation. The army of returned emigrants are the nearest approach to a
middle class to be found in many of the southern communes.
A man should certainly be able, under nearly all circumstances, to find
a better use for his pen than in uttering derogatory statements
concerning any other man or class of men engaged in the service of God,
no matter what their beliefs or his own convictions may be; but the
relation of the Italian priests to the millions of emigrants that have
come or will come to the United States is of such importance that it
would be cowardly not to give an honest expression concerning them. In a
general sort of way the poor provinces are referred to, just as is
Spain, as “priest-ridden”; but to the average American that is a term of
indefiniteness.
[Illustration: Morning in the Village and Vineyards]
The thought of a Catholic cleric always brings to my mind the memory of
the Rt. Rev. M. F. Howley, F. R. S. C., the noble and self-sacrificing
Bishop of Newfoundland; of Father Tommaso laboring among the poor
Italian miners of the Pennsylvania anthracite regions; of priests in
frontier missions of the great Canadian Northwest; of priests in the
slums of New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, and other cities; of men whom I
know, admire, and revere. So, judging the Italian clergy by them and by
them alone, I do not believe prejudice of any sort could be charged
against what is hereafter said.
Nor is it the Italian clergy as a whole or a major portion that is open
to criticism, except as it contributes to the continuance of the
oppressive, vitiating system whose acute wrongs are wrought by the
minority in the cloth.
Rome, as the centre of the tremendous fabric of the Church, witnesses
not only the focussing of the beneficent operations of the Church at
large, but of the condemnable workings of the provincial clerics as
well. There the true root of the trouble is most nearly laid bare, and
it seems strange indeed that something so unworthy should exist under
the very walls of the Vatican.
This basic condition is the propensity of indolent young men, sons of
impoverished families of quality, sickly youths unfit for more strenuous
pursuits, and designing and ambitious students, to turn to the
priesthood as affording them the prospect of a lifelong “soft snap.”
They do this, and are supported in it by their families, without the
slightest regard, as a rule, to any truly religious considerations
whatever. Italy is greatly overcrowded. Opportunities to rise in life
are very few indeed. The man is fortunate who can hold what his father
attained. England has suffered and is suffering from the incompetence of
those younger sons of good families who have turned to the church, army,
and similar professions. In Italy the diversity of pursuits is still
smaller than in England, and the candidates far greater in number, while
the examples of Italian priests who have risen to bishoprics,
archbishoprics, the cardinal’s hat, and even the pontifical chair are so
constantly before them, that men who are really fitted by nature and
fibre for the priesthood are crowded out to make way for those who are
unfit and never become fit. Rome, more than all other cities, sees them
in the early stages of their evil progress, and they take on cant,
hypocrisy, and prejudice there which, mingled with unscrupulousness, and
often with vicious propensities, make them a cloaked harass indeed to
the poor people of the parishes in which they are later established.
In the villages of the provinces where the people are poorly educated,
the priests have nearly an absolute control of local affairs. I do not
mean in any way that pertains to the business of the commune or as to
its officials, or the proceedings of law, but the deeper current of
life. A newly established school will thrive or fail just as the village
priests favor it or inveigh against it. The holidays are the feast days
of the patron saints, and it depends upon the priests whether these days
are mere occasions for bearing a painted and carved figure of a saint
through the streets to be loaded with gifts of money and valuables by
the populace, or whether they shall be made occasions of relaxation and
communal development to the people. A very great deal of letter-writing
is done by the priests for illiterate parishioners, so that much of the
correspondence between emigrants in America and relatives at home passes
through the priests’ hands. Not infrequently priests are money-lenders
and take their usury just as might the veriest Shylock, only that their
loan is a “charitable advance to an unfortunate parishioner.” An
interesting incident of this sort of thing happened at Velletri. An old
priest of one of the churches of the town had two brothers for
parishioners who desired to emigrate to America. One was named Giuseppe
and the other Giacomo. They had barely money enough for one passage,
though Giuseppe had a tiny bit of property. Both had borrowed money of
the old priest before and paid it back with a high rate of interest.
They plotted to get even with him. Giuseppe turned the care of his bit
of property over to Giacomo and sailed for America. In a few months
Giacomo went to the priest and offered as security for a loan of 300
lire the property which did not belong to him. The old priest took a
note of temporary conveyance, installed one of his dependents in the
property, gave Giacomo the 300 lire at twenty per cent per annum, and
Giacomo went to Naples and sailed for New York. At the end of two years
the old priest was beginning to consider the property already his, when
Giuseppe came home on a visit, proved that his brother had no right to
offer the property as security, and forced the priest to pay rent for it
for two years. Giacomo was of course safe from harm in America. Giuseppe
sold the property and returned, and is now in partnership with his
brother in a little business on Vine Street, Cincinnati.
In an effort to maintain in the eyes of their parishioners their own
outward show of virtue, priests whose lives have vicious tendencies
often commit crimes that are worse than murder. The attitude of the
Church toward an adulteress is a matter of common knowledge. When it is
said that the judging of the women of their parish is left in the hands
of the priests, and that in small communities a woman disgraced by such
judgment has no opportunity of hiding it from her neighbors, the
terrible power of the _padre_ can be seen. There is scarcely a community
which has not its pathetic story; some have many, and I have heard more
than one told in brief whispers as the poor woman who was the object of
it passed by. Yet, though convinced of her innocence, her neighbors do
not dare take up her cause, for fear of bringing on their own heads what
has fallen on her.
A son of a well-to-do oil and wine merchant in a certain village was a
patron of the priest in charge at the principal church of the town. He
was in love with the daughter of the man who sold the salt and tobacco
for the government. She refused his attentions, and, though there had
never been a whisper of blame against her, one Sunday she found that the
priest had directed against her the power of the Church. She bravely
faced the conditions, stepped quietly into her new status in village
life, and since then has been living such a life of self-sacrifice and
nobility that her very deeds have daily given the lie to the charge
against her. Since then the son of the oil merchant has ruined his
father and fled to Australia, and the priest died a miserable death in a
_torrente_ into which he stumbled while drunk; but to her is for ever
denied everything most dear to a woman.
Not so with many other women who come under the ban: though equally
innocent, though victims of spite, of distorted circumstances, they fail
to support the blow and _do_ become abandoned. The natural current is
toward the cities, where they may hide from all who ever knew them in
the village.
It must not be forgotten that this system has been going on in a greater
or less degree for centuries, and it has forced the natural attitude of
the fathers, husbands, and brothers of the women into one of the utmost
watchfulness and jealousy. I have often heard philanthropically inclined
Americans who went into the Italian quarters seeking to do good,
complain that the men were exceedingly averse to allowing their wives or
daughters to meet strangers, or to have any of the usual liberties of
American women. This jealousy is traditional, and is the result of the
system outlined above.
Another point on which this system may have some bearing is the devotion
of the Italian women to the Church compared with the indifference of the
men. In most civilized countries the women are more inclined to be
religious than the men, but in Italy this is accentuated, and the
separation is growing, as the skepticism to which I have referred
spreads.
All over southern Italy one hears a bitter reference to the _decime_,
the one-tenth of a man’s money which is claimed by the Church each year;
and though this often works out as not a literal allotment of one-tenth,
there are many parishes, where the principal priests are keen business
men, that more than one-tenth is extracted, and the tithes take form in
labor, vegetables, wine, fruit, fees, etc., but are nevertheless
valuable.
It is not a matter of economics and does not pertain to this
consideration, if the peasantry of southern Italy are such good
Christians as to give to the use of God one-tenth of their all; but it
certainly comes within the scope of this study when that enormous fund
goes to support that portion of the priesthood which is unworthy and is
nothing but an army of hypocritical parasites.
Before leaving the subject of conditions in and about Rome, the
_vagabondi_ should be mentioned. As I have said, the government
considers no man a pauper so long as he is able to beg, and the tourist
centres have gradually drawn a great collection of professional beggars,
who are really artistic in their methods of appeal. They are not
satisfied, as is the beggar of Naples, with a crust of bread, a sip of
wine, and a stone treasuring sun-warmth on which to stretch at night,
but go in for better things. At all the points of interest in the way of
ruins and the like, which lie in the Roman zone, their representatives
will be found. The liberality and apparent great wealth of the American
tourists have inspired many of these to save enough to emigrate to
America, but they have found begging a very poor occupation here, and in
several instances of which I have heard have gone to work and are
prospering.
In many districts where there are clay banks, sand banks, and other
spots where earth materials have been extracted for building or plastic
art work, the extraction has been done as if cutting out arched caves,
and in these and in the arches of ruins, with boarded-up or plastered-up
fronts, thousands of poor families live, making their living by digging
in the pits, acting as guides about the ruins, begging, or working on
the land as hired laborers.