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Of course there was a pleasure in recognising some details of former experience in Florence as they recurred. Colville had been met at once by a festa, when nothing could be done, and he was more than consoled by the caressing sympathy with which he was assured that his broken trunk could not be mended till the day after to-morrow; he had quite forgotten about the festas and the sympathy.
At Bologna I found a festa, or rather two festas, a civil and a religious, going on in mutual mistrust and disparagement. The civil, that of the Statuto, was the one fully national Italian holiday as by law established the day that signalises everywhere over the land at once its achieved and hard-won unification; the religious was a jubilee of certain local churches.
Among the Trasteverini, particularly, these serenades are common. Some of them are very clever in their improvisations and imitations of different dialects, particularly of the Neapolitan, in which there are so many charming songs. Their skill in improvisation, however, is not generally displayed in their serenades, but in the osterias, during the evenings of the festas in summer.
A curious survival of mediæval festivity still exists in the "Moresca," a kind of Pyrrhic dance, danced on national festas, which is a reminiscence of the days of Algerian piracy. There are twenty-four dancers, and the leaders, the standard-bearer, and the "bula," who is the spouse of the Moorish king.
It chanced to be a feast-day; and, instead of playing in the sun-scorched piazzas of the city, or beneath the windows of some unresponsive palace, they had bethought themselves to try the echoes of these woods; for, on the festas of the Church, Rome scatters its merrymakers all abroad, ripe for the dance or any other pastime.
These have mostly grown up within the last hundred years or so as colonies from the chief town, for when the country was less secure the women and children were left within the town walls while the men went down to work in the fields and to fish in the sea, returning for Sundays and festas, and gradually, as it became possible, settlements were formed below to which the women and children could safely be moved.
The bell of the Duomo was ringing, the shops were mostly closed, and all Florence was out in the streets, it being the Festa of the Befana, one of the greatest of all the ever-recurring festas of Florence. Street urchins were parading the thoroughfares with horns and wildly shouting, and there was an exchange of presents on every hand.
They give two performances every day, from six to eight and from nine to eleven, all the year round, Sundays and festas included, unless some irremovable obstacle, such as an illness or a wedding in the family, or the death of the king or an earthquake, necessitates the closing of the theatre. Nearly all the rest of every day they are cleaning up and preparing for the next performance.
And then the festas, every third day a festa. The devil was in my body when I left there and dragged little Brigida into all this misery. We used to walk of an evening along the Marinella, that's a strip of beach just beyond the Molo Piccolo. You were never in Naples?" "Not I," said Richard. "Here, wet your lips, and try to go to sleep again." "No, I can't sleep for thinking.
A dozen sympathetic arms had instantly offered in response to this appeal, for the good-natured Venetian crowd adored festas they also and it would be a pity of pities that the bambini should miss it, and this one was like heaven! "Ah, but she is beautiful, the bride beautiful as an angel: and young young like my Teresina!
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