A later page of that old diary of dates. August 31: Palombara. Well I
remember the hot walk to Palombara!
August 3: Mons Lucretilis, that classical mountain from whose summit I
gazed at the distant Velino which overtops like a crystal of amethyst
all the other peaks. This was during one of my two visits to Licenza.
Pleasant days at Licenza, duly noting in the house of Horace what I have
noted with Shelley and other bards, namely, that these fellows who sing
so blithely of the simple life yet contrive to possess extremely
commodious residences; pleasant days among those wooded glens, walking
almost every morning in the footsteps of old Ramage up the valley in
whose streamlet the willow-roots sway like branches of coral--aloft
under the wild walnuts to that bubbling fountain where I used to meet my
two friends, Arcadian goat-herds, aboriginal fauns of the thickets, who
told me, amid ribald laughter, a few personal experiences which nothing
would induce me to set down here.
July 26: La Rocca. What happened at La Rocca?
October 2: Florence. What happened at Florence? A good deal, during
those noteworthy twelve hours!
Some memories have grown strangely nebulous; impossible to reconstruct,
for example, what went on during the days of drowsy discomfort at
Montecelio. A lethargy seems to have fallen on me; I lived in a dream
out of which there emerges nothing save the figure of the local
tobacconist, a ruddy type with the face of a Roman farmer, who took me
to booze with him, in broad patriarchal style, every night at a
different friend's house. Those nights at Montecelio! The mosquitoes!
The heat! Could this be the place which was famous in Pliny's day for
its grove of beeches? How I used to envy the old Montecelians their
climate!
July 23: Saracinesca. What happened? I recollect the view over the
sweltering Campagna from the dizzy castle-ruin, in whose garden I see
myself nibbling a black cherry, the very last of the season, plucked
from a tree which grows beside the wall whereon I sat. That suffices: it
gives a key to the situation. I can now conjure up the gaunt and sombre
houses of this thick-clustering stronghold; the Rembrandtesque shadows,
the streets devoid of men, the picture of some martial hero in a
cavern-like recess where I sought shelter from the heat, a black
crucifix planted in the soil below the entrance of the village--my
picture of Saracinesca is complete, in outline.
July 31: Subiaco. Precisely! A week later, then, I walk thirty-two
chilometres along the shadeless high road, an insane thing to do, to
Subiaco and back. There, in the restaurant Aniene, when all the
luncheon-guests have departed for their noonday nap, the cook of the
establishment, one of those glorious old Roman he-cooks, comes up to my
table. Did I like the boiled trout?
Rather flabby, I reply. A little tasteless. Let him try, next time, some
white vinegar in the water and a bay-leaf or two.
He pricks up his ears: we are gens du metier. I invite him to sit down
and inquire: how about a bottle of Cesanese, now that we are alone? An
excellent idea! And he, in his turn, will permit himself to offer me
certain strawberries from his own private store.
"Strawberries?" I ask. "Who ever heard of strawberries in Central Italy
on the 31 July? Why, I devoured the last cherry a week ago, and it was
only alive because it grew above the clouds."
These, he explains mysteriously, are special strawberries, brought down
from near the snow-line by a special goat-boy. They are not for the
guests, but "only for myself." Strawberries are always worth paying for;
they are mildly purging, they go well with the wine. And what a
wonderful scent they have! "You remind me of a certain Lucullo," I said,
"who was also nice about strawberries. In fact, he made a fine art of
eating and drinking."
"Your Lucullo, we may take it, was a Roman?"
"Romano di Roma."
Thus conversing with this rare old ruffian, I forget my intention of
leaving a card on Saint Scolastica. She has waited for me so long. She
can wait a little longer....
August 9: Villa Lante.
August 12: Ferento. What happened at Ferento?
Now what happened at Ferento? Let me try to reconstruct that morning's
visit.
I have clear memories of the walk from Viterbo--it would be eighteen
chilometres there and back, they told me. I had slept well in my quaint
little room with the water rushing under the window, and breakfasted in
receptive and responsive mood. I recall that trudge along the highway
and how I stepped across patches of sunlight from the shade of one
regularly planted tree into that of another. The twelfth of August....
It set me thinking of heathery moorlands and grouse, and of those
legions of flies that settle on one's nose just as one pulls the
trigger. It all seemed dim and distant here, on this parching road,
among southern fields. I was beginning to be lost in a muse as to what
these boreal flies might do with themselves during the long winter
months while all the old women of the place are knitting Shetland
underwear when, suddenly, a little tune came into my ears--a wistful
intermezzo of Brahms. It seemed to spring out of the hot earth. Such a
natural song, elvishly coaxing! Would I ever play it again? Neither
that, nor any other.
It turned my thoughts, as I went along, to Brahms and led me to
understand why no man, who cares only for his fellow-creatures, will
ever relish that music. It is an alien tongue, full of deeps and
rippling shallows uncomprehended of those who know nothing of lonely
places; full of thrills and silences such as are not encountered among
the habitations of men. It echoes the multitudinous voice of nature, and
distils the smiles and tears of things non-human. This man listened, all
alone; he overheard things to which other ears are deaf--things terrible
and sweet; the sigh of some wet Naiad by a reedy lake, the pleadings and
furies of the genii--of those that whisper in woodlands and caverns by
the sea, and ride wailing on thunder-laden clouds, and rock with ripe
laughter in sunny wildernesses. Brahms is the test. Whoso dreads
solitude will likewise dread his elemental humour.
It kept me company, this melodious and endearing fairy, till where a
path, diverging to the right, led up to the ruins already visible. There
the ethereal comrade took flight, scared, maybe, because my senses took
on a grossly mundane complexion--it is a way they have, thank
God--became absorbed, that is, in the contemplation of certain
blackberries wherewith the hedge was loaded. I thought: the tons of
blackberries that fall to earth in Italy, unheeded! And not even a
Scotsman knows what blackberries are, until he has tasted these. I am no
gourmet of such wild things; I rather agree with Goethe when he says:
"How berries taste, you must ask children." But I can sympathise with
the predilections of others, having certain predilections of my own.
Once, at a miserable place in North Ireland, region of bad whisky and
porter, they brought me at dinner some wine of which they knew
nothing--they had got it from a shipwreck or some local sale. I am
rather fond of hock. And this particular bottle bore on its label the
magic imprint of a falcon sitting on a hilltop. Connoisseurs will know
that falcon. They will understand how it came about that I remained in
the inn till the last bottle of nectar was cracked. What a shame to
leave a drop for anybody else! Once again, on a bicycle trip from Paris
to the Mediterranean, I came upon a broad, smiling meadow somewhere in
the Auvergne, thickly besprinkled with mushrooms. There was a village
hard by. In that village I remained till the meadow was close cropped.
Half a ton of mushrooms--gone. Some people are rather fond of mushrooms.
And that is the right spirit: to leave nothing but a tabula rasa for
those that come after. It hurt me to think that anybody else should have
a single one of those particular mushrooms. Let them find new ones, in
another field; not in mine.
Now what would your amateur of blackberries do in Italy? From the fate
which nearly overtook me he might save himself by specialising; by
dividing the many local varieties into two main classes and devoting his
whole attention to one or the other; to the kind such as I found on
Elba--small and round and fragrant, of ruddy hue, and palpitating with
warm sunbeams; or to that other kind, those that grow in clearings of
the Apennines where the boughs droop to earth with the weight of their
portentous clusters--swarthy as night, huge in size, oval, and fraught
with chilly mountain dews.
No true enthusiast, I feel sure, would ever be satisfied with such an
unfair division of labour--so one-sided an arrangement. He would curse
his folly for having specialised. While engaged upon one variety, he
would always be hankering after that other kind and thinking how much
better they were. What shall he do, then? Well, he might devote one year
to one species, the next to another, and so on. Or else--seeing that
every zone of altitude bears brambles at its season and that the
interval between the maturing of the extreme varieties is at least four
months--he might pilgrimage athwart the country in a vertical sense,
devouring blackberries of different flavour as he went along; he might
work his way upwards, boring a tunnel through the landscape as a beetle
drills an oak, and leaving a track of devastation in his rear--browsing
aloft from the sea-board, where brambles are black in June, through
tangled macchia and vine-clad slopes into the cooler acclivities of rock
and jungle--grazing ever upward to where, at close of September and in
the shadow of some lonely peak on which the white mantle of winter has
already fallen, he finds a few more berries struggling for warmth and
sunshine, and then, still higher up, just a few more--the last, the very
last, of their race--dwarfs of the mountains, earthward-creeping, and
frozen pink ere yet they have had time to ripen. Here, crammed to the
brim, he may retire to hibernate, curled up like a full-gorged bear and
ready to roll downhill with the melting snows and arrive at the
sea-coast in time to begin again. What a jolly life! How much better
than being Postmaster-General or Inspector of Nuisances! But such
enthusiasts are nowhere to be found. I wish they were; the world would
be a merrier place....
Here is the ruined town of Ferento, all alone on the arid brow of the
hill. Nothing human in sight. A charming spot it must have been in olden
times, when the country was more timbered; now all is bare--brown earth,
brown stones. Dutifully I inspect the ruins and, applying the method of
Zadig or something of that kind, conclude that Ferento, this particular
Ferento, was relatively unimportant and relatively modern, although so
fine a site may well have commended itself from early days as a
settlement. I pick up, namely, a piece of verde antico, a green marble
which came into vogue at a later period than many other coloured ones.
Ergo, Ferento was relatively modern as antiquities go; else this marble
would not occur there. I seek for coloured ones and find not the
smallest fragment; nothing but white. Ergo, the place was relatively
insignificant; else the reds and yellows would also be discoverable. I
observe incidentally--quite incidentally!--that the architecture
corroborates my theory; so do the guide-books, no doubt, if there are
any. Now I know, furthermore, the origin of that small slab of verde
antico which had puzzled me, mixed up, as it was, among the mosaics of
quite modern marbles in that church whither I had been conducted by a
local antiquarian to admire a certain fresco recently laid bare, and
some rather crude daubs by Romanelli.
Out again, into the path that overlooks the steep ravine. Here I find,
resting in the shadow of the wall, an aged shepherd and his flock and a
shaggy, murderous-looking dog of the Campagna breed that shows his teeth
and growls incessantly, glaring at me as if I were a wolf. "Barone" is
the brute's name. I had intended to clamber down and see whether the
rock-surface bears any traces of human workmanship; the rock-surface, I
now decide, may take care of itself. It has waited for me so long. It
can wait a little longer.
"Does that beast of yours eat Christians?"
"He? He is a perfect capo di c----. That is his trick, to prevent people
from kicking him. They think he can bite."