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Updated: June 6, 2025
We smoked a last cigar, crossed our traghetto, and were soon sound asleep at the end of a long, pleasant day. The ball, we heard next morning, finished about four. Since that evening I have had plenty of opportunities for seeing my friends the gondoliers, both in their own homes and in my apartment. Several have entertained me at their mid-day meal of fried fish and amber-coloured polenta.
The dinner of the laborer is a dish of polenta, a few figs, some cheese, a glass of thin wine. His wants are few and easily supplied. He is not overfed, his diet is not stimulating; I should say that he would pay little to the physician, that familiar of other countries whose family office is to counteract the effects of over-eating.
I was with him heart and soul, but I had the parish on my shoulders, and perhaps my long experience of men had made me a little less credulous than Christian charity requires; for I could have sworn that some of the heroes who hung on him had never had a whiff of Austrian blood, and would have fed out of the same trough with the white-coats if there had been polenta enough to go round.
I have seldom caught a casual expression from passers in the streets of Venice which did not relate in some way to gold Napoleons, zwanzigers, florins, or soldi, or else to wine and polenta. I note this trait in the Venetians, which Goldoni observed in the Milanese a hundred years ago, and which I incline to believe is common to all Italians.
There were crumbling fronts, shored up with beams; sordid lodgings whose filth and bareness could be seen through shattered windows; and numerous petty shops, all the open-air cook-stalls of a lazy race which never lighted a fire at home: you saw frying-shops with heaps of polenta, and fish swimming in stinking oil, and dealers in cooked vegetables displaying huge turnips, celery, cauliflowers, and spinach, all cold and sticky.
It is a square stuccoed structure, stained light green, and covered by a dome, a tasteless monument, embellished with stucco medallions, inside, of the poet, of Virgil, of Brunetto Latini, the poet's master, and of his patron, Guido da Polenta.
The latter, usually eaten as an "extra," is really a valuable part of the diet. Corn is the same satisfactory food whether it is eaten as mush in New England, polenta in Italy, or tamales in Mexico. Many of the people of Mexico and Central America live on corn and beans to a surprising extent. In portions of Italy the rural population have adopted the grain as their main food.
The greater part of his poem was composed during this period; but it appears that till the end of his life he continued to retouch the work. The last and most generous patron of Dante was Guido di Polenta, lord of Ravenna, and father of Francesca da Rimini, whose fatal love forms one of the most beautiful episodes of this poem.
It was a delicate matter to negotiate, but quite practicable, for the good man had a large family, estates which produced almost nothing, a ruined palace at Bastia, where his children lived on polenta, and an apartment at Paris, in a furnished lodging-house of the eighteenth order.
The picturesque and half-savage Gaucho, who lived entirely on meat, and would have scorned to have walked even a hundred yards on foot, has been replaced by the Italian agricultural labourer, who lives on polenta and macaroni, and will cheerfully trudge any distance to his work.
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