North Italian Folk: Sketches of Town and Country Life

								

is only an impression of green country far away, with palaces lying on
the slopes of Albaro’s hill, and a knowledge of sea beyond. Behind the
rising ground runs the town’s great aqueduct, that is built through
glens and copses when once it has left the city’s first outskirts. And
to your right is the harbour again, with ships and flags and masts, and
beyond the harbour a waste of Mediterranean neither blue nor grey nor
white, that, in the doubtful light, will seem neither land nor water,
lying out towards the sunset, where dim clouds hold Riviera mountains
in their midst.

Martedì Grasso.
Shrove Tuesday.

Of all the festas we used to have—glorious days when the sun might
shine as fiercely as it liked and we were only the better pleased,
since it was a sin to work outright, but only a venial fault to keep
one’s shops open a little, and to forget about going to mass—of all
those most comfortable saints and Virgins, how few, alas! have they
left us now! One can count the strict day off one’s fingers. ‘Per
Bacco, ’tis a disgrace truly,’ mutter the old men and women who have
been wont to consider a week where there were not three holidays at
least, one really God-forsaken and cursed by the Evil Eye of luck! But,
‘well, well, days are changed, and Providence can’t expect us to give
all that time to religion when it’s all we can do to make way against
the bad times, and keep a roof over our heads,’ say the young men
who have wives and growing children, and the women whose piety would
not be at all equal to the giving up two francs for a day’s ironing,
merely because the Virgin chose to institute a rite, or some strange
saint had seen fit to die! ’Tis an ill wind that blows nobody any
good! Perhaps the greater half of the population are better pleased
than not. The days of the dolce far niente are pretty well over, in
the north of Italy, at all events, and every man must keep pace with
his neighbours. So we let the old people grumble, the half of whose
portion it is the duty of sons and daughters to provide, and the rising
generation are content. Only when somebody wants to tell a story about
Italian festas, he finds that the throng which used to be so goodly
has grown small indeed, and that, if he must needs be faithful to the
present, his choice is very limited, and the colours on his palate
must also be only by half so brilliant as they used to be in the old
days. For where are the gorgeous trappings, the stately pageants with
which Mother Church was wont to send out her saints and her relics?
Alas, for the wild days of mirth and folly, for the glittering sights,
for the colours of street-pictures, we have grown too cynical and too
worldly-wise for such nonsense now! So, we who regret them a little—old
people or travellers that come only to marvel, modern Italy says—we are
fain to go back a step or two into the days when the sun’s glamour off