Tuscan folk-lore and sketches, together with some other papers

On the Feast of the Madonnina, the first of the palladiums is carried in state through the village, the peasants flocking in from all the hamlets near to join in the procession and chant their Ave Marias. The figure is of wood, highly painted, dressed in light blue robes, ornamented with tinsel, and with rings and rosaries on the outstretched hands.

“Did you see my nosegay right in front?” said my landlady that evening. “It was the best there. I love that Madonnina; she saved us from the cholera and from diphtheria. They came right to the foot of the hill, but did not touch us.”

“And it was the Madonnina that saved you?” I asked.

“Of course. We took her in procession through the village, and where she passed there was no illness. It’s like the uncovering of the crucifix.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Oh, don’t you know? There’s a crucifix in the church; and when it rains and rains, and the chestnuts are spoiling, we uncover it, and then the rain stops at once.”

“Why does it stop when you uncover the crucifix?” I rejoined.

“Oh, Gesú likes it to be uncovered.”

“Then why don’t you keep it always uncovered?”

“Well, it’s not the uncovering, but the candles and prayers and incense that Gesú likes.”

“Then Gesú must be vain,” remarked the woman’s husband, who is something of a heretic, “and the Church says that vanity is a sin.”

Each village in the valley has its own special saint, whose feast is the great event of the year, and is observed with more honour than any other festival. Brass bands are borrowed from other villages which are fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to possess them, and the peasants flock in new dresses and bright kerchiefs to walk in procession, pray to the saint, eat, drink, and dance. These feasts are sometimes the occasion of amusing outcrops of the old pagan spirit. Last year, for example, there was a quarrel between the inhabitants of this village, and those of another, further down the valley. When Saint Celestina’s day came round, therefore, our people determined to spite their enemies, who honoured Saint Celestina as their special protector. Brass bands were borrowed, fireworks bought, a huge balloon manufactured, a ball arranged for the evening; no pains were spared, in fact, to render the feast so attractive that even the protection of the saint herself could not draw visitors to fill the purses of her legitimate worshippers.

“But what must the saint have thought of all that?” I said, as my informant was gloating over the clever revenge.

“The saint? Oh, she must have been delighted; she had such special honour that year.”

Who can say that paganism is dead in this 19th century? Images, too, and small cushion-like hearts blessed by the priest on that special day, are supposed to be of peculiar efficacy against evil. Without the latter, the so-called benediction, no mother will dress her child.

I once asked how the young women were chosen who carry the banner of the Madonna in the procession.

“Oh, they’re chosen by lot,” was the answer.

“Then it’s no particular honour, no reward for specially good character,” I remarked.

“But of course it is. God makes the lot fall on the one whom He specially wishes; it’s the greatest honour a girl can have.”

On St. Nicholas’ Day, everyone flocks to a little village called Il Melo (The Apple-tree), which worships the saint as its guardian. The village is perched right on the ridge of a chain of hills, bowered in apple-trees and surrounded by chestnut woods. It consists of eight houses (including the canonica or priest’s house), and a delightfully clean whitewashed church. Outside the church is a large cross of black wood, which the more rigorous kiss before entering; for it was left them, long years back, as the story goes, by a saint-like friar who journeyed through the land preaching to the people.

The Feast of St. Nicholas occurring shortly before I left Tuscany, I resolved to see what was to be seen, and passed the previous night at a farm-house, which, lying higher than my village, was somewhat nearer to the scene of action. A magnificent thunder-storm rendered sleep impossible, and lit up the surrounding hills with wondrous beauty. The next morning was bright and fresh with dripping leaves and mist-wreathed hills, and I started early for the Melo with a peasant friend and my landlord’s son. Our party was soon materially increased, however, for we emerged from the chestnut woods on to the road just as a band of men, with three horses, bound for the same village, were passing the farm-house. They were charcoal burners, and the horses were those poor thin beasts which make their way along impossible roads up and down the mountains, loaded with two great sacks of charcoal. Everything was changed to-day, however. The men were not “in black,” as Punch has it. They wore clean shirts, and bright ties, and carried their best coats flung over their arms. The horses, also, no longer carried charcoal: a single sack, knobbly with parcels for various farm-houses, or with things to be sold at the fair, lay across the pack-saddle, and was tied down with a rope.

“Get up, Signorina,” said my friends. “It’s a long way to the Melo, and you’ll be tired.”

“This last horse is quite safe,” said the man, “and there’s nothing that can hurt in the sack.”

It certainly did not look inviting, but I determined to try, nevertheless. So the horse was made to stand by a stone wall, and up I got; on the wrong side, of course – there was no help for that.

The road was like all hillside roads; now up, now down, now of large slippery stones, now of loose rolling small ones; and when the horse took to making glissades down the former and catching his feet in the latter, I did not find a knobbly charcoal sack, without pommel, stirrup, or bridle, the most pleasant of pleasant seats. However I held on bravely by the wooden front of the pack-saddle, and saved my legs if I exercised my arms and back. A curious procession we must have made, winding through the woods to the music of a concertina with which one of the men intended to provide for the dancing.

When we reached the Melo we found that we were among the first arrivals. In the one street there were two stalls covered with brightly-coloured cakes and sweets; a basket of villainous-looking pears sold by a villainous-looking man; a couple of baskets of figs; and a couple of men with steel-yards selling peculiar wafer-like cakes known as cialde. Visitors had not arrived yet, however, and to pass the time we sauntered into the church where mass was going on. Towards the end, a man brought round the collection-box and a plate of bits of round baked dough. My companion took two or three of these, putting his penny into the bag at the same time, and handed me a couple.

“What are they?” I asked.

“St. Nicholas’ bread. They have been blessed by the priest. Put one of them outside the window when it rains, and no hail will come. Keep them in your bedroom and you’ll never be ill.”

The village was beginning to look more lively now, for it was getting near eleven, the time for high mass. The peasant women were resplendent in new dresses made for the occasion; some of them even indulged in velvet trimming and dress-improvers, to the undisguised admiration of the swains, and the envy of their less fortunate sisters. They all wore their gayest kerchiefs, generally of fine silk, tied tightly over their well-pomaded hair. Many of the younger women, too, had huge bows of common ribbon, tinsel flowers, and paper lace, boldly displayed in the very middle of the chest. It would have been impossible to wear them at the neck, of course, for they would have been partly hidden by the chin and the kerchief ends. The young men evidently considered grey the correct thing to wear; but they enlivened it by sticking jauntily into their hat-bands flowers and sprays of tinsel of the most amazing forms and colours. Of course everybody talked to everybody, and I was closely questioned by one old woman after another, as to my nationality, family, occupation, etc., etc.

High mass over, the crowd was speedily sucked in by the various houses, and the most important part of the day’s business, the feasting, began. My landlord took us to the house of one of his friends, a keen sportsman who had just returned from the low-lands of the Maremma to settle again in his native place. The phrase “Nature’s gentleman,” has grown too commonplace for use nowadays; but it is the only expression which gives an exact description of our host. He was a tall, finely-built man, small-flanked, broad-chested, with grey, bushy hair, thinnish brown face, aquiline nose, bright intelligent brown eyes, and a peculiar grace in every movement. One of his two daughters (hard-working girls, both of them) had all his classical ease of motion, and a winning suavity and urbanity of voice and manner, that made one envy the clowns she was addressing. The blood of some superior race seemed to reveal itself also in the fine figure, clean-cut features, and wide intelligent grey eyes shaded by thick black hair, of the youngest son.

Our host told us stories of the Maremma. He had once been a thriving farmer there, so he said, but American competition was proving too much for Italian agriculture, burdened as this last is with heavy taxes; and in the last years of his stay there it had not paid him even to reap the crops: he had let them lie rotting on the ground. He told us, too, of the terrible fever, and the terrible remedies by which it used to be combated. He had had as many as fifty leeches on the pit of his stomach at once, in one bad attack. Then he and my landlord began to relate tales of the experiences of their common shooting expeditions in past times, and our host fell on an incident of quite mediæval colouring. He was travelling once with a friend and his wife, he said, in the days before railroads. His friend was taken ill on the road, and on their arrival at the inn where they intended to pass the night, asked for some broth.

“Certainly not,” was the answer; “no broth on Friday or Saturday at my house, however ill you are.”

So the poor man said, Well, he would go to bed, and see what rest would do for him. To his horror he found he was to be separated from his wife, who was assigned a room on the opposite side of the inn. He rebelled, saying he was ill and wanted her care; but mine host was inexorable; to-day was Friday, he repeated, and on that day it was the rule, in his house, that the men should sleep on one side and the women on the other.

There were about a dozen people at table with us. The men ate with their hats on, and began by asking for a “very little” of everything. Then the hostesses (the two pretty daughters) would press them, would push meat on their plates by force, would fill their glasses with a struggle, and beg them not to make complimenti. They finished by doing full justice to the fare. It was indeed such as to invite justice, being well-cooked, well-served, and with all the appointments of the table clean if very rough. The profusion was truly barbaric. There were seven courses, with fruit and excellent coffee, served after the fashion of the place in glasses, to finish off with. I entertain to this day an astonished admiration for those simple peasant women, who cooked all that dinner without help, who yet found time to go to mass and take a short walk in the village in their best clothes, and who did the honours of their table with such inborn grace, without haste, or flurry, or bustle.

We had scarcely finished dinner when a little girl came to ask me if I would care to hear some improvisation. My companion and I went into a house close by and found a small party assembled round a bright-eyed, good-looking woman. She was said to have “raised the glass a little” – a Tuscan euphemism for having been somewhat assiduous at the wine-flask. She had not drunk enough to make her foolish, but just sufficient to make her sing. And sing she did; stornello after stornello, composing words and music as she went on; singing with that curious monotonous drawl at the end of the verses, which all visitors to Tuscany know so well. She had a fine voice, and could become quite dramatic on occasion, as when she was describing the thunder-storm of the night before, and how she had awaked to find her bed soaked by the rain. She had to sing in church afterwards, however, and wanted to save her voice; so we left her and wandered into the fields till it was time for mass and procession.

After these were over I sat down at the door of one of the houses to watch the crowd surging on the little open space which served as piazza. Everybody was pushing, laughing, joking, and getting very hot in the blazing sun and the dust. Near me a small acquaintance of mine was shouting himself black over a basket of figs which he was selling, if I remember rightly at ten a halfpenny; further on, the villainous-looking pear-seller was alternately crying his ware and devouring it before the eyes of the people, to prove how good it was; “lying pears” (pere bugiarde) the kind is called in Italian, but it was not the pears but the man that lied. The dominant voice, however, was that of one of the “cialde” sellers. Upright against the corner of the last house, steelyard in hand, this man had adopted a kind of recitative which pierced the shouts of the others by its more musical intonation: —

“An’iamo Giovinotti! An’iamo Giovinotti! da quelle buone cialde, O – h.”4

Many of the people went off to a meadow near, to dance to the music of the concertina, and we, tired, hot and dusty, set out on our walk home through the cool, fresh chestnut woods.

A WEDDING IN THE PISTOIESE

Beppe was the eldest son in a little farm-house hidden among the chestnut woods that clothe the Tuscan Apennines above Pistoia. His younger brother, Sandro, was already married, and it was decided that Beppe, too, must take a wife. Another daughter-in-law was wanted in the house. There really were not enough hands, now that wood must be stacked, fields dug, and fodder prepared ready for the winter. Moreover the chestnut harvest was approaching, and too many girls must be hired unless there were someone else in the family to help with the work. So Beppe, resigning himself to his fate with all the stolidity that breathed from his broad, square-cut shoulders and short bull-neck, set to work to find someone to court. His choice fell on a highly-coloured, energetic woman, well known through all the country-side as an indefatigable worker. He bought her a fairing, had the banns published, and married her in three weeks.

I had been passing a few days in the farm-house, and now received most pressing invitations to be present at the wedding. The guests were first to assemble, at about eight o’clock, in the bride’s house; then after a slight refreshment, rinfresco, to go all together to the church in the village hard by, and thence to return to the Cavi, Beppe’s home, to dinner at about midday.

The bride lived some miles away, in a little hamlet perched nearly on the top of the mountain-ridge. The roads were in many places mere mule-tracks through the wood, and it was doubtful if I could get a donkey.

“Come to the Cavi, Signorina,” said Beppe; “sleep there, and come out with us next morning. I’m sure my bride won’t be jealous.”

I hardly supposed she would; still, I did not accept the invitation.

At five o’clock, therefore, on the eventful morning, a donkey, which had been with some difficulty procured for the occasion, was led round to our door by a boy who boasted the romantic name of Poeta, and off we set: my landlord with his gun across his shoulder; his son, in all the glory of black clothes, bright tie, and heavy watch-chain; a peasant woman who had constituted herself my companion, and myself.

We wound higher and higher in the ever-freshening morning air, between hedges gay with autumn berries, until, just below the Cavi, we halted to await the arrival of the bridegroom and his family. First of all they were not dressed – their new clothes tried them, it appeared – and then the bridegroom had forgotten the ring, and must go back across the fields to get it.

We waited for him by a little lonely shrine under a chestnut-tree. The woods which clothed the slopes of the opposite mountains were still hushed in the cold grey-blue of early dawn. Suddenly the scarped precipices and lonely peaks above them were illuminated, as though from within, by wondrous rose-coloured fire, and hung there like some great glowing amethyst between the cold sky above and the cold woods below. Then, as we continued to gaze, the glorious hope was transformed, and merged into the common life of the new day.

Joined at last by the bridegroom, we had a long but most picturesque expedition up a torrent bed, through rocks and woods of infinite variety. The jokes that enlivened it were hearty, if not too refined. They were the sort of jokes Shakespeare’s clowns might have made; and, indeed, it often seemed as if the characters of some old play were come to life, and were moving and talking around me.

The bride’s house was reached a few minutes after eight o’clock. It was a small one-storied cottage at the farther end of a higgledy-piggledy hamlet. At the foot of the steps which led up to the door stood a man with a remarkably fine white beard, holding a thick stick in his hand. This was the Guardian of the Bride, and he resolutely refused to let anyone enter. A loud altercation arose; Beppe opened his big green umbrella, and, spinning it round above his head, tried to push by; my landlord tried to force his way with his gun; but it was not till pantomime and dialogue had grown fast and furious that the guardian gave the word, and the bride appeared framed in the dark doorway above us. Her rosy face was shadowed by her white bridal kerchief, and in her hands she carried bunches of flowers, which she smilingly distributed by way of welcome.

The door opened straight into the kitchen, where the rinfresco was laid. When my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and my ears to the sound of many voices, I found myself surrounded by a crowd of women, who were questioning me, as usual, on my most intimate personal affairs. “Are you married or single?” was the first and all-important question. “Where do you come from?” “When are you going back to England?” The questions followed each other fast and thick, as the women looked at me with strange curiosity written in their eyes. I very soon managed to turn the conversation on to their own family affairs, however; and taking into my lap a delicate, fair-haired child, who looked slight and flower-like indeed in that smoke-browned room and among those sunburnt faces, set them talking with much gesticulation and great volubility of feeling about the little thing’s illness. They were afraid she would have been lame. “But she’s better now, and will grow into a strong woman yet, se Dio vuole,” they ended, as, smiling down upon her, they turned away to give their attention to the business of the day.

The whole party, some forty in number, now proceeded to the rinfresco. On the coarse, clean table-cloth lay great hunks of excellent brown, home-made bread, each piece about the size of an ordinary loaf. These were eaten with slices of raw ham about a quarter of an inch thick. After the bread and ham appeared huge pieces of schiacciata, a country cake made of the ordinary dark flour, flavoured with anise, and put to rise like bread. After the schiacciata, small cheeses were produced, and, lastly, piles of wafer-like biscuits (cialde). Meanwhile drinking had been going on freely. In the middle of the table stood two gigantic bottles of country wine, while smaller flasks were passed merrily about. When full justice had been done to the wine, a light liqueur called rinfresco was drunk out of small glasses, as well as another liqueur, the reverse of light, consisting, we are told, of rum and gin, or rum and brandy.

After everyone had thus turned this “slight refreshment” into a hearty meal, the whole party set out for the church, which was at Rivoreta, a village some little distance off. I was walking ahead with my peasant companion and one of the men. This man had been carefully provided with halfpennies, as to the use of which I was hazarding various surmises. We had not gone many steps before we found the road barred by a rope, over which were hung the brightest of coloured kerchiefs.

“What is that for?” I asked.

“They have made the barrier,” was the answer; “the bride must pay to go through.”

So the man who was with us, the bride’s forerunner, paid a halfpenny, the rope dropped and on we went. This was repeated several times, the barriers forming charming streaks of colour under the overarching trees and against the grey stone of the cottages, until the bride had finally passed from the little hamlet where she had lived her maiden life.

In due time we reached the church, and the ecclesiastical ceremony was performed. As for the civil marriage, the peasant mind still regards that as a superfluity which can be gone through or not, according to the convenience of the parties concerned.

I was much struck here by the good feeling shown by this ignorant, illiterate bride. Beppe’s father and hers had had some hot words on the subject of the dowry, and the former had sworn that he would not be present at the wedding. Being an obstinate old man he stuck to his word, though he could not resist the temptation of accompanying the party. Near the bride’s hamlet he began to complain of a bad foot, sat down by the roadside, and absolutely refused to go farther. At the church door he placed himself on a stone under the trees, and no amount of persuasion would induce him to enter the sacred building. This incident cast a gloom over the whole proceedings, but the bride was not to be daunted. When she and Beppe, now man and wife, came out of the church, she went straight up to him, took his two hands in hers, kissed him, and looking pleadingly up at him, called him by the pretty Italian name “Babbo.” The old man was mollified, and walked back much more cheerfully than he had come; though we have since heard that his vindictive obstinacy (a strongly marked trait in the peasant character) was by no means conquered, and that much ill-will exists between the two families.

Rivoreta is a delightfully clean, breezy hamlet, consisting of about half a dozen houses, a whitewashed church, and an airy canonica, opening on to a small piazza, paved with white cobble stones. The snowy whiteness of the buildings and the pavement, throwing up the bright colours of the women’s kerchiefs and dresses, the whole shut in by embowering chestnuts, formed a picture not likely to be soon forgotten.

The ceremony over, the guests repaired to the one wine-shop of the place to consume more wine and rum; and as this and the priest’s breakfast (for Don Tito was going with us) took some time, it was getting late ere the long procession started for the Cavi. First went two women with large round baskets on their heads; this was the bride’s trousseau. The bride and bridegroom should have followed next; but as the donkey resolutely refused to play second fiddle, and the way was long, etiquette was thrown to the winds, and we moved on in a merry, haphazard crowd. As soon as the meadow that lies between the woods and the Cavi was reached, however, the bride and bridegroom headed the procession, both with hanging heads; he sheepishly playing with the cheap watch-chain he had bought at the fair, she trying to carry off her embarrassment by smiles, making heroic efforts to be natural in her words and movements.

Beppe’s mother was “discovered” watching at the door of the farm-house. She now came running across the field with outstretched arms, according to prescribed custom, welcomed her new daughter-in-law with a kiss on both cheeks, and led her into her new home.

It was now midday. A man-cook and a woman-cook had been hired from the village below and were already hard at work, but the tables had been put before the house on the threshing-floor, and were in the sun; besides, there was not enough room at them, for more guests had come than were expected, and numbered altogether quite fifty. So everyone set to work to help, the tables were carried behind the house on to the grass in the fretwork of light and shade under the chestnut-trees; planks were added to make them longer, and before long everything was ready for dinner. I should not like to say of how many courses that dinner consisted, nor how much the peasants ate and drank, but I know that, of everything that was provided, there was not a crumb of bread left.