husband and sends her money from Pittsburg, therefore she alone of all
the women is exempt from work in the fields. She is personally neat and
keeps her two rooms clean. Her cousin, a slatternly creature, living
next door, and evidently the beauty’s guardian,--asked us into her
house. In spite of our curiosity to see interiors we quailed at the
threshold of that hovel inhabited by the village _naturale_ (simpleton),
who is brother to Mariuccia’s cousin, a large turkey gobbler, and
several hens.
As we took leave, Mariuccia shyly pulled my sleeve. “When the signori
return to America they will take a _passeggiata_ one day to Pittsbourgo
to see my Andrea, yes?” she whispered.
“_Figlia mia_, from our _paese_ it would take twelve hours’ travelling,
even by the railroad, to reach Pittsbourgo.” Mariuccia smiled
incredulously, she did not believe us but was too polite to say so.
J. says that when Mariuccia goes to mass she carries the American shoes
on her head (I think when he met her she _must_ have been taking them to
show to some friend) and wears _cioce_ on her feet. To fit the _cioce_
to the foot of the wearer, a square of cowhide, with the hair still on,
is soaked in water till it becomes soft and
[Illustration: _Marta, a Vestal of the Abruzzi_
From a pencil drawing in the Collection of Mrs. Whitman] pliable; a
hole is then made in each of the four corners of the hide; the foot is
placed on the damp leather, leathern thongs are passed through the holes
and wound round and round the leg and tied at the knee, so that the
_ciociari_, as the wearers of the _cioce_ are called, go cross-gartered
like Malvolio. When the cowhide is dry it has taken the shape of the
foot, and this simplest of all footgear is ready to wear.
The flat pad worn on the head to support the water-jar is Mariuccia’s
pocket. It is the obvious place to carry things. When there is no
heavier burden of wood or water, her knitting or door key takes its
place. I sent Elena with a packet to the Marchesa to-day--of course, she
put it on her head. As it contained nothing but chiffon, the wind sent
it whirling, and Elena said “_Sfortunata!_” Her little sister, Tina,
three years old, balances a block of wood on her head and toddles
alongside when Elena goes to draw water at the fountain; she is learning
the art of burthen-bearing. Marta, who is six,--the age at which the
vestals were admitted to the novitiate,--has sole charge of the
household fire. When her mother and grandmother toil up from the valley
with their mighty loads of fagots, Marta trots gallantly beside them
under her small load of brush for kindling.
“Why does not your brother, Francesco, help to carry up wood?” we asked
Marta. She shook her firm little head:
“_’Gnor, questo non èlavoro da uomo_ (That is not man’s work).”
Francesco is eight; his hair is a golden fleece, his cheeks are red
apples.
I notice that no man carries weights on his head; if by a rare chance he
has a load to carry, he takes it on his back. We asked the doctor if the
splendid port of the women came from the caryatid act. He said it was
possible, but that the price was high. “So many of the poor creatures
die of consumption. Only the strongest resist.” Here is the survival of
the fittest with a vengeance!
We are good friends with the _sindaco_ of Roccaraso, a social soul
pleased with an opportunity of enlightening the stranger. His village
has a population of seventeen hundred, mostly old men, women, and
children. Four hundred of the young men are in “Pittsbourgo,” most of
them, like Andrea, stone-masons. Others are stable-strappers at Rome or
Naples. The only able-bodied men we have seen at work are the barber
and the blacksmith. The women do practically all the work of the
community; they dig, plough, sow, and reap. The free, proud bearing this
gives them is wonderful; their beauty surpasses belief. Michael Angelo’s
sibyls spin at every street corner, Raphael’s Madonnas suckle their
children at every doorway. The old women are either strong and upright,
like Elena’s grandmother, or, if they go to pieces and crouch into
withered crones, it is with an admirable sombre dignity. We have only
once been begged from: a very old woman,--she looked like Vedder’s
Cumæan sibyl,--evidently ill and suffering, and distinctly not a
professional beggar, after looking furtively about to see if any one
were in sight, laid hold of the hem of my dress and asked for money. She
touched her hand to her lips before and after receiving it, as they do
in the orient. We fancy we come across other traces of Saracen influence
(they overran this part in the Dark Ages) in three-year-old Tina’s tiny
frock covering her down to the feet, and the way the women hide their
mouths when a stranger passes. In a town to the southward the women wear
veils, which they draw half over their faces when out of doors.
ROCCARASO, September 25, 1898.
Still in this sublime place, keyed up and braced famously by the fine
air. No, the name is not Roccaras_a_, though the mistake is perfectly
natural. Roccaraso is an abbreviation of Rocca del Rasino, rock of the
Rasino, the name of the stream running through the valley. The walled,
fortified town was founded in the fifth century; it has changed very
little since. Late this afternoon we stumbled up the badly paved street,
passed out under the ancient gateway between the two ruined towers, down
the steep, stony way to the sheepfolds at the foot of the hill. The
girls were waiting to milk the flocks driven up from the valleys and
down from the hills by the shepherds and their dogs. From the distance
came the song of the “Little Swallow” played on a pipe by Francesco, who
tends a composite flock of sheep and goats. In the early morning
Francesco passes through the town calling his herd together. At the
sound of his voice four brown sheep file down the steps from the house
opposite, a black goat and five white sheep patter out from Mariuccia’s
spare chamber--the very sheep whose wool is being spun and woven for my
cream-colored flannel. This evening Francesco and his flock reached the
folds before all the others. Mariuccia’s shaggy black goat made an odd
grunting noise as it walked.
“Do all the goats here have such strange voices?” we asked Francesco.
“_’Gnor_, no, this animal was brought up with a litter of pigs; in this
manner he learned their language.”
Elena’s grandfather, Giacomo, the chief of the shepherds, came in next,
leading his blind cosset lamb and knitting as he walked: a tall, stern,
gnarled old man, with white hair and keen eyes, over six feet tall, past
seventy years old. His dress is handsome and substantial: dark blue
homespun knee breeches, jacket and leggings, with silver buttons; a wide
felt hat, and a long black cloak lined with green baize. He has two
dogs, lean and fierce, with wiry white hair, pointed noses, and careworn
faces. They have heavy collars studded with sharp iron spikes.
“Good-evening, Sor’ Giacomo, how goes it?”
“_’Gnor_, badly. Last night the wolves carried off the calf I was
fattening for Christmas.”
“Where were the dogs?”
“They keep watch at the folds; the calf was at my cottage.” He counted
the sheep as they filed through the wicket into the pen. “_Vent’ uno,
venti due_; it is early for wolves, but--one understands it--yesterday I
met the _padre_ of Pesco Costanzi.”
“What has that to do with your calf or the wolves?”
Sor’ Giacomo shrugged his shoulders and went on counting his sheep. We
understood: the priest of Pesco Costanzi has the “_malocchio_” (evil
eye).
“How many are your sheep, Sor’ Giacomo?”
“_Trenta_ (thirty), as you see.”
“It was not always so; formerly there were more?”
“_’Gnor, si._ When I was Francesco’s age my father had five thousand
sheep in his care. In those days we of the Abruzzi raised wool for the
whole kingdom, for the world, if you will. Now it is finished: these
poor, miserable ones scarcely suffice to clothe Roccaraso.”
“Why is this thing so?”
“Why? because of an infamy. Understand, since that _castello_ was
built,--who knows how long ago?--since that time at the season when the
white (snow) comes, when the earth sleeps, we of the Abruzzi have always
had the right to drive our sheep down to the plains of Apulia, there to
graze through the winter. In a moment the thing is changed, the old
right is taken away, we are forbidden to drive down our sheep. But is
the winter changed? are the wolves banished? does the grass grow all the
year in these mountains? I tell you it is finished.”
Giacomo is right, it is finished; he is one of the last _pastori
Abruzzesi_. It is a pity; fourteen centuries of herding sheep have
produced a _pur sang_ I have not often seen. The people hereabouts have
that proud look of race that the Bishereen of Egypt and some of the
American Indians have. “_Moglie e buoi ai paese suoi_ (wives and cattle
from your own country)” is a rule rarely broken. The old shepherd-kings
of the Abruzzi married only hill women, scorning the effete race of the
plain, the vitiated blood of the cities. Giacomo cannot understand a
people particular about the breeding of horses and dogs careless about
the breeding of men. He said to his granddaughter Elena:
“What! you wish to marry that poor, sickly fellow, Paolo? Do you think
more of yourself than of your family? Lucky for you your parents were
not so selfish and imprudent.”
Elena has given up Paolo. She wants to go to Rome with us, to earn a
little money to add to her _dote_, so that she may have pretensions to
make as good a marriage as Mariuccia! The _mariage de convenances_, you
see, is as much the rule among the Italian peasants as among the
aristocrats.
We walked to Pesco Costanzi yesterday through the green valley, where
the hobbled donkeys were grazing, and over a golden pasture infested
with talkative geese. All the able-bodied women were at work in the
glorious fields, threshing oats, shelling corn, drying beans. In the
village, humpbacked, crippled, invalid women sat at the doors of their
dark cottages making lace. The Marchesa first discovered the survival of
an ancient lace industry in this hamlet. In the days of the Medici,
girls from Pesco Costanzi found their way to Florence, on some sort of
scholarship, and brought back the art of lace-making, and the fine
renaissance patterns of that time which the women make to this day. We
like it better than any peasant lace we have seen, and have ordered
several patterns of it, the doctor undertaking to remit the money and
deliver the goods.
On the way back to Roccaraso we passed by the tiny hamlet of Pietro
Anzieri, where we saw a man ploughing a desolate patch of land with the
forked branch of a tree shod with a long iron point, a primitive kind of
plough I remember to have seen represented in an Etruscan wall painting.
We loitered by the way, watching the lone man at work, whereat he
stopped, leaned on his plough, and hailed us with the best Bowery
accent.
“Say, are youse from the Yernited States?”
“Oh, yes, we are North Americans.”
“Of course; I see that. I come from New York myself. How you like Pietro
Anzieri? Too slow for me; I only come to see my old mother; go back next
month; got a job at Pittsbourgo.”
He was a hearty fellow, twenty-two or-three years old, a good type of
the Abruzzi peasant, plus the American expression.
“How long have you lived over there?”
“Since I was a leetle boy--eleven or twelve, I dunno.”
The doctor says that most of those who go out to America under the age
of twenty take root in our country and stay there. Men of thirty only
remain long enough to “make their pile,” coming back to Italy to grow
old and spend it.
ROCCARASO, September 28, 1898.
To Castel di Sangro this morning: a gay market-town set in a flowery
meadow beside a small river widening below the bridge into a pond where
the women were washing clothes. I thought I recognized a pink shirt
being beaten between two stones as one of J.’s, which Elena ought to
have herself washed. Her aunt lives here. Perhaps she is a washerwoman!
We were puzzled by the name, Castel di Sangro,--the _castelli_ are all
hill towns,--till we learned that the inhabitants several hundred years
ago deserted the original Castel di Sangro, perched on a hill even
harder to climb than Roccaraso’s, and moved, bag and baggage, down to
the plain and founded the present town. The fibre of the race had
softened since the founders built that crumbling _castello_! We climbed
to the top; the view was well worth the stiff walk. The old town is now
a city of the dead. Long lines of black numbered crosses mark the
graves. Where they stopped a wide, deep open trench began. An old
fellow, a sort of rustic sacristan, who had come up to clean the church,
was the only person in sight.
“What is that trench for?” we asked him.
“_’Gnor_, who can tell which of us it may serve as a bed? In summer we
prepare for winter; when the earth is frozen hard we cannot break her
crust to bury the dead.” He went back to the church and began to toll
the bell.
Looking down, we saw a funeral procession like that in Siegfried
climbing slowly up the narrow, steep mountain path. We went down by a
steep track on the other side to avoid meeting it.
We lunched at the inn; J. ordered trout (the stream is alive with them),
which were served pickled! Everything else was very good. It was a
market day, and the town was full of people; one dealer wished to sell
us a horse, another offered a cow with a crumpled horn. Everywhere the
women were busy making _conserva di pomodoro_; outside the windows of
nearly every house were wooden bowls full of mashed tomatoes evaporating
in the sun. This conserve is the staple condiment of Italian cooking, as
necessary as butter or Parmesan cheese. The tomatoes are reduced to a
stiff red paste, which keeps indefinitely and is used to make tomato
sauce, to dress _risotto_, _spaghetti_, _carciofi_, served in every
conceivable way. Being so concentrated it makes a much richer sauce
than you can get from canned tomatoes. When we got back to Roccaraso we
found that Vittoria had begun to prepare our winter supply of
_conserva_--it takes days to make it. This gives the house a pervasive
fragrance of “golden apples” and produces a comfortable sense of
household thrift.
There is a full moon to-night: a white mist marks the line of the
Rasino; it is too late in the year for nightingales: from the valley
comes a faint snatch of music, played on a shepherd’s pipe, “_povera
rondinella, O povera rondinella!_”
VI
SCANNO
ROCCARASO, October 1, 1898.
Last Monday morning, having decided quite suddenly to go to Scanno, we
applied to the _sindaco_ for horses and a guide.
“For to-morrow, yes, I will arrange everything; for to-day it is not
possible.”
“Why? The weather is fine, it is only nine o’clock. If we start at noon
we shall be in time.”
“_Pazienza, Signori!_ I tell you it is not possible. The horses are at
Pietro Anzieri threshing oats. The guide has gone to sell a pig at
Castel di Sangro; it is market day.”
“There must be other horses. Do you mean to say there is but one man in
Roccaraso who knows the road to Scanno? Even Mariuccia has been there.”
“Doubtless! many of our women went there last year on a pilgrimage. It
is not easy to find a man who knows the way: it is a horrible mountain
trail. I myself, Signors, born in Roccaraso, have not seen Scanno.”
“We shall start at twelve to-day, if we have to walk and take Mariuccia
for a guide.”
I was sorry for the _sindaco_, a progressive man, with a dim sense at
the back of his head of a future for Roccaraso if the mad _forestieri_
take a fancy to it. He pulled his long ginger whiskers and considered.
“There is Fra Diavolo, brother of him I would send with you; possibly he
knows the way, but I take no responsibility.”
“Send Fra Diavolo and the horses at noon, and the responsibility shall
be upon our own heads.” He shook _his_ head, pained but indulgent. The
ways of the _forestieri_ are becoming known to him, and their lack of
that virtue of old people and old peoples, _pazienza_!
At quarter to twelve Fra Diavolo was at our door, with a vicious mule
and pack-saddle for me, a weak-kneed, blind horse with prehistoric
trappings and saddle-bags for J. We soon left the dazzling white road,
struck across a grassy valley, and entered a wild, stony gorge, which
reminded us of the Colorado Canyon. The path is the worst I have seen
outside of Palestine. We soon dismounted and let Fra Diavolo lead our
beasts. He had to be very careful, lest they should break their legs.
The walls of the ravine towered on either side of us; to the left the
granite rocks, which form the summit, seemed to have been shaped into
Gothic battlements, towers, and buttresses. I could hardly believe that
nature, and not one of the Sangallo family (the famous architects), had
been the designer. The trees are of primeval growth. The gorge is
crossed by open plateaus and glens covered with ancient oaks and
beeches. At three o’clock we halted in a fairy dell beside a spring. The
water ran through a trough made from the hollowed trunk of a tree. A
pink-nosed sheep was drinking--the only brave sheep I ever saw,--I had a
hand-to-hand battle with him to get my share of the water. Afterwards J.
and I sat down to rest and contemplated the trail, which here divided
into two.
“Which is the way to Scanno?” we asked our guide.
“Who knows, Signori?” said Fra Diavolo.
“Do not you?”
“No more than yourselves.”
“Why did you say you could show us the way?”
“With the tongue one may go to Sardinia.”
“But we have been walking three hours; for the last two we have met no
living creature except these sheep.”
“Where there are sheep there will be a shepherd,” said Fra Diavolo.
“_Povera rondinella, povera rondinella!_” The familiar air was played on
a shepherd’s pipe.
“What did I say?” growled Fra Diavolo, a really cross person.
We came upon the shepherd a minute later. He sat with his back against
an oak playing on a pipe; near him a goat with one hind leg in splint
cropped the grass. They both seemed astounded at seeing us.
“The way to Scanno, _figlio mio_?”
“This is not the path. Where have the Signori come from? Roccaraso? it
is not possible! You have come by a trail only fit for goats and asses.
Why did you not take the mule-path? That is easy enough.”
“Well, for certain excellent reasons we did not take the mule-path, but
we are going to Scanno all the same.”
“Truly? Then take the lower path--of an unimaginable badness! With good
luck you may reach Scanno by _Ave Maria_.”
_Ave Maria_ is a little puzzling till you learn that it varies with the
season of the year, and is always celebrated fifteen minutes after
sunset.
By this time the gorge was in shadow, and though it is one of the most
beautiful places on earth, and we knew we should never see it again, we
pushed on as fast as we could. At sunset we toiled up the high hill on
which Scanno is perched. It is an old, gray, walled town; the gates
stood open. At the fountain just outside the gateway a dozen women and
girls were drawing water. The moment I saw them I cried out, “They look
like Greeks.” I can hardly tell what gave the impression. J. says it was
the head-dress; I think it was their expression. Their bearing was as
free and noble as the Roccarasans’, but less friendly. They took no
notice of us, showed nothing of that kindly animation and curiosity we
usually find, though travellers are scarce in these parts. I only know
one person who has been here--Enrico Coleman, the painter. I question if
either Mr. Baedeker or Mr. Hare have seen Scanno. Edward Lear was here
in 1856; his visit is the last I have found described in guide-bookery.
Here, I believe, he met that old person of Abruzzi, “so blind that he
could not his foot see. When they said, ‘That’s your toe,’ he replied,
‘Is that so?’ that doubtful old man of Abruzzi.”
_He_ had a certain stoicism, you see, like our silent women at the
fountain. Before going to the inn we stopped at a delicious gray stone
church near the gate, pushed aside the heavy leathern curtain, and
looked in. The church, decorated for a _festa_, blazing with candles,
was full of kneeling people; three priests in superb vestments were
officiating at the altar. The air was gray with the smoke of incense;
the cracked organ and harsh-voiced choristers were in full blast.
Somehow, the sumptuousness of this vespers service was extraordinarily
moving. Coming suddenly upon it after our pilgrimage over that lonely
trail made it doubly impressive.
The inn was filthier than we should have believed possible; our rooms
had not been made up since the last occupants departed. The food was
incredibly bad; even the spaghetti, dressed with rancid oil, was
uneatable. The poor landlady was so mortified at our not eating things,
and brought in the spaghetti with such an air of triumph, that we
waited until her back was turned before we threw it out of the window
into a little, dark back street, where the dogs devoured it. We supped
on the ends of bread and cheese from our saddle-bags, and raw eggs,--the
cooked ones, like the spaghetti, tasted of rancid oil. One of the first
things to learn, if you mean to travel in the byways of the world, is
how to take raw eggs. If you are sure of your glass, break your egg into
it, put a pinch of salt on the tongue, and swallow white and yolk whole.
If the glass is doubtful, you must go back to first principles, and suck
your eggs as the rats do; if they are fresh, like the Scanno eggs, there
is no better way of taking them.
We were so tired with our six hours’ tramp that we went to bed at
half-past nine--and got up again at ten! Sleep was impossible; the
pleasures of the chase only were ours that night. We made ourselves as
comfortable as we could on chairs, wrapped up in the rugs without which
we have learned never to travel. In the dim watches of the night J.
invented a portable bed, drawing the design with a burnt match in the
back of Baedeker the faithless, who only says that Scanno is the most
interesting point in the Abruzzi, and makes foolish remarks about how
high it is, the circumference of its lake, and such dry details. While
J. was designing the portable bed, I planned a foot-note to Baedeker,
about Scanno.
We made out better at breakfast than at supper. Remembering the saying,
“An egg, an apple, and a nut, you may take from any slut,” we ordered
boiled eggs, potatoes roasted in the ashes, and some raw apples.
Afterwards we walked about the town and visited the market-place, where
we had a good chance to see the strange costume of the women. The
head-dress is a curious black turban covering the whole head; the hair
showing behind the ears and below the turban is tightly braided with
bright-colored wool--red, green, yellow. I fancy each color has its
significance; perhaps one is for maids, one for matrons, one for widows.
The short skirt of heavy green cloth plaited at the waist is very full,
the bodice of dark blue cloth has large leg-of-mutton sleeves and
fastens with pretty silver buttons. The high linen chemise showing at
the neck is edged with handsome lace (_real_, of course, they quite
properly scorn the machine-made variety). Nobody offered to make
friends with us; the women held themselves proudly aloof: this was fine,
but not encouraging. The whole place is grave, gray, dignified; there
are some important-looking houses, one belonging to a rich merchant has
an air of solid well-being and thrift. Next time we shall take the
advice of the _sindaco_ and have _pazienza_! If we had given him
twenty-four hours’ notice, he would have sent word to the Mayor of
Scanno that we were coming, and we should not have found things as we
did at the inn. We also should have had “to pay through the nose,” so
perhaps it was just as well to see Scanno for once _au naturel_.
We walked to the lake of Scanno, a mile from the town, an irregular
sheet of water with misty reflections of the bare gray mountains
towering above it and the tender willows on its banks. In the little
chapel of “L’Annunziata,” on the edge of the lake, we found hundreds of
votive offerings, silver hearts on one side of the shrine, on the other
discarded crutches and trusses, hung up by grateful sufferers
miraculously cured of their ailments. These reminded us of the temple of
Juno at Veii. You know the great Etruscan town near Rome, where we saw
and bought those lovely Etruscan terra-cotta heads, votive offerings
which the priests of Juno buried in a trench behind the temple when the
walls were too full to hold more. I wonder what the priests of Scanno do
with the overplus of crutches?