Chapter IV: Part 4

And here Teresa is right. Leaning upon the fortification’s old wall before the front windows—that wall that holds the terrace I have told of, looking around on this sun-lit summer morning that I call to mind, scarce anyone would grumble at Teresa’s verdict. To westward Genoa is hid from sight because of many rocks and promontories that seek the waves, and are pine-fringed and clad with olives; towards the sun-rising a near point—the other of the harbour’s arms, of which our Castle’s pedestal is one—hides neighbouring clefts of the shore, but further on a space, the bays seem to sweep inland with larger curves, and from the point of Portofino Cape many creeks, big and little, go together at last to make the one great gulf that curves round again to Chiavari and Sestri, lying opposite. The blue waves sway softly to and fro with the sun’s glitter on their bosoms; the sky is pale and calm in the heat; white sails and yellow mark the horizon and link sea and sky in the nearer foreground; round shapes of hills along the coast lie languidly to right and left, for the coming heat has sent a white mist before it. This is all looking seaward; from beneath the fig-tree or from off the hindermost wall of battlement you might see that gentle slopes or steeps are around, to girdle the bay—that vineyards and rich cultivations adorn them, that olive and fruit trees shade their sides, that green turf springs near the water, and aloes and house-leeks upon the rocks. And Portofino’s tiny town lies around the head of Portofino’s harbour; this also you can see from off the battlements of Villa C——, can even hear the sound of children’s voices from off the stone-paved piazza—fisher-children, who play around the beach and the little pier—or the harsher tones of women calling and men in argument. Where the land heaves inward and the slopes climb up into hills, chestnut trees grow in place of olives and aloes, and the turf is more mossy beneath them, for streams flow there, on whose brink ferns and the maiden-hair flourish. Looking across the tranquil blue bay, to the hill and cliff over against us, other villas stand up on the green background—where other old families live or have lived with other country housekeepers. And of these our Teresa is strangest and best of all. Watch her now, with Maso the fisher, as she stands in the shadow of the Castle wall, with face set towards that inland aspect that is green with luxuriant vegetation. No silk gown, white apron and sober cap are here the badges of responsible service. Though Teresa’s power be absolute and her position in the household invulnerable, she has rough work to do and wears no stockings to her feet, while her gown is but of homespun linen, her plaited, grey locks are uncovered, and no collar shields a throat that is open to the sun within an amber kerchief. But it is in her strange, strong face that she wears all the dignity of her office. Seamed though it be with gathering years and the labour of life, individuality is set in its every wrinkle, and power in the massive chin, swelling nostrils and heavy brow, while in the keen, black eyes youth’s fire is not yet quenched. Maso is afraid as he stands, leaning with curly, dark head against a cherry tree, for ‘And you think you can pass off your nasty tunny fish on me,’ screams the tall, old woman! ‘And you would like to get _soldi_ from the _marchese_ for what you can’t sell elsewhere, I don’t doubt! Go to, ill-educated man that you are! Sardines for the master’s dinner I will have, if you fish for them even at this hour!’ And Teresa’s palms are poised defiantly on her broad hips, her tall and powerful frame sways with agitation. Maso laughs, but his laughter is timorous, and quickly he turns to run lightly down the hill with the scorned contents of his basket. ‘Yes, yes; you may well run, for back again you need to be in a quarter of an hour, mind you!’ calls the housekeeper in his wake. ‘It is a little fast day, and the _marchese_ eats _magro_, and requires the fish! Truly it seems impossible,’ continues she, using this favourite ejaculation as she comes slowly up again, and round the outer battlements to the brick-paved kitchen! Its deep-set windows look down the castle wall, and down the steep rock into the sea; the sunlight streams through them to flicker the rough floor over, and noting this, that tells the time of day, ‘Up, and quick, you lazy wench!’ calls Teresa sharply to the gaunt help-woman who slaves at her orders. ‘The _Signor padrone_ will be home presently, and no breakfast cooked, and that linen yet to wring out! Come, lend me a hand!’ So the shirts of the marquis being hung out to dry on the castle turret, in company with sundry sheets and aprons, the crumpled-featured woman falls to fanning the charcoal fire with a feather screen, whilst Teresa chops fine herbs for the master’s daily omelette. ‘Here he is now,’ mutters she half crossly, as a heavy footfall climbs the stone stair, and, bustling into the forecourt that is open to the terrace by an archway, she begins to set out two-pronged forks and blunt knives on a coarse linen tablecloth for the meal. The _marchese_ always eats in this middle court, whence he can see his pots of carnation and sweet geranium-leaf on the terrace, and get a glimpse of the sea behind the leaves of the fig-tree across the arch; but the housekeeper oftentimes scolds at him for not using the _salotto_ in preference, which is dark and dirtily furnished; here, in the hall, the coarse oaken table and carved oak press stand alone with a few rush-seated chairs on the brick floor, and are nowise adequate, in Teresa’s eyes, to her master’s high lineage. He comes slowly, he is a man of somewhat sad countenance—dark, and pale, and fat. He wears a limp, long frock-coat now, but soon changes it for a many-coloured dressing-gown, while keeping the flower-worked smoking-cap still that Nina, his pretty niece, made for him last New Year. ‘I have fairly hunger,’ says he somewhat glumly to the old woman, glancing at the scarce-spread table. ‘So much the better,’ replies this one; ‘_vossignoria_ will eat with the keener appetite!’ ‘It is near to eleven,’ murmurs he again, but would not venture closer than this towards a reproof to the all-powerful _donna di casa_. Teresa condescends to no reply; but, when she has placed the white-wine flask beside plate and knife and fork, and has retired into the kitchen to put the omelette on the fire, some sense of justice, perhaps, compels her to deal sharp words again to the drudge, and this is the only effect of the _padrone’s_ mild displeasure! But the omelette is good, and the _funghi_ are better than yesterday’s, so when the _marchese_ has eaten a mouthful he is content to obey Teresa’s summons on the terrace that he may see a white-sailed schooner pass across the offing well in sight. ‘There will be ugly weather to-night,’ remarks the woman. ‘No, I think not,’ replies he, thinking of an unfinished tumbler of Monferrato. ‘_Vossignoria_ is not always right, however! It is not the fishers who will make so sure of fine weather because the sun shines in heaven and the sea is blue! Wait and see if they moor not their boats high on the beach before evening!’ ‘May be,’ says the _marchese_ mildly, and returns to his breakfast, while Teresa, approaching that other turret over the harbour, sends a cry out of good lungs to the fisherman coiling ropes in a boat below. It is Maso, who has not sent the fish. His answer comes travelling up through the olive trees, betwixt and above whose boughs the jewel-blue water lies cool in the heat, and deeper-coloured where a rim of midday shadow is around each brown old boat. ‘We have taken a “sea-serpent!”’ calls Maso again, and Teresa hastens within with this piece of news, for the capture of these dog-fish is an event, even if the sight of a shark or a monster cuttle-fish be a matter of yet more thrilling interest because of rarer occurrence. ‘What will _Vossignoria_ take for dinner?’ asks the housekeeper when the tale has been told. And after a moment’s pause for the reply that well she knows the _marchese_ dares not give, ‘You have a miserable portion of sardines,’ continues the autocrat, having been through this daily mockery of humility, ‘the half of a boiled fowl—which well the priests allow on a half-fast day, having but the health you have—two potatoes, and a filled tomato with a fry to finish.’ ‘_Benissimo!_’ says the _marchese_, as he has said every day these twelve years, and then he knows he has ordered his dinner.

It is evening and—in the boat that has lain gently swaying in the harbour all day, beneath a pink awning—the _marchese_ takes his nightly row. The dolphins, whence Portofino has its name, sport around the prow, but soon they gather in companies, and sink safely low beneath the sea’s surface, for Teresa was right after all, and there is a storm brewing behind the sunset. The _marchese_ comes within doors with the clothes that hung a-drying, for the rain-drops begin to fall. The boats are moored high, the waves gather white crests over the darkening blue. Even in Portofino’s land-locked harbour that is the safest on all the coast, the waters that were as smooth as glass begin to swell a little with the rush of the sea from without; they are blue still from far, and green from off a boat’s prow, but they are duller beneath the grouping clouds than they were in the searching sunlight. Teresa does not mind, for did she not prophesy that bad weather was blowing up?

Bathing Time.

The blue Mediterranean with warm and buoyant waters laps and breaks around Italy’s peninsula, and Italy’s people are none the less fond of their fair and treacherous sea than we of our greyer and more boisterous Atlantic, even though theirs leaves them no passage northward into other lands, nor binds them about with her waves. Long ago, even so long ago as in the time of the first great Romans of the Republic, Italians loved the shores of their land, and would flock thither from the middle countries to breathe the stronger, if not always fresher, sea-breeze, and to rest and revel in the clear waters of ebbing waves. Many fashions have changed since then, but that one still holds good. From inland towns people fly to the smooth beach, or the rocky, of their sea’s landmark when hot August days are heavy; scarce a family even of the hindermost nobility—and in Italy, as is well known, this nobility is only the country’s gentry—but has some kind of dwelling, good or bad, upon some portion of the shore. Even seaport town people seek the mountains less readily than some village on the coast which they have seen all their lives, for, though briny breezes from off these inland waters can never be invigorating as those that travel across the Atlantic, Italians have none the less fond a belief both in them and in the soft waves wherein they delight to plunge. And of all the sea-loving people of the south the people of Genoa are best at the sport. Crowds seek the Lido at Venice, bathing-houses are built into the waves, music plays and fine water-costumes are there displayed. The rich and pleasure-loving of all nations ply this summer pastime busily at Nice, but none of them know the sea as do they of the quieter Riviera haunts; none of them can leap from sharp rocks to cut the green surface, none can dive and swim, and brave risks of dolphin and cuttle-fish, sometimes even of sharks, as can the dwellers on the rocky coast where no smooth sands help the timid ones.

All along the coast on Genoa’s either side habitations crowd the earth; palaces, time-worn and soiled or new and gaudy, for the rich; tall and thin and straight houses with small rooms and many storeys for the class of the _negozianti_ and _artisti_; everybody must do the ‘Season of the Baths’ somehow. Quarto, Quinto, Nervi, Bogliasco, not to speak of Albaro nearer town, and then Sori, Recco, and best of all, Camogli, where the stone pines grow in a fringe along the hill’s ridge—everywhere there are houses in flats, with apartments to let; everywhere cottages stand beside palaces or behind _stabilimenti_, so that all classes should have room equally. The proprietors of villa Franchi, villa Crosa, villa Gropallo, and many more, come in elegant summer attire or in economical costumes, to recruit ‘_in villeggiatura_’ and to bathe and dive and swim in waters that lap the beach of their own domains. _La signora Friuli_, who has many children, and whose husband is in the _Pasta_ trade, comes from the fifth storey of a house in the narrow town street to wear out her own old clothes and to send the children shoeless on to the beach of Camogli, whence one and all dip in the mild blue sea. A terraced hill rises behind Camogli’s picturesque harbour, with its fisher-huts; the hill is cultivated with wheat patches and little potato fields, for it belongs to the old palace that stands below, whose walls, once fresco-painted, are now so weather-stained. But the cultivation is of a desultory nature, and the olives are its best harvest, of which the small, sturdy trees stand over the terraces with gnarled trunks and twisted branches. Following the path that leads up to the flat of a ridge, you can reach pine-plantations, where dark and widely-spreading trees stand in the soft earth on the cliffs’ edge and on the side also where inland scenery comes in sight, with church-steeples and houses dotted over a valley’s expanse. The faint, heavy perfume of tropical vegetation hangs around, pine-dust lies thick and slippery on the ground, paths wind about, laurel bushes grow beside them, and, though the western slope look towards mountains, the hill’s crest rests over against the sea again. Waves lap far below, where cloven rocks and smooth rocks and peaked rocks are sunk in the sand for ramparts; waves swell gently for miles in front, more waves of clouds seem to be in the sky, and fishing smacks sway on the sea’s surface; brown sails and white sails lie against the cloud’s background, and the broken coast-line winds back to where Genoa halts, like a fancy city, between mist and sunshine. This is Camogli, where many a man and woman and lad and lass and child has rejoiced in the _stagione dei Bagni_. And yet Camogli is not the fashionable one among Riviera bathing-places, and we must turn to the sun-setting side of the Riviera capital for a glimpse of the life that is August life indeed to the professional pleasure-hunter.

A railway has been open for some time now along the eastern Riviera: it has marred the perfection of some fair spots, but it has its conveniences, and it cannot spoil far afield. But in the days that I best remember there was no railroad to eastward, and the _Ponente_ shore had thus an advantage over the other in civilization’s eyes. There was a _strada ferrata_ to Nice some time ago, a _strada ferrata_ that some people wondered was ever made: the _vetturini_, whose trade is marred for instance, and the diligence proprietors, who can no longer count on crowding their vehicles with dust-smothered passengers, or the traveller, who has money to pay for a post-chaise, and can spare time to loiter along the road at his pleasure, enjoying the full fragrance of its loveliness, and providing food for extortion to the innkeepers. The trains never run regularly—some part of the road is always out of repair—you travel in fear of being plunged into the sea, and the carriage route is altogether spoilt. Yet it is a step in civilization. ‘What would you have?’ says the ever obsequious guard to whom one confides one’s wrongs at having been five hours longer on the road than the guide-book stated. ‘Did we go faster, you would be now in the sea: the road is not safe. Patience!’ the invariable ejaculation of an Italian when others but himself are complaining.

To anyone who knows the Cornice from Genoa to Nice the name of Pegli will not be totally strange. It is, or rather used to be, a little fishing village; used to be, for of late years there has been built in the midst of it a grand Stabilimento, whither the town’s inhabitants flock during the months of July and August for the sea-bathing. In summer it is a fashionable place; many of Genoa’s nobles divide their summer between Pegli and some inland foreign baths, whilst the _bourgeoise_ class seek their holiday first in quiet mountainous parts of Italy known best to themselves, but do not fail to return for _i Bagni_ when the rich have left things cheaper. In winter Pegli is utterly desolate, excepting for some few foreigners, mostly English, who try to make themselves comfortable in the huge marble halls of the Stabilimento, built only for coolness, in the delusion that they are safer from bronchitis because they see the sun and know it is Italy, than they would be, snug and warm, in English homes.

Pegli stands straggling along the beach of a sunny bay, almost within the Gulf of Genoa. The village itself is not pretty, but around it on the sea shore, with gardens sloping down into the very waves, and stone loggias and terraces whose feet stand in the water, above it on the hill-side, girt about with woods and vineyards, stand many a grand old palace or cool and pleasant villa. True, there are here, as everywhere else, in Northern Italy, queer examples of modern Italian architecture, in thin, tall houses, painted over with every crude tint of scarlet, orange, blue, and violet, bearing staring frescoes of horses and water-nymphs, and balconies out of perspective. But these defective edifices, though many in number, cannot utterly spoil the place. Though dusty the highway and breathless the summer days, the idle, hazy hours are happy that one may spend in the villas or bathing-houses of Pegli. In the Stabilimento for ten francs a day you have (according to the maître d’hôtel) every luxury which human craving may desire. A cool, marble-floored, furnitureless room, with goblin-bedizened ceiling and mosquito-curtained bed, an ample billiard room, an elegant ‘salon,’ a vast dining-room, every convenience for sea or freshwater bathing, even a ball-room, in which to flirt once a week with any one of the pale dark-eyed ladies who invite you to that pastime. Nor is the ball-room the only meet place for this exercise; there is a balcony—two, nay three balconies—and a large marble terrace that you can pace in the cool night air, gently smoking your cigarette in company with an attractive Milanese, Piedmontese, or Tuscan countess. Rising in the morning at five, or even before, you stroll down lightly clad to the shore, where the little waves are washing lazily up and down on the shelving beach, cool and limpid in the dewy dawn; you cross the soft small strip of shingle and parched, wrinkled sand—it is only a strip, for we have no tide—you secure one of those quaint little tents built out into the water and you adorn yourself for the great event of the day. Then issuing forth freely into the soothing water, you meet all the lovely ladies whom you saw last night at _table d’hôte_, in every variety of fascinating attire. Some are dressed as nymphs, some wear the most elaborately embroidered flannel garments, some have broad-brimmed Leghorn hats, but these are they who fear the spoiling of their complexions, and are few in number. Out of this mass of insinuating loveliness you choose the one to you most sympathetic, you ask her if she swims (but of course she swims, since she is Italian, or at worst Italian by education and customs), you engage her for the morning as you would for a dance, you conduct her out to sea and does she need any assistance you offer it. You talk, you laugh, the hour passes, and you bring her safely to shore. You make your way back to your apartment, return to your couch and smoke. You read the paper, you drink coffee, then you dress, play billiards, and attempt breakfast. You yawn, doze, but not again see the fair water-nymph until dinner at five P.M., when she reappears in other guise, as the perfumed, powdered, languid, and _bien coiffée_ lady of fashion. After dinner everyone saunters forth to the woods and gardens. Those who can, go in pairs, those who cannot in dreary solos or triplets. It is still hot, but not beyond endurance. The Pallavicini Gardens close by are wonderful; waterworks are there, artificial lakes, grottos with stalactites, Chinese pagodas, Swiss châlets, and English farmhouses, besides arbours, into which the confiding stranger strolls innocently, to be drenched unawares from a secret stream, and whence he darts, less confidingly, only to be met by four or five more conflicting streams on some deceptive bridge or turret. There are many more cunning devices besides, and beyond all—or rather not to be marred by them all—is the subtly seductive beauty of Southern nature: the luxuriant vegetation, the waveless dreamy sea, the tender rose-tinted sky, the trickle of many a tiny rivulet, the hot, pale air rich with harmonious scents of orange blossom, rose, and magnolia; and then later on, when the hours have sped into darkness, the whisper of rising night-breezes amid the foliage, the flittering of fire-flies, the shooting of stars, the hush of waves on the shelving shore below, when the water is gently moved by the touch of the wind. Night grows, everyone goes home. The terraces of hotels and palaces are peopled with gracefully-reclining ladies who smoke cigarettes and flirt fans, with obsequious and attentive cavaliers, flattering and self-conscious; with fat dowagers, wearied and sleepy, who yet will not for the life of them retire to leave the field open to younger and fairer rivals. The cool hours wear away—the only hours in which one lives in summer—a short while of sleep, and the early morning is back again with its delicious water duties and the lazy hours that follow on till night.

Part Two

_In the Apennines_

The Mountains.

Where the winding chain of the Apennines stretches upward from the sea, crossing and recrossing the land with so many and such strange devices that from off the height of one of the mountains themselves there seems scarce room for a space of level plain, wedged in between ridges or sunk in clefts of hills, are the fair valleys of North Italy. Away from the blue sea and its blinding beauty, and from the leaden heat of the shores, they hold a fresh and free life of their own. Heavy night dews there feed the wild flowers that sicken in the nerveless pallor of the summer sea-air, and fresh water runs swiftly from mountain springs. Sometimes they are narrow and hidden valleys, in whose depth even villages could scarce find a home, did they not climb the hill-sides on either hand, and camp out, as it were, upon the meadows or among the vineyards. Or, again, they are wider, so that little towns have been built within them—quaint towns with tall houses and taller _campanile_, at whose side there flows, perhaps, a shallow river, brown upon its shingly bed.

Where, north of Genoa and the sea some twenty miles, the low back of the Giove mountain lies across the country, there is one of these more open valleys that creeps upward toward the higher peak of Antola, and along its way many a picturesque little village has grown for years, wearing out the thatched roofs of its chimneyless houses beneath hot suns and sharp mountain winds, cheerily holding its own against storms and inundations from the river hard by, that is so cruel a foe when the great rains have been at work. Little hamlets cling to the mountain sides, with scarce a common thoroughfare beside them; while other hamlets that stand upon the roadside can often boast a finer house in their midst, for the _forestieri_ come in summer, and people whose houses lie conveniently can let rooms. By these villages a stone bridge is even built over the stream, so that the torrent may be safely crossed when it is swollen by the rains.

It was early on a summer evening that I first saw this broader and loveliest of North Apennine valleys which is between Giove’s mountain and the more cloven peaks of Antola hills. In the towns it had been so hot of late that not all the delights of sea-bathing in soft, Mediterranean waters, from the marble steps of olive-planted gardens, nor even the seductiveness of the _dolce far niente_ beside spouting fountains, beneath colonnades and on balconies, could banish the longing for the freedom of a fresher air, could atone for the remorseless Scirocco, for the sapping heat of those white August days and terrible nights. I sought release from them all and from the mosquitoes, where green trees might perchance fan a breeze towards me, where turf would at least be cool to lie on, and I sought it in the valleys—so little known even by those who live within their reach—of the Piedmontese Apennines.

I had seen a little station, just at the mouth of the Giove tunnel on the way to Alessandria, around which the country seemed to me crisply and luxuriantly beautiful. It was called Busalla. No one knew of it as a recommendable _villeggiatura_; Pontedecimo, Serravalle, Voltaggio were suggested to me instead, but I preferred my own choice. The little town is dirty, noisy, dusty as little Italian towns mostly are; but in the country round about I was not disappointed. Dense, bountiful chestnut woods, whose tender-coloured, fan-like leaves sway soothingly in the whispering breeze, would alone have been enough to freshen me, wearied by grand buildings and splendid colonnades. And besides the desired trees there was the gurgling of water all about—sometimes I could scarcely find from whence. I would glance around to see the stream that was babbling so audibly, and lay my head down again on the turf, fancying I was mistaken, only to hear the mocking laughter of the water again when I had ceased to look for it.

When I arrived at Busalla, I was rather at a loss at first about a shelter for the night. The cleanest even of the two inns looked scarcely such as I cared to enter. I questioned a comely female in the piazza, who had figs and peaches in a basket on her head, and who was freely gesticulating and shouting at a handsome _negoziante_ from Genoa. Having secured her attention by means of a larger remuneration than the nominal price she asked for the fruit, I learnt that there was a _magnifico stabilimento_ at Savignone, a village some three miles off: I could have a conveyance, or she herself would show me the way, as she was going to the village. I accepted her offer—the _vettura_ I had seen standing out, and I should have feared for my safety at its mercy.

We came first through the little town, with its butcher, fruiterer, and inevitable barber, past the old whitewashed _campanile_ with the sun-dial on its façade, and struck out upon a roughish way to the left. There was a torrent to cross on stepping-stones. I recollect that my guide laughed loudly at my care to keep on the stones. She trudged through the water on her bare feet. For a good half-hour the road runs alongside of just such a drowsy river as I have remembered before, creeping away furtively in the midst of an arid bed, too weary in the drought even to lift its voice; yet this river can swell beneath the sharp lash of an angry thunderstorm, to roll onward in muddy, turbulent volumes, regardless of walls, bridges, or any other obstacle. Now to the left is a weir: the road mounts some hundred feet above the level of the water, and is none of the safest to drive over, being narrow, ill-made, and unparapetted. I was glad I had not chosen the _vettura_.

Glad too, because a more lovely walk could scarcely be conceived. The valley lay before me in all its sweet, mellow beauty: fresh, crisp, luxuriant, and yet burnished all over and saturated with the dim, gently sorrowful shadow of coming autumn. The vintage was near, and the terraced hill-sides were hung with the rich festoons of unpruned vines, that seemed fondly to try and cover the bare ground whence the golden wheat had been shorn. Waving, sweeping chestnut woods drape those hills around, leaving bare only the summits, whose frail outlines lie clear against the pale sky. Unlike bolder types of mountains, these Apennines are fretted all over with a delicate tracery of faint furrows that wander waywardly, and of watercourses that rise slenderly above to grow into large ravines and gashes below. Nature is warm and gracious here, but not wanton with luxuriance, as in the more tropical beauty which I had just left; the country is not a wild country because the hand of man has rested on it all to put cultivation within its valleys, and even upon its hill-sides; but cultivation has not wiped away the mark of nature’s own wayward grace, that is fit to that other grace, free, winning, and wayward, too, even to quaintness, which belongs to its people.

We crossed the bridge—the only stone bridge on the river, that gives its name to a village hard by—and followed the way that steeply climbs the hill for a while until another Campanile is in sight. Ten minutes more of climbing brought us out on to the piazza of Savignone.

I dismissed my friendly peasant guide, who promised me her warmest prayers in exchange for my silver coin, and watching her as she reaped neighbourly greetings from knots of country folk gathered on the _piazza_ for their evening relaxation, I looked around upon the village that was, for a while, to be my home. I stood in a large open square paved with round pebbles; a church was on my right—on either side of which, and forming a quadrangle round about, lay a long, low building, yellow-painted and large-windowed, formerly a hospital, but now the _magnifico stabilimento_ of which I had been told. Here were evidently the remains of an old feudal borough, belonging probably in long-lost times to one of those lords of the marshes so famous in the days of the terrible _condottieri_. Even through the embellishments of modern stucco one could trace the skeleton of a palace which had seen better usage, in the days when architecture was something more than a name; and besides the palace, hospital, or _stabilimento_, there were ruins of a castle on a little hill close above, a hill that in the twilight seemed to dwell beneath the shadow of another and rockier mountain.

All around me rose graceful and methodless mountains, with forms that were broken into a wealth of harmonies, and sky-line lying clear-cut and undulating upon the darkening blue. A soft dew fell from out the hot day upon all drooping things, and, as I rested, the sound of rippling water smote on my hearing—of water that, said I, would ripple and murmur just the same to-morrow, when the sun should be burning overhead. ‘Ah, yes, we have many streams here; that is why the doctors have built a _Stabilimento Idroterapico_,’ was the old _contadino’s_ explanation, to whom I turned now for advice. ‘Your honour will be well there in the Stabilimento; there is true luxury! We have a fair spot at Savignone for anyone to pass the time in, and one does not feel the heat too much—no! And over the gorge of the river is _la Valle Calda_.’ So I stayed at Savignone; and when the sun’s power had flagged the next day, and dews crept down once more, I went back upon my steps of the first evening—back almost as far as Busalla, that I might learn to know that other gorge, which the old peasant had called _la Valle Calda_.

Leaving the town of Busalla, my road struck off from the main highway across the Giove, from that highway which was in olden times the traveller’s only route from Turin to Genoa. It is still studded along with many a little wayside inn, now forlorn and impoverished, where carriage-loads of foreigners used to stop in days gone by, while their horses were baiting. These little inns have sunk nowadays to the lower rank of ‘_bettole_’ or taverns; since the making of the railway they lack the custom which raised them into ‘_alberghi_,’ and no longer profess to find beds, but only to supply the wayfarer or the waggoner with food and drink. Nevertheless the ‘_bettole_’ are still distinctive features, and picturesque with a purely Italian picturesqueness.

The branch road up the valley of the Scrivia is not at first sight inviting. Poor and dirty buildings of the town’s outskirts flank its ill-paven and narrow streets, but squalid houses are soon left behind, and the country opens out before and around you. As I have said before, it is a free landscape, even though the hills stand about on every side closing in the valley, and though, looking up toward the farther end of it, you can see that the land grows more mountainous, and that the cones and shoulders of hills seem to lie up more cumbrously against the horizon. But they are not mountains whose peaks tower into the sky, neither are their sides made up of cliffs and dark ravines. They are scarcely perhaps high enough and important enough even to deserve the name of mountains—these slimly moulded and graceful hills, daintily muffled in luxuriant vegetation—excepting that they are so amply cultivated where the chestnut woods are not, that something of their height is lost, perhaps, because their nature is so like the nature of the plains; the plains, that are no more than narrow little strips of level land from which cultivation creeps up the steep slopes; for patches of corn-field, of maize and potato crops, intersected with vineyards and trellises, find room on many a tiny ledge or terrace of earth till the whole land wears a look of careful plenty.

Even the timber vegetation of the country has a sort of prodigality in its beauty, which seems to tell how the broad-leaved chestnut trees are not only fair to behold but also bountiful in service. They wear a promise of warmer tones now over their brilliant summer colouring, for the autumn has just begun to shed a new influence abroad, and faintly golden tints speak of the fruit-time of the year, after the sunnier time of flowers and scents is over. The whole land has a flush of this new promise. Harvest is over, and the corn-fields are laid bare, yet there is a golden burnished hue upon the ground where the yellow stubble is left upon the yellow clay soil. The vintage is not yet gathered in, so that the vines have lost none of their beauty, but that rather the cool purple-red of their luscious fruit-clusters, near to that other warmer red which is faint as yet upon the gracefully-turning tendrils and broad leaves of their foliage, serves to help the warm painting of the whole. As far as the eye can see, gold and green mingle in subtle harmony. A faintest fancy of coming gold in the chestnut woods, the steadier gold and yet pale of the cropped fields, the gold that almost deepens into brown where patches of ploughed land lie here and there upon the hillsides and in the valley, and through the whole the golden-winding thread of the river.

This is the valley of the Scrivia, from whose main course that side gorge creeps up, among the mountains, to the village of Savignone and the feudal castle. At its foot a mountain stands sentinel to all the little quiet and cosy villages within the precinct below—a tall mountain, uprising many hundreds of feet in one solid mass, but indented with many clefts and water-courses, and cut at its summit into many sharp peaks, each different in shape and in size, and all lying clear and fine against the sky. Here the river winds in closer coils, and its rough bed spreads across the valley; for soon the water gathers itself together, since it is somewhere in the fissures of Monte Baneo or her range that the Scrivia has its birth. At the foot of the sentinel mountain you may see a little white town lodged—and this is the town, more properly called the village, of Casella.

All this you will have seen on before you and beside you as you walked up along the stony road from Busalla. The stream has been flowing at your left, and on your right were chestnut woods growing up into the hills, and turf and moss that spread beneath them, and little hamlets dotting the wayside, and blackberry hedges by the road. Many little torrents bubble across the footpath—streams that must be crossed on the roughest of stepping-stones, for only the village called ‘_Ponte di Savignone_’ boasts a stone bridge across the river for those who are bound for the Baths, and here are houses gathered on either side of the bridge, finer looking than the smoke-coloured and thatched cottages. From this point the main road of the Scrivia valley runs on the farther side of the water.

But I, in my evening ramble, was not bound for the high road nor for the town of Casella, that lies at the valley’s foot. The old _contadino_ had spoken of the mountain’s eastern side, when he had pointed across the gorge to the slopes lying opposite, and he had spoken of it as _la Valle Calda_. I did not therefore cross the stone bridge again, but holding to the right, went in search of this new valley. No carriage—not even the brave one offered to my notice the evening before at Busalla—could have held its way upon this road, for the stones lay looser and larger than ever upon it, and, as it went farther into the hills, it narrowed, and grew more and more uneven. Monte Baneo still stood up before me with the valley and the river at its feet, and to westward the slopes of Antola. Little cottages began to appear in clusters upon meadows and peeping from among woods; blue smoke curled into the air from dells and copses, showing where other human habitations lay hid; then the _Campanile_ came to sight. It stood close against the hill, and as I came nearer the bells began gently to chime with gladsome rhythm for the morrow’s feast of Saint or Virgin.

This was _La Valle Calda_; and as I stood gazing on the soft and quiet scene there came an old woman along the road who went across the mountains weekly with new-laid eggs to sell, and she, greeting me friendly, as all these peasants do, told me many things of the country and of the neighbours, and commending me heartily for my genuine admiration of this valley of her home, she bade me turn my walk once more to the right till I should reach a village called, she said, _La Madonna della Vittoria_, for there should I behold a view worth the seeing indeed!

So towards the east I turned again, and climbed my way into the chestnut woods. I left the river behind that had been flowing on my left through green meadows as I walked from Ponte towards the chief village of _La Valle Calda_. I left even this semblance of a high road, running parallel with the real high road on the stream’s opposite shore which had seemed so close in the summer air that I had heard the laughter of the _vetturino_ as he drove his infirm vehicle, and chattered with his passengers, or urged his horse by loud vociferations.

My new way was nothing but a mountain path, and a steep one—for _La Madonna della Vittoria_ stands on a hill. The foot-track winds up between chestnut groves, rising higher and higher above the banks of a mountain torrent that in autumn and winter time is turbulent in its downward rush to the river. Now and again little hamlets appear, whose houses are ranged and huddled on both sides of the path; the road grows steeper, and the sides of the ravine, in whose deep the torrent gurgles, are rough and jagged as you look down upon them. In this side valley the country is wilder and more bleak, for there is less room for cultivation. The path creeps round an angle of the hill, and the long ridge is in sight, where _La Madonna della Vittoria_ stands between two heads of the mountain. The place takes its name from a little oratory, sacred to the Virgin of that title. People come hither in pilgrimage from the parish church; and in times of blight or of pestilence, of rains or of long drought, processions are frequent. The chapel is beyond the village, a little farther up on the hill. If you mount the street and the flight of stone steps that is at the end of the village, you will come upon the little mound on which stands the oratory. The piazza is a paved enclosure with a low stone wall and a stone bench that runs round hemming it in. There are acacia trees and cypresses against the church, and upon its front a worn and faded image of the Madonna, with sceptre and crown and glory, stands where it has stood for many a year within shallow niche to receive the winds and the rain and the people’s obeisance.

A sharp air blows of an evening around this little piazza upon the hill, a breeze that is keen to refresh and yet soft enough to soothe. Sitting upon the little low wall, it blows around, while your looks stray over the goodly country spread out beneath and about you. Ranges upon ranges of hills set a girdle on every side. But they are not hills that tell of a mountainous land far ahead, as do the hills of Savignone. There is a vague sense of space and freedom here, for we have turned our faces back again towards the sea. The distance that your eye can scan seems measureless: hills as far as you can see—tier rising behind tier, the higher peaks standing forward and the lower ones peering forth, as it were, from betwixt their shoulders; hills on every side, but hills whose outlines sink and grow dim in the filmier light as they near the sea far away. At first the mountains seem so thickly wedged upon the soil that no room can remain for places of human habitation; but as you gaze, you see how the rivers flow down from them, growing wider in their course, and with space for towns upon the banks. Far out ahead, where the blue air grows paler, the dim sky sinks down into a silvery line, that is the Mediterranean. And, perhaps, if the sunset has been clear, and if the vapours have not arisen to muffle it, you may see in the vague distance other things that are dim, yet more solid in their dimness, and these are the islands of the sea; and further up, beyond the sky-line, forms of dazzling whiteness, and these are peaks of the Maritime Alps; while below, in the nearest valley, the town of Ponte Decimo gleams out in the last of the sunlight, and _La Madonna della Vittoria_ looks down upon it all.

The old _pedona_ had been right when she told me it was worth while to climb the hill for the sake of the view at its top. I sat a while on the wall of the little _piazza_ watching the evening vapours creep down from the mountains, and feeling their breath on my cheek. Women with children clinging to their skirts, and small, swaddled babies in their arms, came to make their evening prayer in the sanctuary—to have their evening gossip in its porch. They greeted me with courteous grace, and one of them talked long with me, telling me of the neighbourhood and of its people—rambling on with stories of her own and of many other villages. They have the true grace of perfect unconsciousness, the dwellers in these little Apennine homes, and have no conventionalities, since each acts upon the moment’s impulse that he may enjoy life to the full. I call them all to mind, those simple friends of a time long past, and, as I think of them, I think of summer days when breezes moved silently amid leaves, and the air was white with heat as it lay clear above the tender green of chestnut trees.

I think of little rough and quaint villages that are the homes of these my friends, and, best of all, I remember one village that stands beneath the crest of a hill, with shady woods and orchards to girdle it about. Another hill lies over against it, whose graceful form I seem to see as I write—soft shapes, yet varied that rest upon the sky, subtle waves and indentations of earth, with which play the lights and shades of the daylight. It is that village of _La Valle Calda_, towards which I turned my steps again after I had looked on the fair scene from _La Vittoria’s_ hill. A church stands for centre to the parish—that church with tall _campanile_ and blue-painted belfry—and, beside the church, an oratory, where the memory of some special saint is sacred; but the parish itself is scattered far and wide through copse and over meadow, in hamlets that stand beside streams or on hill-tops.

The steeple is nevertheless, here as elsewhere, the beacon that can gather all neighbours together, and beneath it is a piazza with stone benches around, where at Ave Maria my memory confidently returns to recall each one of those faces seen long ago. I know I shall find them there, for I know they must have a goodly portion of gossip and loitering, and am fain indeed to confess that if foreign sayings about Italian impetuosity, and easily moved Italian feelings, have been often exaggerated, these Apennine country people are, on the other hand, no taciturn race. They are cunning to mould to their use the lithe tongue of their land, to adorn it with expletives, and to point it with gesticulation; and it is even this habit of noisy vociferation which has perhaps won them abroad the character—so little deserved—for curbless passions and vindictively cruel propensities. For they are a kindly people in their mutual relations, and formed by their very nature for warm, social life, since they need a free neighbourly intercourse, such as quiet and colder temperaments can scarcely understand.

Hence it is that the life of an Italian community, unlike the comparatively secretive life of northern lands, is to be learned in its open thoroughfares rather than its individual homes, and that we must seek on cottage door-steps, in market-places and piazzas, where men and women mix freely together, the true colour of the Italian people.

At the Chestnut Harvest.

As October days draw nigh to their end there is festival in the cottages of North Italy. Walking at evening among her mountains and passing through her homely villages, a red light of wood fire comes streaming upon you from open cabin doors and from between the chinks of clumsy window-shutters, and noisy sounds of revelry fall around. For this is the season when the chestnuts are ripe, and the peasants are making merry by dark, for the work they have had during the hours of day, and they are glad for that harvest which is to them the most bounteous of the year.

In autumn, thunder-storms lower in the Apennine valleys. Torrents grow turbulent, hurling themselves in foam from the hills around, and rivers that, in the long drought, have grown meagre, swell rapidly to great size, fed by rains amid the mountains and by the hundred little streamlets and torrents that cast themselves noisily down ravines. The river-beds are wide—so wide that in summer their barren expanse of shingle looks ill amid the green land—yet now there is often no room within them for the mass of moving water. It overflows the banks and swamps the near-lying cultivation, till the maize plantations lie dashed and the meadows are soft, like bogs. It carries away the little temporary bridges which, spring after spring, are newly set across the streams; scarcely can it flow, sometimes, beneath the arches of more stable bridges that, here and there, are built for greater security; it damages the weirs, and brooks no obstacle in its way, flowing swiftly—a great muddy, turbid stream, that bears upon its breast the trunks or the branches of trees and many other spoils from off the banks. And year after year the people know that this may all happen, yet year after year they take no precautions to shield themselves from evil; they build up no embankments, turn aside the course of no injurious waters, only, laughing they say, or sighing, ‘It is time that the great waters descend.’

And during the present month they are almost sure to descend, once, at least, with all their power of devastation, for the best of the sunshine has taken its leave of the land by the end of October. Down in the more level parts of the valleys, where the meadows lie, little cottages look out ruefully from amid the dripping walnuts, their thatched roofs damp and glistening in the wet; and higher up, among the chestnut woods, sad leaves lie damp upon the ground, where the mossy turf is so moist, that mushrooms are spoiled ere they be grown. The country looks tenderly forlorn, that was so gay with its vintage in September. Trees shed their foliage early in chestnut-wooded districts, and already tints have little left that is freshly green, but leaves are yellow upon boughs, and scattered day by day more thickly to earth. There is no hot sunshine, no blue light that is misty with heat; yet the valleys can still smile in their soberer mood when chance and glorious sunbeams strike across the land, or when the rain ceases and bright days come back, here and there, with warmer breezes. Swollen rivers abate if the deluge cease only for a day, and as you walk upon their banks the waters are limpid again, yet green from their depth with an intenser colour.

And wandering beneath the chestnuts, no sense of damp or dreariness oppresses now that sunshine is abroad once more, for yellow-tinted leaves wave brightly overhead, and yellower leaves, that are scattered, rustle pleasantly beneath your feet, while now and again a quick sound breaks the stillness, and that is the fall of the fruit. Since the middle of October you might have heard it when you were in the woods, for the chestnuts began to ripen at that time and the brown-burnished fruit to peep from out its prickly shell. But scarcely before the end of the month does the chestnut harvest begin in earnest in the Apennines. There are divers kinds of chestnuts, and the gathering of each dates properly from a different day: the so-called ‘timely chestnuts,’ that ripen before the commoner sorts—but this variety is rarer and the fruit finer than that of others—the late chestnuts, such as, of their own accord, do not fall sometimes till November—though these trees are often thrashed during the general harvest for the greater convenience of the gatherers.

Companies of women and girls greet you now upon your walks. They have little bags of sackcloth slung around their waists, and rough wooden tweezers in their hands, with which they open the spiked husks, where the fruit lies yet in its green case. They are merry; they laugh and talk, their shrill Italian voices sounding shriller to English ears in the harsh Genoese dialect. It is a season of festivity. The festa of the ‘_Santi_’ has but lately passed, and there is much interchange of colloquial news and much surmising on parish matters, with a little gossip and neighbourly scandal mixed therewith.