THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA
Rome is set in the _campagna romana_. The strange beauty of this
"Roman country," the birth country of the Latin League, assails the
very doors of the Roman citizen, intruding its poetry, its stillness,
from point after point of vantage, causing the beholder to lead every
now and then a sort of dual existence, to lose his sense of time and
place and personality, and with his feet planted in the city which was
once the hub of the world to find himself dreaming in a cloister
garden. The atmosphere, the combination of colour and light, is
characteristically Roman, it suggests what is mystic but never fails
in perfect clearness. With its mystic blues, its blue-greens, its
silence, its vastness, the campagna presents none of the features of
the _pays riant_ of Florence where little olive-crowned hills, so
cared for, so laughing, convey a message like its history definite,
homogeneous, cultured, charming. But here a dead city has been
besieged day and night by a dead campagna, big with its speech of
silence, untilled yet a cradle of civilisation, with the complex
language suited to a more difficult message, not entering into your
humour but taking you into its secret, beautiful, austere, massive and
careless of little things, yet yielding you out of its rich secular
treasure details of beauty in abundance--here before you lies a
history, a power, heedless of your judgment, but century after century
looking back at you [Greek: meidiasais' athanato prosopo], as one of
the finest lines in Greek verse says of Aphrodite, and recreating your
universe for you.
_Latium_ was the name of this country round about Rome, Latium--as
though it were wide and spacious, suggesting the civilisation which
was to spread from here, with its largeness, its spaciousness, its
contempt of the trivial and restricted. The campagna (between Civita
Vecchia and Terracina) embraces a tract of country some ninety miles
in extent, with a maximum breadth between mountain and sea of forty
miles, enclosing part of ancient Sabina, Etruria, and Latium, this
last lying seawards, between the Alban hills and the Tiber. The _ager
antiquus_, the Roman _ager_, however, was of much smaller extent,
bounded by a point five miles out on the Via Appia, by the shrine of
the Dea Dia towards the sea, by the _Massa Festi_ between the seventh
and eighth milestones on the Via Labicana, the farthest point
eastwards, and by the primitive mouth of the Tiber six miles from Rome
on the Ostian Way; and these always remained its confines for ritual
purposes. From here derived the original families whose chiefs became
the Roman patricians and formed the nucleus of the Roman Senate--the
so-called _gentes_. The extension of the campagna beyond the _ager
antiquus_ to form the _ager publicus_ was the result of conquest, the
territory thus acquired being let or assigned to private persons as
tenants-at-will of the State, apportioned to poorer citizens in
allotments, or colonised by Roman citizens. The hill-villages and
towns, the _castelli romani_, are so-called not as is popularly
supposed because they are near Rome, but because they too were
colonised by Romans from the _ager_ under the protection of the great
feudal barons to whose fiefs they belonged in the city. Thus
_castello_, the baronial castle, easily came to denote the village
which clustered round it.
Something of the dualism which possesses the soul of the Roman, which
has I think always conveyed a message to his eyes, his ears, his
heart, is derived from the scene before him. Life and death, the _va
et vient_ of the world's masters, "the desolation of Tyre and
Sidon"--the Roman campagna has looked on both. Chateaubriand describes
it as a desolate land, "with roads where no one passes," with "tombs
and aqueducts for foliage" usurping the place of trees and life and
movement; the stillness is broken by no happy country sounds, the eye
sees no smoke ascend from the few ruined farmsteads. No nation it
would seem has ventured to succeed the world's masters on their native
soil, and the fields of Latium lie "as they were left by the iron
spade of Cincinnatus or the last Roman plough." Decimated by plague
and pest and deserted by man, malarial, fever-bound, the smiling
country-seats of the world's conquerors have given place to tiny
scattered colonies--as at Veii--haunted by a people emaciated by
fever, where lads of eighteen, looking like boys of twelve, are
certified by the parish priest as unable to bear arms. Along the
world-famous roads lined by the Romans on either hand with the
monuments of their dead, that they might retain a constant place in
the thoughts of the living who journeyed on these most frequented
ways, the ruined tombs are left in possession of the dead alone. The
tombs, the _hypogaea_ and _mausolea_ of the great families who dwelt
there, often remain standing when all trace of the villas to which
they belonged have disappeared, as though one further proof were
needed that this is indeed the land of the dead.
[Illustration: A TRACT OF THE CLAUDIAN AQUEDUCT OUTSIDE THE CITY
The Sabine hills are in the distance. See pages 21-22.]
Nevertheless this deserted country once teemed with life--some seventy
cities, it is surmised, once covered the plain, and countless villas
and farms, the property of Roman patricians, consuls, and senators,
made it a veritable garden. Driving within the walls of Rome being
forbidden save to the Emperor and the Vestals, the tenants of these
villas met the _rheda_ outside the gates, drawn by its pair of
fast-stepping horses. These light carriages were gaily painted with
some classical subject, as the peasants' carts still are in Naples,
and a leather hood with purple hangings protected the owner from the
heat. At all the cross-roads are fountains for the use of man and
beast, near which a seat shaded by ilex or olive awaits the tired
traveller, as we may see it still awaiting him for example at the
Porta Furba on the way to Frascati. Excellent roads kept in excellent
repair honeycomb the plain, while aqueducts, temples, trees,
shrines, monuments, and statues rejoice the eye and enliven the
journey. Villa, dependents' dwellings, the mausoleum, the farms, are
seen a long way off in this flat land, and not the least curious
feature as the traveller approaches is the formal garden still known
to us as "an Italian garden," an entirely artificial creation where
each tree and shrub has not only its prescribed place in the scheme,
but its prescribed form, giving the impression of a continuous trained
English box hedge. The shrubs are tortured into the semblance of
beasts and snakes, the name of the owner being sometimes cut in the
foliage, a device which may still be seen in the modern grounds of the
Villa Pamfili-Doria. The most conspicuous features of the campagna
from classical times are the aqueducts, stretching right across the
_agro_ to the walls of Rome; gigantic remains of the Claudian aqueduct
extend for six miles, and the ancient _peperino_ arches of the
favourite _acqua Marcia_, which cross the Claudian aqueduct at Porta
Furba, still bring water to the city. As classic Rome is represented
by the aqueducts and mausolea, so feudal Rome is represented by the
towers which rose in the campagna between the eighth and the fifteenth
centuries--the early semaphores on the coast-line to give warning of
the approach of Saracen or Corsair, the vedette towers which figured
in the baronial wars, and the later fortified towers of the baron's
castle. Last but not least Christianity has strewed the campagna with
chapels and shrines, the earliest of which supplanted the cult of the
local pagan divinity in the ages when Christianity was gradually
driving the religion of imperial Rome into the villages and hill
retreats. So S. Sylvester replaced the woodland deities, Michael
supplanted the god of war, S. George became the Christian protector
against the depredations of ferocious beasts, S. Caesarius replaced
the genius of the imperial Caesars. Of the same period are the
basilicas erected over the _sepulcretum_ of a martyr at the mouth of a
catacomb.
Several causes led to the abandonment of the _agro romano_. The
neglect of the roads and the ruin of the aqueducts, which cut off the
water supply, the poverty of the despoiled landlords, and the general
insecurity following the incursions of the barbarians in the fifth and
sixth centuries, brought about a rapid depopulation and gradually
turned the _agro_ into a pest-bound desert. It would seem that
malarial fever is virtually indigenous to the soil of the _agro_,
besetting every region as soon as man deserts it. It did not make its
appearance, we may suppose, in the inhabited towns of the classical
period, but that it existed before the middle ages, the popular date
for its appearance, is shown by the allusions of classical writers
since the time of Augustus and by the existence of several temples to
the goddess Fever. In Rome itself it is the persistent belief, which
appears to be abundantly confirmed by statistics, that the more
building is extended and the horribly noisy paved streets are
multiplied, the faster the evil diminishes; for the malarial miasma is
held to be an exhalation of the soil, and where earth is freshly
turned there is danger. As we all know, it has been quite
recently shown that the microbe of malaria is carried by mosquitoes,
mosquitoes abound where water abounds, and one of the reasons for the
unhealthiness of the _agro_, one of the greatest obstacles to its
reclamation, is that there are not less than ten thousand little
water-courses which filter down to the valleys, creating marsh and
stagnant pools. The evil may really date from the last years of the
republic, which saw the displacement of the small freeholders by the
large landowners, of the old free labour by slave labour, and the
consequent fatal depopulation of the _agro_. But during the middle
ages, from the sixth century onwards, all the causes were intensified,
and the difficulties which now beset the secular problem of the
restoration of agriculture in the Roman campagna and the expulsion of
malaria, resolve themselves "into a vicious circle"; for men cannot
live there until the malaria is exorcised, and until men live there
the malaria will remain in possession. No less than seventy-nine
measures for what is known in Italy as the _bonifica dell' agro
romano_ have from time to time been projected; and whether Italy will
succeed where the popes failed is still doubtful. The initial
necessity, the drainage of the campagna, seems in itself to be a task
too great for Hercules. For the last four years the military _Croce
Rossa_ has perambulated the campagna during the summer and autumn
months, combating the malaria with doctors and medicines. It is hoped
that this will be followed by the establishment of a larger number of
permanent sanitary stations. Since 1870 millions of eucalyptus trees
have been planted as air purifiers especially at the little railway
stations and other inhabited sites. It is not forgotten that the
agricultural colonies of the classical age were once the saving of
Rome, and within the last few years similar schemes have been devised
in the hope that the birth-land of the Roman people may become once
more the home of agriculture. Such a _colonia agricola_ for Roman
lads, outside the Flaminian gate, was founded by a visitor who has
since become the wife of an Italian well known for similar enterprise
in Italian Africa.
The moral wants of the _agro_ have appealed to the sympathies and
occupied the attention of the excellent society of young Catholics,
the _Circolo San Pietro_, which has opened and furnished thirty-four
of the closed and neglected churches and chapels of the _agro_ for the
use of the scattered population; mass is also said in the hayfields on
Sunday for the haymakers, on a wain drawn by oxen, and a very charming
little picture of this scene has been prepared under the auspices of
the President, Prince Barberini. There are within the city many
hundreds of extra-parochial clergy--monks, friars, clerks regular,
missionaries, and members of the various ecclesiastical congregations,
with scores of churches and chapels where hundreds of masses are daily
celebrated, and where expositions of the Sacrament, novenas, and
benedictions are multiplied. But just outside the walls there are
people who never hear mass, who live and die without the consolation
of religion, "without a priest." When the _Circolo San Pietro_ set
their hand to the good work of opening the churches and chapels of the
_agro_ their difficulty consisted in finding priests to minister in
them without payment. "Your Indies are here" said the Pope of his day
when S. Philip Neri, the Apostle of Rome, wished to go abroad as a
missionary, and Pius X. has recently echoed the saying. There is only
one confraternity in the city which imposes on itself the duty of
seeking and burying the bodies of those who die from sudden illness or
from violence in the campagna. This well-known black "Confraternity of
Prayer and Death" accompanies the funerals of the poor gratuitously.
It is affiliated to the Florentine _Misericordia_.
[Illustration: CAMPAGNA ROMANA, FROM TIVOLI
See page 78.]
The _agro romano_ is divided into nearly 400 farms owned by half as
many proprietors. The largest of these farms comprise between 8 and
18,000 acres, the two smallest 5 acres each. About half remains
ecclesiastical property, while a third belongs to the great Roman
families, one-sixth being still owned by peasant holders. The
proprietors allow the big estates to be farmed by the so-called
_mercanti di campagna_, who take them on a three or nine years'
tenure. These large merchants of country produce keep a _fattore_ on
the farm who is the actual manager; he is both farmer and bailiff. The
cattle of the _agro_ are, Signor Tomassetti tells us, its most
considerable inhabitants. There are 32,000 sheep, 18,000 cows, 10,000
goats, 7000 horses and mules, 6000 oxen, and 1800 buffaloes. The oxen
were brought by Trajan from the basin of the Danube, the buffaloes
came with the Lombards and were originally natives of India.
Beyond the _agro_ are the _castelli romani_, the hill towns of the
Alban and Sabine district. There above Frascati lies the site of
Tusculum, the mighty rival of Rome; to the right is Monte Cavo the
highest peak in the Alban range where stood the temple of the "Latian
Jupiter," sanctuary and rallying point of the Latin League. Below lies
Albano of which See the English Pope, Hadrian IV., was Cardinal
Bishop. In the Sabine range is the famous city of Tibur (Tivoli), the
villa of Hadrian, and S. Benedict's town of Subiaco. To the east is
the rock Soracte, "the pyramid of the campagna" and the meeting place
of Etruscans, Sabines, and Latins; while a score of little townships
in both ranges of hills record the feudal families of Rome, and
harbour the descendants of the Latin rural _plebs_. The life led here
is not the village life of England, but the life of small, primitive
townships, with a mayor, a commune, and the customs of the middle
ages. There are no manufactories and no crafts, and there are no
cottages, the dwellings being divided into floors as in the big towns.
[Illustration: SUBIACO FROM THE MONASTERY OF S. BENEDICT]
The great business of the year is the vintage, which takes place in
the Roman campagna in October; in land held under manorial rights,
however, the tenants must await the lord's pleasure. The vines are
trained round short canes set close together, and the grapes are
collected in wooden receptacles narrowing towards the base: these are
emptied into the _tino_, whence they are pressed, by the old biblical
method of treading with the feet, into an enormous cask below called
the _botte_. Here the grapes are left for several days to ferment,
the skins rising to the top. In the little yards of filthy houses one
may see the grapes being boiled in a cauldron, an illegitimate
substitute for fermentation. The wine of the _castelli romani_ is
famous; every district makes both red and white, the latter being
generally preferred in Rome itself; the white "Frascati" and white
"Genzano" are famous; Albano wine is praised by Horace, and excellent
"Marino" is still made in the vineyards of the Scotch college which
has its summer quarters there. The Sabines yield the "Velletri," a
good red wine but difficult to find pure; Genazzano and Olevano also
produce an excellent grape, but the difficulty in some of these small
towns is to find a vine grower to take sufficient pains with his wine
making. Colouring matter is usually employed for the red wines, the
least noxious resource being a plentiful admixture of elderberry. The
wine made one year is not as a rule drunk till the next; it is not
prepared for exportation, but is kept, or sent to Rome, in barrels,
from which it is decanted for retail commerce into flasks where the
wine is protected with a few drops of oil in lieu of a cork. The wine
is also sold by the _barile_ (sixty litres), _mezzo barile_, and
_quartarolo_ (fifteen litres), the usual price given in Roman
households being about seven francs the _quartarolo_. Every
_trattoria_ and restaurant, however, sells wine by the Roman
half-litre measure--the _fojetta_--and the prices 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 may be
seen chalked up outside the wine-shops. Outside vineyards and rural
_trattorie_, where wine is sold, a bough is hung out as a sign,
reminding one of the origin of the proverb "Good wine needs no bush."
The olive harvest is in November or December. Nowhere is the olive
more appreciated than in Italy where Minerva is said to have bestowed
it, the horse, which was Vulcan's gift, coming only second in
usefulness. The picked fruit is made into the finer oil, then the
fallen olives are gathered by women and girls, and the occupation is
very popular, as what is thus earned helps to provide the winter
comforts. Fine oil has a very delicate scarcely perceptible taste and
smell, and an Italian condemns the oil by saying "_L'olio si sente_"
(One can taste it). Frying is generally done with oil and some
vegetables and all fish are cooked with it. "_Ojo e sempre ojo, ma
strutto! chi sa che struttaccio sara?_" (Oil is always oil, but who
knows what lard may be?) they say. The olive tree not only yields the
fuel to feed the oil lamps, but it provides some of the best timber
for the fire. Not only is it useful but it is one of the most
beautiful things in the Italian country--and its grey-green colour,
with the tender sheen on the leaf, is as characteristic of the Italian
landscape as the deeper green and lordly shaft of the stone pine, or
the blue of the hills. The seasons in Italy are two months ahead of
ours in England, the wheat harvest being in June. There is seldom any
cold before Christmas, and in fine years the winter may be said to be
over after the middle of February.
The people who inhabit the Alban and Sabine country are the same
Latin _plebs_, except that they no longer serve the world's masters
and take their part, if only as spectators, in a great classical
civilisation: they have served for centuries a papacy which in habits
of thought never belied the heredity of the middle ages. In the
general outlines the same people--but more not less barbarous than of
yore, because they have been arrested, literally have been brutalised,
by a complete absence of that moral and intellectual growth which has
been the conquest of the centuries. As in pagan Italy, the people are
consulters of oracles, confiders in charms and exorcisms, slaves to
the belief in "destiny," a word which is ever on their lips ("_e il
destino_" absolves you from taking any action); they are cruel and
coarse as the cruel are coarse. The inhabitants of the _castelli
romani_ were described by a compatriot as "_pieni di superbia, debiti,
e pidocchi_" (full of pride, debts, and lice); and he who ventures to
hear mass in the parish church of one of these hill towns must have a
bath on his return and discard all the garments he wore. Among the
Sabine villages, where in our own time the public sport was the
baiting of the poor beasts who were going to the slaughter-house,
there are smiling olive-crowned towns whose evil reputation for deeds
of blood has made it necessary to change the name of the township more
than once. In one of these villages, in the "eighties," a man raised
his gun and calmly shot his brother _in the presence of their mother_.
The mother and son were punctual in their obligations to church and
convent, and the _arciprete_ of the parish journeyed to Rome to bear
witness at the trial that the murderer was "il fior del paese," (the
flower of the flock). When the man was acquitted, the priest had no
better lesson to inculcate for the community of which this was the
"pearl," than to accompany the local band which went forth to welcome
the fratricide back to the village which held the still fresh grave of
the brother he had treacherously murdered.
[Illustration: GARDEN OF THE MONASTERY OF SANTA SCHOLASTICA, SUBIACO
This fifth-century monastery (restored five hundred years later) was
dedicated to the sister of S. Benedict, the founder of Western
Monasticism. The first printing press in Italy was established
here.]
It is commonly believed, even by the educated, that "things" happen in
the campagna which happen nowhere else, possession, obsession,
"overlooking," witchery. Hysterical manifestations are indeed common
at all the noted shrines, and wherever the excitement of exorcism is
at hand to feed the morbid preoccupation with self of the hysterical.
Some sixteen years ago the government determined to check this source
of hysteria, and directed the rural clergy to perform no more
exorcisms. I visited a friary in the Sabines at this time and saw the
work of the evil spirits in the shape of a packet of hairpins
(complete with its sample pin), tresses of hair, or a good fat nail
which had been swallowed by the energumen and which under the
emotional stress attending the exorcism--the dim light, the monotonous
droning of the _frati_ who are saying their office behind the high
altar--are brought up again. I enquired of the Father Guardian what
happened now that exorcism was forbidden? Well, a woman had been there
only the day before, and he had explained to her that he could only
pronounce "a simple benediction," which had resulted after a quarter
of an hour before the altar in the ejectment of the objects shown
me. Such an end to an ancient Christian ministry destined to free poor
human beings from the toils of Satan gives food for reflection. The
secular conflict between religion and science has set foot even in the
Roman campagna. If in England we have our Christian scientists, in
Italy the authorities have to cope with a people whose remedy for the
bite of a rabid animal is a mass said at the shrine of some special
madonna--both put faith before a trust in "dry powder," and there has
never yet been an age of the world in which there have not been those
who thought them right. The popular sanctuaries in Italy, indeed, help
to keep up much that is undesirable. At the April festa at Genazzano a
peasant will kneel down before the miraculous image of the Madonna
which hangs, like Mohammad's coffin, without visible support, and
having made his prayer will rise and shake his fist at the picture,
exclaiming "_Bada, Maria!_" (Beware, Mary!) Many things, thin silver
hearts, candles, and other dainties have been promised if the desired
favour be granted, but if the Madonna be not tempted by these to
accede to the wishes of her worshipper, she must look out for herself.
Wax images can be laid out to melt in the sun, there to learn how
agreeable is a continued drought, statuettes can be stood in the
corner with their faces to the wall, a rival patron saint can be
pitched into the river, by the same hand which brings gifts. "See how
you like it!" Does not the primitive man create his god by looking
into himself? and Caliban with his "So he!" inaugurates theology.
Another Roman picture is afforded us by the lottery. It is to be
found, indeed, all over Italy, but we are only concerned with its
influence in Roman life, where it has always flourished, first under
the popes when a prelate presided to bless the opening of the lottery
and now under the State, for the Romans are born gamblers. Seventeen
millions a year are raised in this way out of the pockets of the
poorest of the poor. The excuse made is that as the people will gamble
the only safeguard against gigantic frauds on the gamblers is to make
the lottery a department of the State. Certainly it would be
absolutely impossible to trust to fair play if the choice of the
numbers depended on any private persons; even if they were honest, no
Italian would believe it. The "Book of the Art," with its rough
hideous drawings of the things represented by the lottery numbers--one
to ninety--is the only book which the unlettered Italian can read.
Every event national or domestic becomes the subject of play. You
"play" the assassination of the King or the death of the Pope, the
accident which has happened to your neighbour your master or your
mistress, and you play the death of your kinsfolk. In order to get the
money the people have recourse to the _monte di pieta_--the
pawnshop--and the women will pawn the mattress off the bed. Sometimes
the choice lies between the two chief pleasures of the Roman, eating
and the lottery, and it is the best proof of the fascination of the
latter that it is so often preferred to the joys of the table. In
every tiny village as in every great city throughout Italy there is a
_banco dell lotto_, and the winning numbers are exhibited over its
doors every Saturday. Five numbers--for example, 5, 9, 27, 36,
50--appear each week. This is called the _cinquina_. But you can win
the _ambo_ (two correct numbers), the _terno_ (the most usual of all),
or the _quaterna_. Not more than five numbers can be played, but if
you "plump" for the _cinquina_ you gain a big sum; or you can declare
your intention to play for all four possible combinations. In this
case you gain little if the _cinquina_ comes out. It is the same with
the _terno_, if you plump for it you gain much more. But the gain also
depends on the amount you put into the lottery, and any sum from six
_centimes_ can be played. When Pius IX. died a Roman jeweller won
40,000 scudi (L8000). How can one expect the gambling of the poor to
cease when even twelve _centimes_ (less than five farthings) may bring
fifty francs?
The Roman goes to the lottery with all the paraphernalia and a good
deal of the sentiment of devotion. "Se ci aiuti Iddio e la Madonna,"
they exclaim--If God and the Madonna will help us--we shall win the
_terno_. There are several "tips" for winning. One which is as awesome
as it is efficacious consists in starting the _kyrie eleison_--hardly
recognisable in its popular dress as _crielleisonne_--and then say on
your knees thirteen _ave marias_ to as many madonnas. Having invoked
Baldassare, Gasper, and _Marchionne_ (Melchoir)--though what the three
wise kings have to do in that _galere_ is not very obvious--you go out
of the house, taking care to answer nothing if any one calls you. You
go straight to the church of S. John Beheaded, where those who
suffered capital punishment used to be interred, and then whatever you
see or hear inside or out, look it up in the "Book of the Art" and you
are safe to win. Another _bella divozione_ for the same end is to go
up the steps of Ara Coeli on your knees reciting a _requiem aeternum_
or a _de profundis_ on each step. A large number of the people praying
so devoutly to the Madonna di Sant' Agostino (whose other principal
care is the safety of childbirth) are praying for luck in the
lottery--praying or threatening, for the one is very kin to the other
in the primitive mind as it is in the magic of all primitive peoples.
Some of these may have been conducting a solitary nocturnal vigil,
having risen from their beds, kindled two candles, and proceeded to
carry through one or other of the _belle divozioni_.
[Illustration: HOLY STAIRS AT THE SAGRO SPECO
The ravine (above the monastery of S. Scholastica) where S. Benedict
took refuge from the corruption of Rome, became the site of the
_Sagro Speco_, the sacred cavern, with the ninth-century monastery
of _San Benedetto_. The peasants of Subiaco ascend the stairs here
represented on their knees, as the _Scala Santa_ in Rome is
ascended, and, occasionally, even the numerous stairs of _Ara
Coeli_. See page 86.]
In the country-places the great stand-by is the Capuchin, who has a
reputation for suggesting lucky numbers. When he comes collecting alms
in village or city the poor man asks him for a likely _terno_. He is
not supposed to suggest these numbers, but he and the people
understand each other, and every word, every allusion, which falls
from his lips is thereupon eagerly noted. If he mentions a recent
assassination, you "play" number _72 morto assassinato_, then the
numbers indicating the day or some special circumstance, "a quarrel,"
"the knife" with which it was done, "jealousy," "a man," or "a woman."
The element of chance, the ineradicable belief in luck, makes a man
sure to play if three numbers come unbidden into his head. No pious
person dreams of the "numbers of the Madonna"--6, 8, and 15--without
at once "playing" them. The Madonna evidently intends "to do
something" for you; indeed "if the Madonna suggests numbers" it is a
safe thing, you can put five francs on it. It is popularly said that
2, 3, 5, 6 are numbers which always come out, these and their
combinations. Fifty-eight is the number indicating the Pope, and 52,
_morta che parla_, is played by good simple women who have dreamt of
their dead mother. The industrious working middle classes and even the
better classes "play," though the latter play _sub rosa_. On Saturday
the people collect round the little lottery offices--some of them have
waited to pay their bills until they ascertained their luck. On the
appearance of the fateful numbers there is a general talk, a general
lamentation: "If I had only done so-and-so." "If I had only played
_morto_ instead of _ferito_" ("dead" instead of only "wounded.") For
the Roman the whole known world sacred or profane is absorbed in the
business of the lottery. Thus one of the popular sonnets in the Roman
dialect describes how the flight into Egypt came about. On the 27th of
December the Patriarch Joseph is snoring in bed, dreaming of lottery
numbers, when an angel appears to him and says: "See here, old man,
what a fine _festa_ there is going to be over number 28" (the 28th of
December commemorates the massacre of the Innocents). Thereupon S.
Joseph wakes like one crazy, hires a young donkey, and takes the
Madonna and her child off to Egypt.
Many English travellers to this favoured country of the gods since the
days when Vulcan and Minerva vied with each other as to which should
bestow the best gift on Italy, must have wished that nothing more
sensitive than the olive had been placed in the hands of its
countrymen. Signor Gabelli has described the burly Roman carter
beating his horses or mules, the red cap which hangs over one ear
matching his flaming face, afire with triumphant pride in this
exercise of brute force and dominion. No one rebukes him. On the
contrary the clergy delight to dwell on the distinction between the
duties owed to men and the absence of all obligation towards the
brutes. The distinction, of course, works no better in modern than in
ancient times, and means nothing less than the systematic
brutalisation of the Italian people. The doctrine that animals (like
"the sun and moon") were "made for man" is held to justify all
mishandling of them, all domineering and callousness. This is frankly
immoral; and until priests overcome their reluctance to set forth
ethics in a way that does not involve a break with the order and march
of all human civilisation, theology will continue to accommodate
itself to racial characteristics, and specious theological
propositions will still serve as a cloak for bluntness of moral
perception. Only this year a _marchese_ told me that he "could not
admit that animals feel." The effect of such sentiments in a squire
among an illiterate tenantry may be readily imagined; the ignorant
Italian gentleman justifies theology by the astounding proposition
that all sentient creatures below man have been provided with a set of
non-sensitive nerves; the rustic finds in the pleasure which it
affords him to know that this proposition is untrue an ampler
justification of the ways of Providence.
The police system of Italy has always been so ineffective that many of
the great Roman families have preferred to pay tribute to the brigands
in return for protection for their farms and estate to claiming
assistance against them from the government. One of the best known
Roman princes paid this tribute regularly to the archbrigand Tiburzi.
In old days the brigands came down into the villages on the great
festivals in velvet jerkin and feathered cap bearing candles and gifts
for the Madonna and the presbytery. Hardly less picturesque than the
brigands are the chief herdsmen called _butteri_, in blue jacket and
brass buttons with a feather in the soft-felt Italian hat. Their skill
as rough-riders is celebrated and the palm remained with them when
Buffalo Bill's cowboys challenged them to a trial of skill. A
primitive and classical feature of campagna labour is the singing with
which it is enlivened. Hour after hour while sowing a field a
monotonous folk-song will be kept up, verse succeeding verse at
regular intervals, a woman singing and a man whistling the
accompaniment--the phrase ending always with that long-drawn dying
cadence peculiar to primitive song, like the chant sung to-day by the
Neapolitan girls in the caves at Baiae, though it is the dirge which
their predecessors made for Adonis. One of the most familiar sights
which pass these workers in the fields are the wine-carts bound for
Rome; a folding linen or leather hood, generally purple in colour,
protects the driver, and a little dog of the common and wrathful
species known as the _lupetto romano_--the Roman wolfling--balances
himself on the cargo and constitutes himself the protector and
companion of his master. At the back of the cart there is always a
tiny barrel fixed transversely; this is the perquisite of the driver
and his friends when his errand is accomplished. Occasionally a
garlanded cross marks the spot where some carter was killed under the
wheels of his cart, just as a stone wreathed with flowers showed where
a wayfarer had died struck by lightning in the pagan campagna. These
cart accidents are not infrequent: in the long silent journeys across
the sunburnt plain of the _agro_ the men drop asleep, and it is then
easy to fall heavily and be crushed beneath the cart, while the horse
or mule pursues the accustomed route to Rome. Little wayside
sanctuaries like those which stud the campagna, and which the wayfarer
salutes as he passes, still exist in some of the untouched parts of
Rome down by the Tiber in the region of Piazza Montanara and in the
Borgo of S. Peter's. The goatherds, like the _butteri_ and the
wine-carts, may also be seen by those who never leave the walls of
Rome. Perhaps when we see them standing by the little herd of goats on
the shady side of piazzas in May, clad in such goatskin breeches as
were worn by their pagan ancestors, it is not the "Roman country"
but the beginnings of the "eternal city" of which we are chiefly
reminded, when figures like these with their pastoral divinities took
possession of the Palatine hill.
[Illustration: LITTLE GLEANER IN THE CAMPAGNA]
Italy has always been the land of Saturn, the nature god. Her
festivals were the festivals of the doings and events of nature, the
Lupercalia of Lupercus, the Palilia of Pales; she was and she remains
pagan, if pagan is to mean the natural as opposed to the supernatural
attitude towards life--natural and humanistic as opposed to mystic and
ideal. Under the new names lie concealed the old gods. The true Latin
goddess is Pales, the earth mother, the source of grace, the real
giver of gifts to her devotees--enshrined, dedicated to the gospel
under a hundred aspects of what Bonghi has happily called that
"gentilissimo fiore del cattolicismo," the cult of the Madonna. Some
unseemly tracts and pictures have represented Christ as turning away
from the leprosy of the sinner's sin, and it is Mary whose compassion
for the prodigal never wavers, who persuades the Christ to have pity.
That, though false enough as theology, accurately represents the
Italian mind. The nature goddess, the mother, the earth and its
fulness, will console, recreate, and speak to the soul of the Latin on
his native soil when religion has no language which reaches him. From
the heart of that soil the Latin learnt his religion, and he has never
parted with it.
It is the hour of the god Pan, that midday hour which Pan alone can
withstand. The sun is high in the heavens, the earth exhales heat,
round about are the great silences. Nothing else stirs, nothing
moves, nothing breathes. The great repose is indeed tense with a great
activity, but a hush of nature greets this supreme hour of the sun in
its glory--the world lies dead at the feet of the giver of life. The
hour of the god Pan is the mystery which is daily renewed for the
Italian; what has remained constant amid all changes is the
nature-myth, and the secrets it is always whispering to the children
of its soil.