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Updated: July 19, 2025
The cripple at the door lifted the heavy leather curtain for her and she put a soldo into his outstretched hand as she went in. The church seemed very still, very quiet, after the clamour of the streets. The acrid scent of incense was as the breath of spent prayer. Little yellow flames flickered in the shrine lamps before each altar, but it was early yet and for the moment no mass was being said.
We walked up the street, attended by a rabble rout of boys diavoli scatenati clean, grinning, white-teethed, who kept incessantly shouting, 'Soldo, soldo! I do not know why these sea-urchins are so far more irrepressible than their land brethren. But it is always thus in Italy. They take an imperturbable delight in noise and mere annoyance.
Well, let me sometimes feel that good wish called forth, merited by you; draw a soldo from your little purse now and then, and let it fall into the hand of a blind man without means of subsistence, of a mother without bread, of a child without a mother.
The conversazioni are of all sorts, from the conversazioni of the rigid proprietarians, where people sit down to a kind of hopeless whist, at a soldo the point, and say nothing, to the conversazioni of the demi- monde where they say any thing.
The figs, massed together in serried layers between fresh vine leaves and costing a soldo the dozen, stand around in glossy purple pyramids, so luscious that their sugary tears are exuding from their skins, and so ripe that they seem to cry to be eaten before noon.
Imagine our feelings! Just what had happened; the man had fallen from the window and had been carried dead to the hospital! Perhaps you don't know what a tremendous part the lottery plays in Italy; it is to an Italian what sausages and beer are to a German. An Italian will spend his last soldo to buy a ticket. He simply cannot live without it.
"O man Of God!" she cried, for grief had made her bold, "Mock me not so; I ask not prayers, but gold; Words cannot serve me, alms alone suffice; Even while I plead, perchance my first-born dies!" "Woman!" Tritemius answered, "from our door None go unfed; hence are we always poor. A single soldo is our only store. Thou hast our prayers; what can we give thee more?"
"Did you get any reward for returning to harbor and reporting?" I asked. "Reward!" echoed one of the men, the elder of the pair. "Not a soldo! The English only cursed us for interfering. That is why we believed that they were trying to make away with the vessel."
The priest followed with the two boys, whom he rebuked for levity, simultaneously tripping over the Latin of a prayer, with his eyes fixed on our harmless little party as if we were a funeral, and the dead in the black box an indifferent spectator Then he popped down upon his knees, and made us a lively little supplication, while a blind beggar scuffled for a lost soldo about his feet, and the gondoliers quarreled volubly.
In the large, old church in the square, which was the centre of the life of the fiera, his image, smothered in paint, sumptuously decorated with red and gold and bunches of artificial flowers, was exposed under a canopy with pillars; and thin squares of paper reproducing its formal charms the oval face with large eyes and small, straight nose, the ample forehead, crowned with hair that was brought down to a point in the centre, the undulating, divided beard descending upon the breast, one hand holding a book, the other upraised in a blessing were sold for a soldo to all who would buy them.
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