United States or Bouvet Island ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Now there was a quick beating of the oars in the water, then silence, then a heavy splash as if one of the oars had escaped from an uncertain hand, then some uneven strokes, one oar striking the water after the other. "But Gaspare is a contadino," she said to herself, "not a fisherman. Gaspare is a contadino and " "Gaspare!" she called out. "Gaspare!"
But my contadino inhabited a large and roomy casa colonica; he and his buxom wife, had six stalwart sons, and was the richer man in consequence of having them. No, in my early Florentine days the cogito, ergo sum could not have been predicated of the Tuscans.
The road was alive with walkers and riders; here a dashing, open carriage, filled with rosy English; there a contadino, donkey-back, dressed in holiday-suit, with short-clothes of blue woolen, a scarlet waistcoat, his coarse blue-cloth jacket worn on one shoulder, and in his brown, conical-shaped hat, a large carnation-pink.
Accordingly, the young Count shouted again, and with such effect that, after several repetitions of the outcry, an old gray woman protruded her head and a broom-handle from a chamber window; the venerable butler emerged from a recess in the side of the house, where was a well, or reservoir, in which he had been cleansing a small wine cask; and a sunburnt contadino, in his shirt-sleeves, showed himself on the outskirts of the vineyard, with some kind of a farming tool in his hand.
If Andrea, a contadino by birth, an artisan by education, was not originally of the most refined nature, his artistic training did not go far towards refining him.
My donkey was killed by the railroad cars the other day, and he gave just seventeen groans before he died. I shall have luck to-day. We refrain from writing the exclamation the contadino prefaced his remarks with, for fear the reader might have a good Italian dictionary an article, by the way, the writer has never yet seen.
In the fields, the pecoraro, in shaggy sheep-skin breeches, the very type of the mythic Pan, leaned against his staff, half-asleep, and tended his woolly flock, or the contadino drove through dark furrows the old plough of Virgil's time, that figures in the vignettes to the "Georgics," dragged tediously along by four white oxen, yoked abreast.
The mouth full-lipped, petulant, and passionate above a firm round chin. He was dressed in the shirt, white trousers, and loose white jacket of a contadino; but he did not move with a peasant's slouch, rather with the elasticity and alertness of an untamed panther.
And I shall look once more on the Loggia de' Lanzi, and see Cellini's young contadino masquerading as Perseus, and in my heart I shall remember the little wax figure he made for a model, now in Bargello, which is so much more beautiful than this young giant.
At one moment he fancied that he recognized the wild, free, rather strutting walk of the fisherman. At another he believed that his fear had played him a trick, that the movements of the figure were those of an old man, some plodding contadino of the hills. Artois wondered increasingly what he was looking at. A silence fell between them.
Word Of The Day