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Updated: May 19, 2025
It is there that the veglia, or evening rendezvous of lovers, the serenades and balls and feste, of which one hears so much in the popular minstrelsy, take place. Of course it would not be difficult to paint the darker shades of this picture. Autumn comes, when the contadini of Lucca and Siena and Pistoja go forth to work in the unwholesome marshes of the Maremma, or of Corsica and Sardinia.
A part of the mountain-top is occupied by the church of St. Margaret, and this was St. Margaret's day. The houses pause roundabout it and leave a grassy slope, planted here and there with lean black cypresses. The contadini from near and far had congregated in force and were crowding into the church or winding up the slope.
Nor in winter will she forget to be liberal; she sends you wood, oil, vine branches, laurels, junipers to keep out snow and wind, and then she comforts you with the sun, offering you the hare and the roe, and the field to follow them...." Nor are the joys of summer less, for you may read Greek and Latin in the shadow of the courtyard where the fountains splash, while your girls are learning songs and your boys are busy with the contadini, in the vineyards or beside the stream.
Making many allowances for the poetic fancies of Italian peasants, he set it down for fact that his friend, in a simple way and among rustic folks, had been an exceedingly delightful fellow in his younger days. But the contadini sometimes added, shaking their heads and sighing, that the young Count was sadly changed since he went to Rome.
The labour of the husbandmen in Tuscany is very graceful, partly, I think, because it is so primitive, but also because the people have an eminently noble carriage, and are fashioned on the lines of antique statues. I noticed two young contadini in one field, whom Frederick Walker might have painted with the dignity of Pheidian form.
The Contadini were driving into the city in their basket wagons, and there were some fair young faces among them, that made us think Italian beauty was not altogether in the imagination. After walking three or four miles, we entered the Appenines, keeping along the side of the Arno, whose bed is more than half dried up from the long summer heats.
At noontide, the contadini and laborers feed upon them without even the condiment of salt, crunching their white teeth through the crisp, wet leaves, and alternating a bite at a great wedge of bread; and toward nightfall, one may see carts laden high up with closely packed masses of them, coming in from the Campagna for the market.
Two cloddish-looking contadini stood gazing at him, rapt in awe. Kosinksi stood little apart from the rest, not a little bewildered by the enthusiastic reception which had been accorded him by old friends.
"Oh come, Spadoni, that won't do this time. Bah, you are the only living soul in the town that don't believe it then. Evidence, per Dio! Go and ask the men at the Porta Nuova, who received the body, when the contadini brought it in," cried a dozen voices at once.
It represents a moment in the national development when the sphere of the Count outside the city was defined against the sphere of the municipality. The Contadini are the people of the Contado, the Count's men. Fam. xi. 16, ed.
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