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Updated: May 5, 2025
There were facchini those doers of nondescript smallest services, quarreling amiably to pass the time, springing forward for custom as the gondolas neared the steps; gransieri the licensed traghetto beggars, ragged and picturesque, pushing past with their long, crooked poles, under pretence of drawing the gondolas to shore; one or two women from the islands, filling the moments with swift, declamatory speech until the gondola of Giambattista or of Jacopo should close the colloquy; an older peasant, tranquilly kneeling to the Madonna of the traghetto, amid the clatter, while steaming greasy odors from her housewifely basket of Venetian dainties mount slowly, like some travesty of incense, and cloud the humble shrine.
The parish priest went first, bearing the consecrated wafer in its vessel, and at his side an acolyte holding a yellow silk umbrella over the Eucharist; after them came a number of facchini in white robes and white hoods that hid their faces; their tapers burned sallow and lifeless in the new morning light; the bell jangled dismally.
Whoever has lifted hand in your service in any way during the past year expects a reward on New Year's for the complaisance, and in some cases the shop-keepers send to wish you a bel capo d'anno, with the same practical end in view. On New Year's Eve and morning bands of facchini and gondoliers go about howling vivas under charitable windows till they open and drop alms.
The brave words comforted her a little. She was very tired, and presently she slept. She was awakened by the discordant yells of the Roman facchini on the station platform.
The funeral train is of ten or twenty facchini, wearing tunics of white, with caps and capes of red, and bearing the society's long, gilded candlesticks of wood with lighted tapers. Priests follow them chanting prayers, and then comes the bier, with a gilt crown lying on the coffin, if the dead be a babe, to indicate the triumph of innocence.
Danglars was tired and sleepy; he therefore went to bed, placing his pocketbook under his pillow. Peppino had a little spare time, so he had a game of mora with the facchini, lost three crowns, and then to console himself drank a bottle of Orvieto. The next morning Danglars awoke late, though he went to bed so early; he had not slept well for five or six nights, even if he had slept at all.
It appeared to me time to go to the front, but Pasquale said that this evening I might stay behind during the performance if I liked and I accepted his invitation, for I had a toy theatre of my own once and used to do The Miller and His Men with an explosion at the end; it had to be at the end, not only as a bonne-bouche, but also because my audience, not being composed of Sicilian facchini, were driven out of the room by its effects.
It is a little harder for us this winter than usual, because there are so few forestieri. It really seemed as if the alberghi would never open. Luigi said that every evening there would be a crowd of people waiters, and facchini, and so on waiting at the door of the albergo and begging for work.
For nearly six years he did his duty in that state of life in which it pleased the Secretary of War and General Scott to call him; he had crossed the plains one bleak winter to a post in the Rocky Mountains, and he had danced through two summers at Fort Adams at Newport; he had been stationed for a while in New Mexico, where there was an abundance of the pleasant sport of Indian-fighting even now he had only to make believe a little to see the tufted head of a Navajo peer around the columns supporting the Lion of Saint Mark, or to mistake the fringe of facchini on the edge of the Grand Canal for a group of the shiftless half-breeds of New Mexico.
I must own that the honest facchini who bore the candles were equally affable, and even freer with their jokes. But in this they formed a fine contrast to here and there a closely hooded devotee, who, with hidden face and silent lips, was carrying a taper for religion, and not, like them, for money.
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