The church-feast of its saint is of course for Anacapri, as for any
self-respecting Italian town, the great day of the year, and the
smaller the small “country,” in native parlance, as well as the simpler,
accordingly, the life, the less the chance for leakage, on other
pretexts, of the stored wine of loyalty. This pure fluid, it was easy
to feel overnight, had not sensibly lowered its level; so that nothing
indeed, when the hour came, could well exceed the outpouring. All up and
down the Sorrentine promontory the early summer happens to be the time
of the saints, and I had just been witness there of a week on every day
of which one might have travelled, through kicked-up clouds and other
demonstrations, to a different hot holiday. There had been no bland
evening that, somewhere or other, in the hills or by the sea, the white
dust and the red glow didn’t rise to the dim stars. Dust, perspiration,
illumination, conversation--these were the regular elements. “They’re
very civilised,” a friend who knows them as well as they can be known
had said to me of the people in general; “plenty of fireworks and plenty
of talk--that’s all they ever want.” That they were “civilised”--on the
side on which they were most to show--was therefore to be the word of
the whole business, and nothing could have, in fact, had more interest
than the meaning that for the thirty-six hours I read into it.
Seen from below and diminished by distance, Anacapri makes scarce a
sign, and the road that leads to it is not traceable over the rock; but
it sits at its ease on its high, wide table, of which it covers--and
with picturesque southern culture as well--as much as it finds
convenient. As much of it as possible was squeezed all the morning, for
St. Antony, into the piazzetta before the church, and as much more into
that edifice as the robust odour mainly prevailing there allowed room
for. It was the odour that was in prime occupation, and one could only
wonder how so many men, women and children could cram themselves into so
much smell. It was surely the smell, thick and resisting, that was least
successfully to be elbowed. Meanwhile the good saint, before he could
move into the air, had, among the tapers and the tinsel, the opera-music
and the pulpit poundings, bravely to snuff it up. The shade outside was
hot, and the sun was hot; but we waited as densely for him to come out,
or rather to come “on,” as the pit at the opera waits for the great
tenor. There were people from below and people from the mainland and
people from Pomerania and a brass band from Naples. There were other
figures at the end of longer strings--strings that, some of them indeed,
had pretty well given way and were now but little snippets trailing in
the dust. Oh, the queer sense of the good old Capri of artistic legend,
of which the name itself was, in the more benighted years--years of the
contadina and the pifferaro--a bright evocation! Oh, the echo, on the
spot, of each romantic tale! Oh, the loafing painters, so bad and so
happy, the conscious models, the vague personalities! The “beautiful
Capri girl” was of course not missed, though not perhaps so beautiful
as in her ancient glamour, which none the less didn’t at all exclude
the probable presence--with _his_ legendary light quite undimmed--of
the English lord in disguise who will at no distant date marry her. The
whole thing was there; one held it in one’s hand.
The saint comes out at last, borne aloft in long procession and under a
high canopy: a rejoicing, staring, smiling saint, openly delighted
with the one happy hour in the year on which he may take his own walk.
Frocked and tonsured, but not at all macerated, he holds in his hand a
small wax puppet of an infant Jesus and shows him to all their friends,
to whom he nods and bows: to whom, in the dazzle of the sun he literally
seems to grin and wink, while his litter sways and his banners flap and
every one gaily greets him. The ribbons and draperies flutter, and the
white veils of the marching maidens, the music blares and the guns go
off and the chants resound, and it is all as holy and merry and noisy
as possible. The procession--down to the delightful little tinselled and
bare-bodied babies, miniature St. Antonys irrespective of sex, led or
carried by proud papas or brown grandsires--includes so much of the
population that you marvel there is such a muster to look on--like the
charades given in a family in which every one wants to act. But it
is all indeed in a manner one house, the little high-niched island
community, and nobody therefore, even in the presence of the head of it,
puts on an air of solemnity. Singular and suggestive before everything
else is the absence of any approach to our notion of the posture of
respect, and this among people whose manners in general struck one as so
good and, in particular, as so cultivated. The office of the saint--of
which the festa is but the annual reaffirmation--involves not the
faintest attribute of remoteness or mystery.
While, with my friend, I waited for him, we went for coolness into the
second church of the place, a considerable and bedizened structure,
with the rare curiosity of a wondrous pictured pavement of majolica,
the garden of Eden done in large coloured tiles or squares, with every
beast, bird and river, and a brave _diminuendo_, in especial, from
portal to altar, of perspective, so that the animals and objects of the
foreground are big and those of the successive distances differ with
much propriety. Here in the sacred shade the old women were knitting,
gossipping, yawning, shuffling about; here the children were romping and
“larking”; here, in a manner, were the open parlour, the nursery, the
kindergarten and the _conversazione_ of the poor. This is everywhere the
case by the southern sea. I remember near Sorrento a wayside chapel that
seemed the scene of every function of domestic life, including cookery
and others. The odd thing is that it all appears to interfere so little
with that special civilised note--the note of manners--which is so
constantly touched. It is barbarous to expectorate in the temple of your
faith, but that doubtless is an extreme case. Is civilisation really
measured by the number of things people do respect? There would seem to
be much evidence against it. The oldest societies, the societies
with most traditions, are naturally not the least ironic, the least
_blasees_, and the African tribes who take so many things into account
that they fear to quit their huts at night are not the fine flower.