Some Peasant Friends, Italy, 1908
The truth is that only in parts is Italy a richly fertile country, and her summer droughts and sudden tempests of rain and hail are perhaps harder to fight against…
From: 1908 C.E. To: 1908 C.E.
Location: Apennine Mountains, Appennini, Italy
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Home Life in Italy: Letters from the Apennines by Lina Duff Gordon, 1908.
The traveller who, on his way south of the Alps, looks out of his carriage window upon irrigated fields, rich in crops, lemons, and oranges, gardens and hillsides terraced and planted with vines, does not always realise the wonder which lies hidden. Then comes a Tuscan valley waving with green corn, millet, and maize, slopes shimmering with fruit blossom and olives, maple trees garlanded with vines, and he thinks of Italy as a garden which the picturesque peasant daintily cultivates as he sings his love songs.
The truth is that only in parts is Italy a richly fertile country, and her summer droughts and sudden tempests of rain and hail are perhaps harder to fight against than our want of sun in the north. To the Italian people we owe a great part of this seeming miracle of luxuriant plenty—to the peasants who laboriously have irrigated the plains of Italy, have turned sandy wastes and the barren rocks of the Apennines into cultivated fields, and steep, arid cliffs into vineyards and olive groves. Not a square inch of ground is ever wasted, and the possible return of the soil, calculated to a nicety, is induced to yield up its full promise by incessant and vigilant toil.
But these very people, the backbone of Italy, are those who for the most part lead a life of suffering and of grinding poverty. The women are withered at forty, the men toil on like so many driven beasts, and pazienza, if any real profit went into the pockets of the toilers. For what is all this thrift and labour? To eat a little bean soup and a hunk of coarse maize bread, and clothe themselves with a cheap flannelette bought from the travelling merciaio who climbs many a steep hill with his pack.
The Italian, so quick with his knife to avenge a small wrong or a supposed insult, is the most patient being in the world in bearing the great ills of life; and they recount their misfortunes with a dignified submission to the inevitable. Only in some parts of Italy, where Socialism is rife, are they beginning to realise their poverty and the possibilities of a different sort of life. When they are all fully aroused, one wonders what will happen. At present they take the good and evil in life as part of the great scheme of the world.
Few bright gleams come to them from without;but they are naturally gay and light-hearted, and directly the sun shines and the earth yields generously, they respond in song. How a ringing voice, suddenly breaking the silence of the vineyards, seems to reveal the poetry of the land, and the misery of the singer is forgotten!
In our valley we are in touch with many sides of peasant life. Within sight of us, across the valley, and only six hours' journey between carriage-drive and walking, we reach the smooth green grass of the Alpi, where in summer the shepherds take their herds and flocks. They live in stone shelters, hardly distinguishable from the rocks around. Some we saw on the heights of the Apennines, set above a lake which lay in a deep dell, like the mirror of Venus, with giant beech-trees, stretching right down to its sea-green waters.
Range on range of mountains, bathed in opalescent summer mists, lay below, and beyond the white shimmer of the Po marked the great plain. From a summit we saw the Gulf of Genoa, like smooth, beaten gold in the setting sun.
Far below the summer pastures, and yet still high up in the Alpi, come scattered hamlets whose grey stone houses and pent roofs of slate look as if they had borne the brunt of many an Alpine winter. In the summer time all is alive, and there is a wealth of flowers in the luxuriant hay-fields. But in the late autumn the whole population, with the exception of the old and decrepit, moves down into Tuscany and the Maremma, some to mind their flocks, the others to search for work as day labourers. What those months of solitude must be like to these old people left in the snow-bound villages it is impossible to imagine. The shepherds of the Abruzzi are met with in the extreme south, but generally without their families, whom they only see for a short period of the year.
These migrations of men and herds have gone on since primitive times. The mountains and hills have a network of grass paths and mule tracks leading in every direction, which pictures a people forever on the road.
In our immediate neighbourhood we have no big landed proprietors. The Padroni of the peasant under the metayer system, or of the day labourer, are only the well-to-do artisans, local shop-keepers or notaries, who with the peasant proprietors divide the valley between them.
Some of these proprietors living in Brunella assure me that they make their land pay ten per cent, and, considering the wages they give their labourers, I can well believe it. The chemist owns a few terraces at the foot of the fortress hill, and keeps two cows and some sheep, all of which is looked after by a little crooked man, called Franceschino, who works like a machine from morning to night, and is paid four shillings a month, and is graciously allowed the leavings from their table. He sleeps with the cows.
Another proprietor, an advocate, works his farm with one man, who is offered the alternative in wages of thirteen shillings a month and is given his food (bean soup and maize bread, be it understood), or one pound six shillings a month and no food. On the other hand, when he has to get in extra labourers, especially during the harvest, he cannot get any one under two shillings a day.
On our walks with Ulisse we have got to know several of the peasants about here. Often we have come upon hamlets several miles from any road, where the women all ran out to gaze at us like a herd of cows. Then one of them has come forward and asked us to forgive them for staring, but we must have ''compassione," for it was the first time they had ever seen a woman wearing a hat!
Because of the hospitality of our peasant friends, who place their fields at our disposal, we enjoy the feeling of being immense landed proprietors without owning a single acre. "Sono padrone, padronissimil'' they say, with old-world courtesy.
Characteristic, too, of these mountain-bred people is their independence. We have always found it impossible to give them a present; a loan they will sometimes accept, and in this way. The first time that we had left a few things at a peasant's house whose little girl was ill, such as white bread and sugar, which are luxuries to them, we had no sooner returned home than I heard a voice from the drawbridge commanding me to come down. Irritated at being ordered about like a child, I leant over the ramparts and said whoever it was might come up.
To my shame, I found it was the mother of the sick child, who had hurried after us, with her skirts held up full of fresh eggs, and holding a struggling hen by the legs. These, she said, were the only things she had to offer, and apologised "for the disturbance we had taken" on her behalf. She was very distressed because "her man" had not asked us into the house, a thing which would never have happened had she been at home, but then her husband was somewhat of a bear—though a good bear, she added, with a laugh.
Once when several months had elapsed I began to breathe, thinking that at least one family had accepted the few sweets and bits of stuff given to the ragged children. At the time the mother had looked distressed, saying, "How can I compensate you for all this?" as if a fortune had been given her. But at Christmas-time she appeared with a basket on her head full of gifts for "her illustrious friends"—pigeons, eggs, a chicken, dried figs, and nuts and white grapes, kept over from the vintage. Her tact, too, was exquisite—these gifts I could not regard as exchange but as Christmas offerings which every proprietor receives from his peasant mezzadri. It will be seen that the profit is all on our side.
Their hospitality is on the same footing. Even passing strangers are sometimes pressed to taste their vintage, and no labourer or peasant eating his onion or crust by the roadside fails to beg of you to partake of it with the familiar "vuol favorzre"?
One day, seated with a strange medley of people at a wayside inn, we offered a hard-boiled egg to a toothless old man, half mendicant, half casual labourer. He was delighted, but before beginning to eat it he offered us a penny, and, as we refused it with much amusement, later in the day he brought me a bunch of wild flowers.
Gordon, Lina Duff. Home Life in Italy: Letters from the Apennines. Methuen & Co., 1908.
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