Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 31, 2025
It cannot be the same as that between a master sitting in his chair and a servant standing hat in hand before him. And then how proudly does the gallant buttero ride past the pariah shepherds tending their shaggy flocks and seeming barely raised above them in intelligence! All this tends, as may be supposed, to civilize the buttero to a degree that he would not attain without it.
"And who and what is Nanni Silvani?" asked my companion when I had categorically answered his question by stating the name of the rider whose salutation I had returned. "Nanni or, more correctly, Signor Giovanni Silvani is a buttero of the Roman Campagna," said I.
The buttero looks down upon him from a very pinnacle of social elevation in the eyes of every inhabitant of the towns and villages around Rome, especially in those of the youthful female population.
The buffalo has ceased his trot round the railing, and stands head in air as he bellows his defiance. That is the moment seized by the watchful buttero for accepting the challenge. With a sudden spring at the animal he seizes him by the horns, and with a sudden vigorous and knowingly-applied wrench throws him to the ground on his side.
But this would involve change of habitudes, recourse to new methods, modern improvements, a confession to the mind of the buttero that he was no longer able to do what his fathers for many a generation had done before him.
They are almost always handsome fellows, well grown, and striking specimens of robust and manly vigor, probably by virtue of the lives they lead, and of the similar lives the race from which they spring have led before them; partly also, no doubt, from the fact that should any son be born to a buttero who should not be thus happily endowed, he could not think of following the ancestral occupation, but would have to be weeded out from the race and seek his place in the towns, where he would not become the father of degenerate butteri.
It must not be supposed that the buttero or his family lives on the malaria-stricken plains which his occupation requires him to be constantly riding over.
He is, as has been intimated, generally eminently self-conscious of his own advantages and proud of his position. To the other elements which go to produce this feeling may be added the pride of caste. Our buttero is probably the son and the father of a race which follows the same occupation.
Not unfrequently, the latter occurs; and then the city crowd, who were so loud in their plaudits of the victor cruel as their ancestors whose upturned thumbs condemned the conquered gladiator in the Coliseum are equally loud in their hooting of the prostrate buttero. But only his self-love and self-respect, and not his life, in these days pays the penalty.
For a young buttero to marry with a daughter of the despised shepherd class would be a mésalliance not to be thought of. Nor would a marriage with the daughter of a small artisan of the towns be deemed a very acceptable one. The chances are that the young centaur marries a girl of his own centaur breed, and all the prejudice and barriers of caste are thus propagated and intensified.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking