United States or Palau ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He left Miss Garland a while on the steps of the choir, where she had seated herself to rest, and went to join their companions. Mrs. Hudson was watching a great circle of tattered contadini, who were kneeling before the image of Saint Peter. The fashion of their tatters fascinated her; she stood gazing at them in a sort of terrified pity, and could not be induced to look at anything else.
Perhaps the sort one gets down Monte Video way, where France fades into Italy perhaps, at least if her kind fancy could get the better of the reality. In Sicily there were just such table-cloths as these, and just such fat floor-shaking contadini to wait upon you. And look now at the purple one behind the desk child or gnome feet not touching the floor centuries of Italy in her face.
But these exceptions are insignificant in comparison with the vast mass of songs which deal with love; and I cannot find that Tuscany, where the language of this minstrelsy is purest, and where the artistic instincts of the race are strongest, has anything at all approaching to our ballads. Though the Tuscan contadini are always singing, it rarely happens that
These they buy from the peasants on market-days; and some there are, more active than their neighbours, who make a very early start to anticipate their arrival; and many a long and weary mile will they trudge, far, far beyond the tomb of Cecilia Metella, or the Ponte Molle, before it is day, each striving to outstrip the other, and to be first to greet the simple contadini on their road Romewards from Tivoli, Frescati, Valmontone, or Veii.
The Campagna song is to be heard not only in the Campagna, but everywhere in the country, in the vineyards, in the grain-fields, in mountain and valley, from companies working together, and from solitary contadini, wherever the influence and sentiment of the Roman Campagna is felt. The moment we get into Tuscany, on the one side, or over into Naples, on the other, it begins to be lost.
There are twenty places where the Florentine story- tellers might have sat round on the grass. Outside the villa walls, beneath the over-crowding orange-boughs, straggled old Italy as well but not in Boccaccio's velvet: a row of ragged and livid contadini, some simply stupid in their squalor, but some downright brigands of romance, or of reality, with matted locks and terribly sullen eyes.
The company is commonly stupid, but one evening, as we strolled idly through the walks, we came upon an interesting group forty or fifty sailors, soldiers, youth of the people, gray-haired fishermen and contadini sitting and lying on the grass, and listening with rapt attention to an old man reclining against a tree. I never saw a manner of sweeter or easier dignity than the speaker's.
The contadini, who have been to Rome to be hired for the week to labor on the Campagna, come tramping along too, one of them often mounted on a donkey, and followed by a group carrying their tools with them; while hundreds of the middle classes, husbands and wives with their children, and paini and paine, with all their jewelry on, are out to take their festa stroll, and to see and be seen.
My land brings me just double what it brought my father! and our contadini are twice as well off. There! that's in our starving Italy in the north of course, mind you! He threw himself back, smoking furiously. 'Optimist! said a woman's voice. They looked round to see the Marchesa Fazzoleni upon them.
By rocky paths he would lead her, beyond the olives and the vines, beyond the last cottage of the contadini, up to some eyrie from which they could look down upon the sunlit world. He wanted to be in wildness with her, inexorably divided from all the trammels of civilization. A desire of savagery had hold upon him to-night. He did not go into detail.
Word Of The Day