North Italian Folk: Sketches of Town and Country Life

								


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                           LONDON: PRINTED BY

                SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE

                         AND PARLIAMENT STREET

   Randolph Caldecott’s



                    Sketches of North Italian Folk.



                      Special Issue of 400 Copies

                           COLOURED BY HAND.



                             Each Numbered,

                         this Copy being No 339



                         PICKERING AND CHATTO,

                                LONDON.

                           NORTH ITALIAN FOLK



                   Sketches of Town and Country Life



                                   BY

                            MRS COMYNS CARR

                  ILLUSTRATED BY RANDOLPH CALDECOTT

                                 London

                     CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY

                                  1878



                        [All rights reserved]

PREFACE.

Italy—about which so much has been written—political, geographical,
social, pontifical, poetical—Italy is my theme. But not the Italy
of popes and priests and controversies, of civic struggles and new
kingdoms, nor the Italy of tourists or guide-books, of fame and
fashion, nor even the Italy of art and artists. The folk about whom my
gossip shall be are folk who, living or dead, have made the best part
of Italy these many years gone by. They are those who, unwittingly,
inherit most of the poetry for which their nation, long ago, won its
fame; on them—innocent of lore and reading though they, most of them,
be—has fallen something that recalls the great names of their own
great men of the past. They are of the people. To them rather than to
others in the land belong the freedom and freshness, the grace and
good-heartedness, the frank honesty that finds a place even beside
worldly-wise prudence, the simple and courteous dignity which the
educated classes have not always been able to maintain. No one who has
lived long beside them could have failed to learn the grace of their
ways, the humour of their rustic simplicity; no one who has grown
up in their midst could ever forget their pleasant faces and quaint
enthusiasms, their friendly greetings, their frank speech and emphatic
opinions.
I, who thus learned to know them in days gone by, can, at all events,
never so forget; and I am fain now to set down some memory of those
sun-lit scenes of the past, for friends whose lot has never been cast,
as mine was, among them. My sketches will not always be portraits of
living people or existing things, but they will always be sketches of
things or friends that have been: recollections vignetted in the past,