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Updated: June 21, 2025
Nina had meanwhile opened the piano, and was letting her hands stray over the instrument in occasional chords; and then in a low voice, that barely blended its tones with the accompaniment, she sang one of those little popular songs of Italy, called 'Stornelli' -wild, fanciful melodies, with that blended gaiety and sadness which the songs of a people are so often marked by.
She sung with exquisite expression, and many an evening when Guido and myself sat smoking in the garden, after little Stella had gone to bed, Nina would ravish our ears with the music of her nightingale notes, singing song after song, quaint stornelli and ritornelli songs of the people, full of wild and passionate beauty.
Of his successor I never heard any evil sung, though I remember once hearing a great crowd of soldiers and civilians at Genoa shouting monotonously. "Viva, viva il Generale Dia!" The refrain of the stornelli was onomatopoeic, and was intended to represent the sound of gunfire. "Bim Bim Bom, Bim Bim Bom, Al rombo del cannon." What a theatrical country Italy is!
There, on all those beautiful gay roads, you will pass numberless villas whispering with summer, laughing with flowers; you will see the contadini at work in the poderi, you will hear the rispetti and stornelli of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries sung perhaps by some love-sick peasant girl among the olives from sunrise till evening falls.
Signor Tigri's collection, to which I shall confine my attention in this paper, consists of eleven hundred and eighty-five rispetti, with the addition of four hundred and sixty-one stornelli. Rispetto, it may be said in passing, is the name commonly given throughout Italy to short poems, varying from six to twelve lines, constructed on the principle of the octave stanza.
They ate their bread not without due condiment of compagnatico, or even their chesnuts in the more remote and primitive mountain districts, drank their sound Tuscan wine from the generous big-bellied Tuscan flasks holding three good bottles, and sang their stornelli in cheerfulness of heart, and had no craving whatsoever for those few special liberties which were denied them.
All this is not the poetry of the Renaissance peasant; it is the poem made out of his reality; the songs which Valléra sang in the fields about his Nencia we must seek in the volume of Tigri; those rispetti and stornelli of to-day are the rispetti and stornelli of four centuries ago; they are much more beautiful and poetic than any of Lorenzo's work; but Lorenzo has given us not merely a peasant's love-song; he has given us a peasant's thoughts, actions, hopes, fears; he has given us the peasant himself, his house, his fields, and his sweetheart, as they exist even now.
And as we went up beyond San Domenico, through those lands which in spring and summer are so fruitful with their vines and olives, two peasant swains passed, chanting one of the old stornelli, those quaint love-songs of the Tuscan contadini the same which have been sung for centuries in and about old Firenze: Acqua di rio. Teco sarò di luglio e di gennaio Dove tu muori te, morirò anch'io.
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