From all these people there comes a babblement that seems quite
disproportioned to the number of tongues that make it. So many words are
not uttered in a New England village throughout the year--except it
be at a political canvass or town-meeting--as are spoken here, with no
especial purpose, in a single day. Neither so many words, nor so much
laughter; for people talk about nothing as if they were terribly
in earnest, and make merry at nothing as if it were the best of all
possible jokes. In so long a time as they have existed, and within such
narrow precincts, these little walled towns are brought into a closeness
of society that makes them but a larger household. All the inhabitants
are akin to each, and each to all; they assemble in the street as their
common saloon, and thus live and die in a familiarity of intercourse,
such as never can be known where a village is open at either end, and
all roundabout, and has ample room within itself.
Stuck up beside the door of one house, in this village street, is a
withered bough; and on a stone seat, just under the shadow of the
bough, sits a party of jolly drinkers, making proof of the new wine, or
quaffing the old, as their often-tried and comfortable friend. Kenyon
draws bridle here (for the bough, or bush, is a symbol of the wine-shop
at this day in Italy, as it was three hundred years ago in England), and
calls for a goblet of the deep, mild, purple juice, well diluted with
water from the fountain. The Sunshine of Monte Beni would be welcome
now. Meanwhile, Donatello has ridden onward, but alights where a shrine,
with a burning lamp before it, is built into the wall of an inn stable.
He kneels and crosses himself, and mutters a brief prayer, without
attracting notice from the passers-by, many of whom are parenthetically
devout in a similar fashion. By this time the sculptor has drunk off his
wine-and-water, and our two travellers resume their way, emerging from
the opposite gate of the village.
Before them, again, lies the broad valley, with a mist so thinly
scattered over it as to be perceptible only in the distance, and most so
in the nooks of the hills. Now that we have called it mist, it seems
a mistake not rather to have called it sunshine; the glory of so much
light being mingled with so little gloom, in the airy material of that
vapor. Be it mist or sunshine, it adds a touch of ideal beauty to the
scene, almost persuading the spectator that this valley and those hills
are visionary, because their visible atmosphere is so like the substance
of a dream.
Immediately about them, however, there were abundant tokens that the
country was not really the paradise it looked to be, at a casual glance.
Neither the wretched cottages nor the dreary farmhouses seemed to
partake of the prosperity, with which so kindly a climate, and so
fertile a portion of Mother Earth's bosom, should have filled them, one
and all. But possibly the peasant inhabitants do not exist in so grimy
a poverty, and in homes so comfortless, as a stranger, with his native
ideas of those matters, would be likely to imagine. The Italians appear
to possess none of that emulative pride which we see in our New England
villages, where every householder, according to his taste and
means, endeavors to make his homestead an ornament to the grassy
and elm-shadowed wayside. In Italy there are no neat doorsteps
and thresholds; no pleasant, vine-sheltered porches; none of those
grass-plots or smoothly shorn lawns, which hospitably invite the
imagination into the sweet domestic interiors of English life.
Everything, however sunny and luxuriant may be the scene around, is
especially disheartening in the immediate neighborhood of an Italian
home.