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IIMLY
/ Leter hrom Siend
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DAVID
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76 DEAN
LONDON, a
LETTER FROM SIENA
Maurice Rowdon


- E T TE R FRO M SI E N A
Maurice Rowdon.


E T T E R F R 0 a M S I E N A
Maurice Rowdon.


The road outside hasn't been asphalted and is a blinding
dusty strip in the morning sunlight. I've seen a salamander
twice, darting across the pebbles; and a Little Owl sitting on
a milestone in broad daylight, staring at us, craning his neck
round; also a grass-snake, and a weasle. There are many
cuckoos in the woods behind us, and sometimes they sing on the
lower note only, three straight notes like a train-hooter;
and nearly always there is a nightingale at night, quite close
to our window, quite alone. There are foxes in the woods but
we never hear one bark. Sometimes a pheasant or woodgrouse
flaps away close to the house, with an ec choing cry of alarm.
There are warblers and wheatears and stonechats; many house-
martins, but I've only seen one swallow so far. The house-
martins swooped over the house for a few days after we arrived
but they seem to have lost interest now. I was surprised to
see a jay yesterday with its win-colêured breast, flapping
down heavily from one branch to another. We look straight
across at a wonderful property where there are vineyards,
cornfields, grass fof forage, olives, tomatoes, maize, and a
stream hidden among saplings; the crop grows between vines.
Two families Work this land, which divides a valley and two hills
in a checkboard way; and the padrone lives in town. From here


the house looks Austrian, shaded with trees, with a steep
slope in front of it. The owner has let it go to ruin and
won't allow the peasants to use the vacant rooms. We went
over these yesterday---the beams were propped up with tree-trunks,
the windows were hanging open and birds had made their nests in
the hinges; there were rat-holes everywhere and the furniture
was encrusted with filth. All the pride has been knocked out
of the land for both the owners and the peasants. They are in
the hands of middlemen, who pull strings and influence the politics.
The cities are living on the Italian earth like vampires, giving
it nothing back. Hence you get a big communist vote, because
the communists promise a state agricultural programme.
I suppose the charity and harmony in Italy come from the
common people. The aristocracy was all but destroyed by the
Counter-Reformation. There was some faitn activity in the
eighteenth century---the baroque; but the cause of this was in
the north; it was European. After the Renascence there remained
only the common people. They were the presence that pervaded the
land. That was how Italy became the land of sound nerves. The
aristocracy had been anything but har-monious; they'd been sane
and S ound for themselves, like the Germans; but not for others.
Our house stands at the top of a short rocky pat th above the
road, and has a tall cypress outside, shading a haystack.
There used to be a gateway into the courtyard but there is only
a bare space now between sturdy walls where weeds are growing,
and the cobbles of the little courtyard itself are sunken and
split. When we first came into the courtyard, on a sunny
afternoon, with not a sound in the whole valley, it seemed a


world on its own, glittering and quaintly talkative in its
silence, especially with the pigeons that flew from one perch
to another over our heads, gazing down at us with slightly
turned heads. Brick steps led up to our door, under an arch
which must be four hundred years old. The brickwork and plaster
are crumbling, and the tiny Windows of the house, looking down
into the courtyard like ancient people, are crooked and filthy.
But upatairs a palazzina has been made, Which now means a few
rooms With marble floors in bad taste instead of the lovely old
red brick. The narrow balcony upstairs, with french windows
behind it, makes the house look as if it had a steeple as well,
and one expects a clockface and bell. Under the balcony there
is the stall, with two oxen, and on the other side of the court-
yard, humbled and dark, are the peasant-rooms; these, too, lead
from the archway at the top of the steps. But no peasants live
here now. A man called Manelli comes here evefy day from the
village on a motor-cycle; our padrona calls him Manelli and the
peasants all round Gigi. He looks after everything---the oxen,
also
the chikensgand the podere that lies on the other side of the
road, a field of about three hectares which slopes gently towards
the stream among the saplings. We often lean on the terrace-
wall---hidden among the mellow roofs of the house (it has two
levels)---and stared across at this field in its mysterious
shadows, with inclines and sudden dips that make it impossible
to know, 'even if you walk in it for an hour. And immediately
underneath the terrace-wall is the roadway, curving round the
side of the house. Over to the left stands the terracotta-
painted palazzo and peasant-houses of Altopasquale, to which we
belong, $o to speak: they cluster together and dominate our


valley in a way that sometimes seems fussy and sometimes,
especially on a moonlit night, immensely serene. And up the
hill behind us, in the woods, there are one or two other houses,
including that of Paolo the shepherd, at the very top, on its
own cool plateau. A narrow rocky path goes up from our house,
covered with fossilised seashells and snails and mussles, all
foim
in perfect form, only rock now. From its field below the road,
our house looks like a miniature castle, behind massive sloping
walls; it might have been a defensive position at one time, in
lc) the Mtddle Ages. This was the road to Volterra, and there was
an unending feud between that town and ours.
In the darkness last night, op the rocky path above the
house, we met Giovanni for the first time. He lives in one of
the houses hidden in the woods, near the shepherd. Even in the
darkness we could see that he was blond in the Italian way, with
rather curly hair and freckles: his eyes were large, and he had
a frank, gay face. He made a sort of speech (the first of many):
we must come to see him and his family; he had heard we lived in
Rome; certainly the air here was invigorating and healthy, far
superior to city-air; his family would make us welcome; we would
find them friendly folk, and in this part of Tuscany, once you had
made a friend, he was your friend for life. He shouted all this
across the darkness rhetorically, standing on one of the bare,
slippery, volcanic stones that mark our hill. His vbice rang out
in the still air, with the sky clear and bright overhead. We
nodded in a bewildered way and the moment his speech was finished
he stlked off up the hill with a dramatic 'Felice notte!'
The speech gave no idea of his gaiety, and of the soft,
flexible intimacy inside him: of his frolics and puns and devil-


may-care laugh. We put him at twenty-two or twenty-three.
We saw his home today. Everyone calls him Gianni.
The house is tiny, long, intimate-looking, with an outdoor stone
staircase like ours. The dwelling rooms are above. It must
be mediaeval.
They hate it: 'dirty and inconvenient'. A Worker
from the town who happened to be there said with a scowl, 'I
wouldn't live here if you paid me! : I'd blow the whole lot up
tomorrow.' They can't understand how we can admire it, and they
laugh.
He has two brothers, Lorenzo who works in town at a wood-
factory, and Alberto who looks after the podere with his mother.
They have oxen, and three or four large fields with grain, vines,
olive trees and some fruit. The woods slope up directly from
these fields, making them look idyllic. The wheat is just
beginning to get high.
Alberto is tall and gangling next to
Gianni: he smiles, shows bad teeth. 'A good ladt' his mother
cries. 'He works hard!' And Gianni (who doesn't Work hard)
smiles and winks at us. She is a tiny, dark, wrinkled woman
with blazing eyes and no teeth. She shouts and makes everyone
laugh---'Madonna cane---" (a favourite curse)---twhere's the sickle? 1
They work endlessly, even while we are there. Gianni's mother
is shrivelled and dried-up with work. She lost her husband in
the war and has brought up her three sons alone.
The two oxen are kept roped up in their stall under the
staircase. Gianni calls them 'veal' and, smacking one on the
rump, says they will fetch over a hundred and fifty thousand lire
each when they're ready. They never see the light of day, never
have done. At the age of ten months or so they will die. They
tug at their chains. He says some people put them out to


pasture, but they fatten better in the stall. He clearly hates
them and beats one of them with a switch for breaking away from
its chain. The chains are weighted down with iron loads so that
they won't move too far. They have just room to turn their necks
and look at the door, but they can hardly raise their heads, unless
they lie down.
We walk outside to the vines which are growing like trees,
separately. Gianni wants cleaner work. He strolls along
between us, rather poutingly, flicking at the grass with his
switch. He has bright eyes that flicker quickly With amusement.
He responds to everything with amazing quickness. He has dreams:
the land is a drudgery that never stops, he says.
With no religion to mitigate it W orking on the land is hard
and ugly. Peasants know this, in themselves. They'd like to go
to church again, I think---though most of them wouldn't admit it.
Only one or two do: seeming to speak for the rest. The men
hang about outside the church doors in great dark clusters on
Sundays. It is a matter of pride not to go in: you're a fool,
but more than that a betrayer, if you do. When you go into a
church you betray your class. Sunday used to bring S oftness into
the week---thought and art. They look wistfully at the church-doors,
some of them. There isn't softness in the country any more.
The longer we live here the more I think of certain things
in the city---the intimate light in a café in Vienna, the settee
by the W indow of a Salzburg tea-room, the glow of certain streets
in Paris on a rainy evening. Before, I never thought I would
ever see a valid reason for the city: through being born in one,
I suppose.


It has been ra: ining for days with low misty clouds hanging
round the house, and there are uncanny thunderstorms st night,
lasting for hours, rumbling continuously among the dense clouds,
with sudden blinding flashes, and crashes that shake the house.
I'm here alone for a few days. The oxen undernea th the bedroom
stamp and shift their chains, breathe out with a great puff every
now and then; when they feel peace, after the silence of the
night has fallen, they slump down with a thump into the sitting
position. The pigeons flutter their Wi ings suddenly, shift in
their loft.
Last night Gianni and I went to the local film. Toto the
comic was playing. It thrilled me being in the long bare hall,
like a palace dreamed by people far away, with youths down in the
stalls whistling, talking at the top of their voices, chewing
chocolate, smoking, putting their arms out on the back of the
seats, crossing their legs over the seats in front.
Before the cinema we went to Poggibonsi, which two years ago
(people say) had ten thousand inhabitants and now has over forty
thousand, though this ia an exaggeration. The roads are being
torn up, there are smoky trains passing through, an air of hurry
and commerce, crowds going to and from Work, cars jammed in the
sidestreets, the cafés full.
Italians love this and their faces
kook different there, lively and optimistic. Noise, light,
company---these are what they yearn for. Their lovely valleys
have no culture.
By the time the film was over the clouds had gone away and
there was a full moon in a clear and serene sky. The air was
brisk and biting, as it often is before a dazzling sunlit day. The
valley outside the house looked marfellous and rapt, in the hush.
There were deep shadows under the olive-trees, and the saplings in


the dip looked black and mysterious. The lights of the town four
kilometres away looked bright like lamps hung out to celebrate
something in a biblical country long ago.
When I went to sleep the moonlight pouring into the room
through two windows seemed to fix everything, including myself,
into a single motionaless unit.
Yesterday I watched a chicken pecking away outside the wastepipe
from our kitchen and thought to myself, 'You'd better look out---the
shops sell poisons freely nowadays---detergents, washing soap.' And
this morning the chitken was dead.
There was a great clucking from
the other hens which brought me downstairs, and she was just moting
her claws for the last time, lying on her side. The others were
already in their dark house, in silence, and they haven't emerged all
day. Their silence is real and active, as I feel when I go through
the courtyard. Animals have a world of feelings we neither know nor
respect. The beasts due for slaughter know more, perhaps, than we
think. We are so gross and numbed that we depend on the slaughter,
in concentration-camp conditions, of millions of creatures every day;
and sometimes with such cruelty that if we knew about it we'd renounce
meat overnight, some of us. In the old days an animal was killed in
its due time, after a life in one place. How can we go on feeding
the world with ghosts---from our wars, our famines, our slaughters?
The pigeons were curious and awed at this death. They gazed
towards the corpse from the barn roof and didn't flap about as usual.
Then Gigi the peasant came and threw the corpse away. The pigeons
flapped about again and went to and fro from the olive grove across
the road as usual: the hen had ceased to die.
The barber on the square said yesterday that the unusual weather
was due to missiles. He said the scientists knew it influenced
the weather but still kept quiet about it as they had done
about the effects of atomic experiments while it suited


them. 'They want to advance,' he said, 'even if it means
sacrificing humanity.' He said he'd never in over sixty years
of life known weather like this. It has been raining more or
less continually for six months now, and there was a two-month
freeze-up in the winter. Nothing like it recorded in Italian
history, either.
Gianni, on his way this morning to cut forage f or the oxen,
said he thought the cause wasn't missiles but nuclear weapons.
'There's an enormous explosion,' he said, 'Which displaces
thousands of acres of air, and moves dense blocks of cloud.'
He made a little speech about it: the missiles were, however,
a logical necessity of the exploration of the universe; but the
nuclear weapons had no justification.
Gigi and I stood talking last night about oxen, after he'd
put them in the stall. I said I wondered why the yoke was put
across their necks, as it always looked so uncomfortable. He
said, yes, it was a funny place but it had always been done.
A horse, on the other hand, pulled with his chest. We stood
there wondering why this was when we suddenly tumbled to it:
the OX like all horned creatures fights with his head, butting
forward, so that his maximum strength is there, in the collar;
while a horse fights with his hoofs, rearing, and his main
strength must lie in his chest.
Sometimes I step back in astonishment at What I have done
in life: I mean, in horror.
The worst was when I had instruments of murder at my finger-
M the war
tips. I never committed a cruelty, but I committed blunders.
Since horror was at your feet you stumbled into it all the time


and only woke up afterwards. The memory of this didn't terrify
me in the years immediately following the war: more so now, when
they are all but forgotten.
The best thing I did, standing by a machine-gunner, was to put
my hand on his arm and stop him firing when a dozen or so Germans
passed unsuspecting a few yards in front of us, a helpless target.
I thought, in that instant, of wives, children, front doors with
people standing by them.
I thought I had found that house the other day, a few miles
from here. I saw the hill those Germans crossed, in front of the
barn-window where the machine-gunner and I were watching, our breath
tense. Nothing seems to have changed. I saw the tiny courtyard
where other English troops left their armoured car abandoned, after
being blown out of their house by German bazookas; we watched the
Germans come in on the tail of the English, and peer about in the
car, picking up maps, unaware of us so close.
It isn't the actual look of the Cathedral in Siena that
makes it the most serene church in Italy for me but the mystery
that seems to combine bitter S truggle and thought and commerce,
like a dust that drifts through the air; a certain sternness
and ferocity together with a compactness that come from unint-
errupted intimacy, and also fineness of imagination, in a
bewildering amalgam.
The shaft of dusty sunlight on the
wall reminds me of where I was born---the tramlines, the squalidly
vivid shopfronts of London, the grimy houses, with that same
air of travail and intimate thought, combined in a strangely
mystical way. And the square outside the cathedral was like
the stern backyard of a factory. It throbs with struggle.


And there is a sense of university as well, pale and lonely
work, the glow of lamps over tables, books, and the tinkling
sounds outside, a soliloquy with the past; and silence.
Commerce, study, independence. But I shall never grasp
the fascination of Siena. Perhaps she has been deprived of
so much: defeated by Florence, waterless, at the edge of a
desert, unvisited by any of the main military routes through
Italy. With the sturdy, dusty, intimate air you get from
being negzected.
I noticed the W omen in Siena: a certain light curiosity
and expectancy that reminds me of French women.
Paolo the shepherd appeared yesterday wit th a calf of
seven or eight months. He had arranged with Gigi to keep
it overnight in our stall, as it must go for slaughtering
in the morning. 'People want tender meat nowadays and are
prepared to pay for it!' he said. It was a cow-calf---still
tiny and babyish-looking, with loose skin round the neck,
and sensitive legs, her eyes wide and round.
Today people
ate meat as never before, he went on. So one had to kill
the animals before their time: this calf would fetch twice
the price in another ten months. Not so long ago meat was
a special dish---for Sundays and holidays. That had always
been the vase in his family. It was how he'd grown up.
Now everybody, includ ing his own family, ate meat at least
once a day and sometimes twice. And the huge cities had
to be supported. So more and more beasts were slaughtered,
in the most uneconomical way, as in this case. It was a


situation, he said, that couldn't go on---unless they found
a way of mai nufacturing meat in factories! They'd found ways
of produci ing wine without grapes SO---! The result, of course,
was that the feeding of the animals was forced. What used
to take six months, in terms of weight, now took two or three.
This couldn't have a good effect on the quality of the meat,
which lacked taste and fibre, and in the end it might have
an effect on the race itself. What was the result when you
not only inseminated COWs and oxen on a large scale but reared
the young by forced feeding, with special foods, and even--
they had started this in some countries---kept them in batteries
like chickens, away from all natural light and air? You
needed nature to make bones, liver, tissue, circulation---
how far could you play about with her? In the old days
you put your animals out to pasture and they were slaughtened
when they were strong, heavy, full-grown beasts. The meat
was tasty and substantial, and if the pasture happened to be
good it was tender as well. But nowadays there was a madness
for meat and the madness had to be satisfied.
'But what a pity!' he said. 'What a pity to send this
beast off to slaughter when you could getvtwice or three
times as much weight out of it later, and more tasty meat, too!'
And he flicked the creature with his switch.
In the end, he said, it must lead to anmial factories,
where the breeding, feeding and slaughtering went on in the
same place. But what would happen to the race? It must
get degenera te. Disease would start. The doctors, as fast
as they got round to one disease, would be faced with another.


The effect of overfed meat was also apparent in people:
to be healthy for the human digestion meat had to be healthy
too. Just as we would go down the drain if we didn't take
exercise and never saw the light of day, but only gorged our-
selves, so will the animals. But people won't think of that
side of it. They prefer to leave everything for the next gener-
ations to solve.
Paolo has a sharp, wide-eyed, Etruscan face, and shows no
interest in anything but monen. He would sell me and my wife
quite mercilessly for a few thousand lire if he could. When
he takes money he makes a kind of gasp. Gianni says he has
become quite a rich man in the last few years, calculating every
cent.
He gave us bad cheese the other day, and also he charges us
ten lire more per litre of milk than the shops do; and Gianni
says quietly, Philistine.'
Paolo only talked on the theme of healthy meat because we
started him on it: he doesn't give a damn about it in fact.
I remember when we were issued with gas-masks at the time
of the Munich crisis, a year before the last war started. They came


in square cardboard boxes rather like Easter egg boxes (the
ones with lots of caramels inside the egg). I leaned out of
the window on the warm September day and watched them being
delivered at the houses opposite. Our turn didn't come the first
day and I remembering wondering what would happen if a war suddenly
started and they used gas: the people on the other side of the
street would be saved and we wouldn't.
Then they arrived.
One per head, which meant we got five. I was alone in the house
when they came. The gas-masks seemed flimsy, a bit of rubber
and glass, and I tried mine on in front of the mirror in the room
we used on Sundays only. I tried to measure the gravity of the
situation by gazing at myself with the gas-mask on. The elastic
held it round one's head and one could adjust the little metal
strap at the back to one's size. I stared through the great
07 glass goggles. The mouthpiece was roundgand pierced like that
of a telephone. But it was impossible for me to penetrate that
lovely autumn wea ther to the point of gravity. I couldn't make
it real. Not only this but everything seemed in a strange way
impossible: a dream---all life. The shops were full, the
streets were hot and dusty, London was vast and full of the most
intricate systems---of transport and commerce and electricity
and thought and amusement----Which it seemed impossible to
interrupt. Being brought up in a city was like being brought
up in a dream. The trams and buses and trains worked by them-
selves, the meat and vegetables that came to the table had no
was
connection with the fields ; Monday was washing day, Thursday, the
day welhad sausages. And the gas-mask was also something in
a dream. The political pamphlets I used to read said they were
useless---they wouldn't even protect you from a cold-germ.
And so they were doubly unserious: first because the war Would


never happen, and secondly because they were useless. They
were perfect dream-things. I stood in front of the mirror
trying to look seriously like a child in a gas-raid. But it I
only looked like S omeone in a rubber gas-mask. I gazed across
the street, wondering. I seemed to spend all my time wondering.
I wondered about reality: what was it? It never seemed to come
down our street. Everything we did was surrounded by a fond
and devout dream, that had grown out of the ages and had its
ecstatic climaxes (usually on Saturday nights, though Fridays gere
good too).
Lettuce' was what you chewed on Sunday afternoons,
at tea; 'sugar' was what came in thick blue bags. But there
was a perplexed pause now and thenfo Were there wars? Was
there death? I used to ask my mother both questions and be
astonished that she couldn't reply for sure. Some people cl ung
to the dream all their liges---the real born city-people. They
even seemed to hide their eyes. The afternoon was the cup of
tea they had in it, Hay seemed 16 say.
Sooner or later the city-dream grows too big and the
perplexity in people's faces grows, until no one is capable of
making reality any more with his own hands, and his own brain.
It has been raining again, with thunderstorms and wind:
nearly three weeks of it. People keep mentioning tast winter:
the deep snow Tuscany has never had before, the recurrent frosts,
over a period of two months. Biting Winds as late as April.
For years now the old Italian spring that should begin in its
first intimate signs as early as February or March has been
lacking.
A dream: lying back in a cart behind the great flanks of


a horse, on the road outside, so that the cartwheels make a
grating and rumbling sound on the gravel; on a hot, still
day; my hat tipped forward over my eyes, the reins loose in my
oulside
hands. And the Elsa
in her
valley,
noonday hush.
Paolo the shepherd won't leave milk any more because we
complained to our neighbours about the bad cheese he'd given
us: it was a peccorino cheese two or three weeks too young,
so that quite three etti of it in weight were liquid.
I met him in the village yesterday, on the feast of Corpus
Christi, and asked him, 'What about the milk today?' He was
dressed in his best, With a neat trilby hat and feather.
(Ah,' he said, 'Iforgot it---today being a holiday.' They
were just strewing flower-petals down the middle of the cobbled
street for the procession. I made a mock lunge at him and
he laughed in his bashful way.
The peasant across the valley who is sometimes called il
mafioso because of his stocky, piratic look told us yesterday
that at one time, before the last war, the procession of Corpus
Christi was a marvellous affair, with the square in front of
the church packed with people, and the church itself a mountain
of flowers. But the pope of that time decreed that communists
were to be excommunicated, he said, so---per forzal---all the
men began to stay away; now you see the churches half-empty,
and the Corpus Christi procession is a thing for children,
who go carrying their lilies, dressed in their communion white.
People weren't communists because they didn't believe in God,
he said, but because they wanted hetter lives.
His eyes shone when he talked about the old Corpus Christi


processions.
I took a bath in the village-hotel yesterday and was
excited at the feeling of civilisation. I looked at everything
as if I'd never seen taps and tiled walls before. Our house
has no running water or bathroom.
There were books in the hotl dressing room and when I
opened one of them it seemed like an essential part of that
glittering and fabulous world. And just outside the window
lay the village where we were known to everybody, the lanes
dusty, the walls crumbling, with chickens stalking about.
ply
Everything shone in the room: the Eaid/wood (called compensato)
covered with veneer, the uncomfortable signorile beds which
were made to impress the peasants outside but not to sleep
tired visitors, the wardrobe handles which were already half
off, ghairs impossible to sit in.
I lay in the bath and dreamed about a pleasant city:
thonght
towns are the achievement of dreams, I suppose; then poeple
flock to them, to participate in the dream,and everything
collapses---the tender requirements of dreaming have gone.
And art tends towards the town-- - --towards its creation. I
hadn't realised this before.
As I lay there the sentence came into my head, for no
apparent reason, puzzling me, 'Christ had an Etruscan smile.'
I remebered a visit to Babylon. I had a sense of marvellous
liquid richness there but don't remember if this was from the
trees and the actual place or from the words 'By the waters of


Babylon I sat down and wept' that came into my head.
I saw no water there. Only trees and rich foliage, following
a river-course that seemed to have dried up. And a dusty village
near by. Only the dream of the city remained, hanging over the
golden ruins. Auoman with her abba drawn up to her eyes watched us.
Going to Babylong wàs like driving towards heaven all morning.
The road was bumpy and if I remember rightly went between trees at
certain places, close to a wadi, and across open desert. I saw
no one all the way.
I imagine Babylon, the city, marvellously cool after the desert,
With the sound of cattle-bells, and the air sparkling between the
roofs, with the same flat terraces that you see today in Baghdad,
Cairo, Beirut.
Gianni and his brother Lorenzo burst in this morning---are we
going to Siena? Yes. When? In half-an-hour. Can Gianni get
a lift as far as the village? Of course he can! Lorenzo will go
on his motor-cycle. 'Be careful!' I say to him with a laugh and
a wink. 'Ah! Lorenzo says, taking my meaning. 'I'm loaded--
son cericato---devo scaricarmi!t I must unload myself!
'He isn't capable!' Gianni shouts.
'His pipe is that
'But full---Dbo buono---full!" Another great laugh,
swinging round on his toes, plump and red-cheeked with health,
his eyes beaming.
'No, no, don't believe him---he isn't capable---he doesn't
know what to do with it---it just isn't big enough---if there's
a vertical entrance or a horizontal one, he doesn't know the
difference!'
And here Lorenzo gives a bashful glance up the stairs to


see if there are any women about who might have overheard.
Then, with another burst of laughter, they are gone.
fhe
It reminds of sunlit Sundays ten years ago near Rome, before
Italy broke completely with her past. The same loud and vigorous
tones, and the stillness outside, the sparkling light.
Gianni claims that he goes to Poggibonsi twice a week and
spends a thousand lire each time on a tall, handsome Whore with
fine legs. He told me, out of earshot of my wife, that she took
him home with her, from a bar where they met. And he laughed
flippantly, described what a comfort her breasts were when he
itali drew her towards him, and What a fine thing a woman had---'though
not pretty perhaps.' He made a little ironical speech extolling
nature, a smile making his lips tremble as he talked. Hets a L as
cleanas theyellow corn-o UT L S ae aLr through.
He doesn't like the idea of 'going home' with a girl, he
says.
'Going home! means being officially engaged: you
approach the girl's father, and if he agrees to your being
engaged he invites you home, and this is the first of many long,
tedious visits throughout life. He doesn't want that, he says.
His
Giennils mother shouts, *When are you going to marry?'
When is he going to do a real job of work? He leaves the work
of the podere, as well as the cleaning of the stall, to Alberto.
Gianni is 'rash' and 'forward', they say. But he has imagination,
fantasia. He used to paint marvellously as a child; and they
respect this.
He has a special path to tread, they say, and they don't
know what this is. Nor does he.
He came with us all the way to Siena. He suddenly decided


to, on the outskirts of the village. He seemed to feel it as
a great liberty: and at the same time to want to hide it from
his brother. His family doesn't know about things, he says.
He noticed everything outside the Window as it flashed by---
piecemeal, in the Italian way; without sustained inner themes.
And when he wasn't noticing things he was asleep like a child,
with his hand round out dog's neck.
On the outskirts of Poggibonsi he got excited at the hédeous
new factories going up in the fields. 'Bello!' he shouted.
'Bello da vero!'
Gianni said when we first met him, 'I'm looking for a job.
There's no money here. Ican't find Work.' It was a dark
picture: the ancient Italian dirge, that no longer seems to
apply. What are the facts? His padrone is a generous man
from Torino who owns a number of factories there: the produce
of the land---grain, maize, wine, olives, fruit and vegetables---
all goes to Gianni's family; and fifty-hhree percent of the
money derived from selling the cattle (about four head a year)
goes to them as well. So they have a house (which though they
despise it is solid, With massive walls and a sturdy roof) stand-
ing in a field perched high among the woods, for which they pay
no rent, plus all the food, wine and oil they need for the year;
plus an income from the cattle; while the padrone pays the taxes.
For this they have to work like dogs, but only because it is
a dog's life for them, spiritually. Worked out on paper the
family is better off than most industrial working families:
though it is true that these get_sick benefit and pensions,
which the peasants don't. This is the great source of peasant
strikes this year.


The peasant still doesn't know what it means to be
disinherited---to pay for everything he needs, to get nothing
by habit or love or natural right: he only sees the cars flash
by and says, 'Ah, signori!' The city-world is 'gentlemen'.
Give him palaces of gold, remove every trace of miseria
from the countryside, and he will still lie and dream, 'The
city, the city!' just as I did the other day.
When we got back from Siena it was dark and we found
Gianni's brother Alberto working on the rocky path with
Paolo the shepherd.
The endless flows of water this year
have ruined the gullies, and they have to be cleared every
week or so.
Gianni had got out of the car fifty yards back, to
visit Altapasquale: he knew his brother was working here,
and wanted to avoid reproach. Alberto said quietly to us
in the darkness, pushing at his long S pade, 'Did my brother
come back with you?'
Everyone seems to grudge Gianni this journey to Siena.
I believe he makes much of his journeys with us, even the
ones into the village: it is a kind of new social position.
Sergio who lives a little further down the road with his wife
and son joked about it as Gianni got out of the car: he was
standing in the darkness, S] pare and sunburned, and cried to
us with a smile, 'If you're going to take him to Siena, take
me as well! I love Siena!'
Siena shines for them, distantly. And it has begun to for


us, too.
Yet everyone has a car or motor-cycle locally. Paolo
the shepherd has a car. Lorenzo has a motor-cycle; so has
Renato, Sergio's son, Who works at a marble-yard in Certaldo
and is plump, shy and jovial, taking after his mother. Yet
they never go to Siena, much less Florence, much less Lucca,
Pisa. Sergio told us one evening that peasants have only been
tkeir preden Ge
going to the village since the war: before then thest
loun
eveut
them in the rillege-streets would have
they
beengremarkable;
looked, behaved quite different, wore quite different clothes.
His wife, Caterina, seems frightened of the village. She won't
go there. She must stay with her chickens, she says. And
her husband laughs at her, making her turn her head bashfully and
stiffly away.
shouled
Gigi cried as we were starting out for Siena With Gianni in
the back, 'You're not taking him? Let hime walk!' Then he
laughed in his boyish, throaty way, thr ough cigarette smoke,
half spluttering. He has a thick, soft neck and quick eyes
that sometimes look delicate, belying the gruffness of his voice.
leated
He has brought-up two sons and two daughters perfectly: he
town-
satisfied the dream the-town early, and moved there over five
years ago. His family is polite and optimistic, as if they were
the product of all his silent aspirations as he worked in the
fields, cursing the oxen and puffing at his cigarettes. He
isn't really a peasant. He worked as a kind of fattore for a
time, a farmer, though perhaps more a go-between, selling and
buying cattle. But it wasn't steady enough. So now he Works
on a day-to-day basis for our padrona, Who lives in one of the
tall houses on the village-square and never visits the land
except once a year when the demijohns of wine are weighed and


sold; she stands by with a little notebook, writing the weights
down as the men balance the stake on their shoulders and hang
the demijohnsbetween them.
The thunderstorms continue. Rain more or less night and
day, with bursts of very hot sunshine. Danger for the vines:
and the grain is late.
Paolo the shepherd brings the milk again: down ten lire
per litre.
I notice that everybody is delighted and flattered by Gianni's
presence. The peasants smile and chuckle---unwillingly. Renato,
Sergio's son, who is stolid, unbends slowly under Gianni's banter.
Gianni's lips always quiver with suppressed joy when he talks.
He says to us, 'How strange you should have come here! How
strange!'
He looks a little Scandinaviën. I remember the same
look in a young Roman girl---the same Wi ild, freckled, clowning
nature, with blue eyes that seem to open into space When they
laugh. Blond Italians---dashing, reckless people. They will
burn life right through. Gianni's father came from the Veneto,
and so (people say) he may have a touch of Austrian blood.
His father died young in the last war, transporting ammunition
for the Germans; he was walking behind the cart when one of the
wheels went into a mine; the oxen wefe untouched---had he been
walking in front of them instead of following he would have been
unhurt.
In Siena we saw boys rehearsing for the palio: beating
drums, throwing flags high in the air and catching them, swinging
round with their flags whirling. People looked on in an un-


concerned way. We were fascinated by their costumes which
are identical in every way with the original medivaeval ones.
The Sienese are fierce: you can see it in the eyes of their
young---a ceratin daring and impulsiveness, which isn't used now
except in quick family encounters and at the annual palio, Where
the Winning horses are said to be fixed, sometimes cruelly maimed,
etc. The city itself has changed little since mediyaeval times.
The middle ages were its baptism, as they were the baptism of all
Europe, except that we can hardly see it now.
I was excited to hear that the Etruscans settled this valley,
along the road that runs outside, immediately underneath our walls.
I went cherry-picking with Gianni yesterday, along narrow,
dusty lanes, high up among thick woods and cornfields, where the
sun goes down late: it was just setting when we left, disappear-
ing behind a vast plain, like a table over the world. We passed
the lane where his father was killed, and they have put an iron
cross there, over a marble slab. 'B---- Vittorio, died here
tragically in July, 1941.'
Then we went on to where the family lived twenty years ago:
a grey, tumbledown house with all its bricks and stones showing,
the courtyard overgrown with tall grass, the steps up to the door
entangled in weeds; a man's jacket half-henging out of an open
window. We climbed a tree and picked a basket-full of cherries,
not quite ripe because of the late summer. Vines were tangled
with the tree, and there were clusters of grapes in embryo.
Noises came from the woods which I involuntarily thtought
were traffic-noises, but they were birds. Everything stands quiet
and withheld, in a dignity that quite excludes us.


On the way back Gianni was suddenly stricken with fear that
we'd been stealing. Perhaps he should tell someone---in one of
the local houses? But when we'd got to the road again he settled
in his seat and laughed: 'We're safe!'
In the middle of the rain and thunderstorms last week a
priest said on the radio or television, 'Summer will come---and
stay---on June 17th.'
That was three days ago: since the
morning of the 17th it has been hot with a blazing sun, and the
temperature is now normal for this time of year. I've been
reluctant to write this down, for fear of tempting the gods to
bring the storms back.
Two guesses about the priest: he has divine insi ight; or
he knows somebody in a missile-fectory.
Due to the hot weather Gianni is working again. A day's
work makes him disgruntled and resentful. He came after dark
yesterday, on the back of Lorenzo's motor-cycle, to deposit two
bags of flour in one of our outhouses, to be picked up later by
Paolo the shpeherd and taken up the hill. He tugged at Lorenzo's
sleeve: and said, nodding towards me, with his flickering---and
this time rather hurt---smile, (Which of us is fortunate, eh?
Is he all right or not?' And Lorenzo disclaimed the question,
turning away. The work is an affront for Gianni: a personal
insult. Like many Italians he has a horror of getting his hands
dirty; the best thing about my work in his eyes is the fact that
I keep my hands clean. Hence the exodus to the towns.
Actually they get their hands dirtier in a factory or garage,
but it's fashionable dirt.
This morning he came bright and early, as I was washing


the dishes: his face was clear and untroubled again. He'd
slept well.
Clouds again. I looked out of the window just now and
my first though t was, 'I shouldn't have written anything about
the weather.'
(This is how paganism justifies itself).
And now the sun has gone completely.
Heard some Renascence music on our portable radio:
danc es, with pipes, cymbals. It was so lovely that all I
could think was, The grace and tenderness have passed out of
us; we don't know how bleak and damned we are; and we can't
discover---except by a chance comparison like this one.' A
man who three or four centuries agpo split someone's head open
with his sword had more tenderness than we have with our peaceful
hands. How many of us can weep?
The sun is out and resplendent. I lie on the terrace
naked, gazing at the woods tha t rise above the house.
The butcher the other day: 'You should go to Certaldo--
it's very interesting, the house of Boccaccio, and some wonder-
ful ruins!' Absent-mindedly, not really intending it, I said,
'E bello?'---is it nice? 'Bello!' he said in a baffled tone,
staring into my eyes with his mouth open. 'No, no, not at all---
only the modern can be bello for me!' Solo il moderno!
Gigi has long arguments with the oxen when he arrives in
the morning. 'Good God---Dio buonol---what the devil have you


been doing here?', as he pushes the door open and enters the
dark stall.
'Your chains all twisted! And look---look!
The mess down there! Up! Up! What a fine night you've
had: Porca la Madonna! Dio cane!' Of course, they don't
reply.
When they're led from the stall to be put under the yoke
they look like queens coming out into the light, tall and pure
and white, blinking and Wondering.
After he'd taken the yoke off them this morning the taller
one stepped up into the stall without waiting, trailing her
halter-ropes behind her. Gigi watched her in silence and then
said quietly, All right---now you're going in---what are you
going to do?' He meant to say, how was she going to extricate
herself from the ropes? And for answer the beast stopped,
gazing before her, vast and queenly, letting out an enormous
breath, a tower of white in the dark stable, admitting that
she was puzzled: and Gigi then bent down and untied her.
The romanic church at Cellole is dark like a tunnel,
with thick pillars down either side. At the door there is the
sign of Solomon's knot. Not one of the pillars is uniform.
The altarvis dark, dark---only just developed from a sacrifical
altar. Everything lies in the darkness of first thought.
There is the first calm and astonishment of Christ, after
paganism---the first moment. The pagan itches to sacrifice
perhaps---a twinge from the past---but inside there is this
calm. He has to learn it slowly.
There is a young priest with glasses, like a Russian in


his quick movements, with his talkative mother, tiny and
clear-spoken. He works on his two poderi and rarely seems
to wear a cassock.
After that first moment of conversion everything wakes
up slowly, like flowers in the morning. The sunlight begins
to pour through the open doors, down into the tunnel between
the pillars, towards the rounded altar, where there are slender
ancient columns.
Gradually the hill-top wakes up: outside the door there
is an avenue of trees, in line with the pillars. The sun-
light will be hot and blinding. It touches the church like a
baptism. It seems like the first light there ever was.
Paolo the shepherd is going to move soon. He has made
millions, Gianni told me. He did it by means of 'sacrifices';
a shepherd's life has no holidays, and Paolo never had less
than a hundred sheep at a time. Five years ago 'he was
nothing'. He isn't on mezzadria, like most of the peasants
here, that is, committed to giving his padrone half---now forty-seven
percent---of his yield. He has made his money slowly, trickle by


Tnckle
(on his sheep's cheese, his ricotta (butter-milk curd), and his
cattle, sheep and pigs for alaughtering. He pays little for
the rent of his house, land and outhouses---perhaps s ixty thous-
and lire a year. He has a regular deal with one of the local
hotels to sell them his cheese. Now he'll move to the village
and become a butcher.
There are three families on the hill above us---Paolo's,
Gianni's and a family W orking on mezzadria. In a few motithagv Yme
only Gianni's family will be there: the other two are moving.
Paolo's wife, a pretty young woman, has just given burth
to a child, and looks exhausted: the cheeses have to be pressed
every day, the sheep and COWs milked, While she is nursing her own
child as well. she has a flinching, self-doubting look, as if
yearning for society. 'It's so isolated here!' she says. There
is only the forest at the edge of their land; and the sound of
pigs rooting close to the house.
Paolo seems quite unItalian. But then a determined money-
maker never seems to belong anywhere.
Sunset: we walked up the hill and looked across the
whole vastness of the Elsa valley. The few light clouds were
bright yellow, like all the midsummer afternoons one had ever
known as a child, overlooking endless plains. And towards
the sea the sky was deep-blue on one side and the colour of the
sea itself on the other, an astonishing limpid green. The
hills over the Pesa valley were dim and peaceful in the dista nee.
The houses down below, including our own and those of Altapasquale,
shone red. There was a nightingale close to Sergio's house,
and a few cicadas, and the raucous sound of frogs, still enjoying
the wet.


We were surprised to hear last night from Sergio that he
also is leaving soon with his family. That will leave us with
no near neighbours at all. His house, the closest to us,will
stand smpty and abandoned. Together with three other men Sergio
has bought some land on the outskirts of the village, and a house
for all four of them, with separate flats, is being built.
He will have no garden to speak of; and he'll be five miles
further from his work. But he will have two rooms, a kitchen
and
and bathroom: he's never had a bathroom before. He works on
a vast podere further down the valley: they have machines and
the property is paying its way. He is on daily hire and therefore
has more money in his pocket than the other peasants: he is
a worker, as opposed to contadino, peasant.
With friends yesterday at a tiny hillside church. Standing
in the garden there was a large terracotta coppo, a pot once used
for storing oil and now quite fashionable for ornamenting gardens.
Our friends wanted it at once, to stand in their courtyard. The
priest, a small, resentful-looking fellow, without much heart,
crisply said that he'd bought this one from a nearby peasant and
didn't want to sell it. But, he said, we could try a certain
Antonio down the road, in the house beyond the wayside shrine:
he had several, and one of them was as large as this.
We went down and inspected the thing in the man's chicken-
house: black with filth but still serviceable. He would give
it a clean-up, he said. He was a thin, dark, erect young man
with the large Etruscan eyes; his face was able---I've noticed
this more than once here---to look suddenly questing and joyful,
though in fact it is neither in itself; but it seems a throw-
back to those first Etruscan years ofgrade centuries ago.


Even the common people had a culture than, or so it seems
from their naked dances; because nakedness has to be shared, it
can never be turned into privilege.
We asked him to name a price: no, no, he said at once,
laughing shyly, he didn't have an idea! He Would enquire, and
we would enquire, and then We'd come back after we'd both enquired.
We did enquire, but no one had any idea: the pots used to
be made at a place called Imprunetta, near Florence, and a few
still are, people say. But now they aren't used. But originally
Rave
they would only, cost a few thousand lire. They were only terra-
cotta after all, without much design. It was only their largeness
were
and bowl-shape that was attractive. So we returned to the priest, luk
who was out working. Down to the peasant again. He hadn't
shaved for two days, and considering that he worked in the fields
all day he could have looked healthier. The strange Etruscan
light breaks on his face as he smiles---yes, he's cleaned the pot!
We must come and see itt There it stands, remote and mellow-
looking, in the forecourt. How much will we offer? I say five
thousand. No, no, una scioccezza! A trifle! Much too little!
How much, then? Well, he's heard from the priest that, well,
these things are---well, quite in demand... We stand there
begute
patiently, waiting for the dirge we've heard so often toend.
I ask, 'How much?' And he says softly, 'Una trentina di mila
lire.' About thirty thousand. The priest, he says, gave that
much for his.
(Extraordinary thisi---a priest in his condition
gets forty thousand lire a month and has to keep a family on it1
usuelly his parents, sometimes a sister). He couldn't, by the
terms of his own conscience, let it go for less than thirty---
certainly not less than twenty-five---0r twenty at the very
minimum. Such things were precious, he said, and he was sure


of being able to sell the thing at his price later on.
And, he said, to tell the truth (this meant he was going to tell
a lie, which he did), he was only offering it for sale because
he was moving house soon and didn't want to take it with him.
So wefturn away.
'Niente da fare!' After a few brief
goodbyes, during which he offers us something to drink and we
refuse, we leave. A telephone-call to the friends: 'Offer him
fifteen thousand,' they say. We go to the priest a second time.
Again he's out: at Work on his land. But just, we drive out of
the courtyard he drives in: he doesn't pause when he sees us but
drives straight to his door. Nor does he even turn when we walk
over to him. He's used to visitors---in fact, they plague him,
because his church is of historic interest. When I spoke he
turned from unloading the car and seemed to say, Oh, so you've
come to COo at my bare stone walls, have you, and gape at dirty
pieces of clay and broken torsos Which should have remained buried,
and at my filthy villa that leaks water, and at bits of manuscript
and painted ganvas that should all have been burned long ago in
the name of sanitation? For he didn't recognise us: we were
Foreigners. And, Very well, he seemed to go on, if you want to
put on these airs, and play the signore Who is really interested
in such things (I myself haven't the money to spare for touring
the world to cut a figure), I shall smile too and play my part,
and cOo with you, and show you my charming Italian teeth (app-
arently you find us charming!), but by God I'll mak e you pay for
it, if there's any paying to be done!
And I asked about the coppo. What price should we pay?
He stood there with his sleeves rolled up, his arms frail and
pale underneath the day's sunburn, and then he talked: first,
he was busy, he said, very busy---and therefore didn't know as


much about these things as he should. Yes, I replied, you're
very much in giro---you go around a lot. 'No, no!' he was quick
to reply. 'I'm not going round---I Work!' And he gave me a
sort of fanatical look through his glasses.
'I've offered the peasant five thousand lire, T I said.
'Not that it's my affair.' At once he replied in his dry, hard
way, without a trace of charity, 'No, no, five thousand is a
sciocchezza! No, no, they're Worth much more than that!'
I said to this: 'I offered him five thousand, and he said thirty,
so perhaps we both erred, in opposite directions.' No, no,
he didn't think the peasant had erred at all: thirty thousand
was quite right. After all, these things were coming into great
demand (a lie), his mother told him how every day tourists came
and esclaimed over his pot (a lie); they weren't producing them
any more (a lie); they had great historical interest (a lie)
because they were hundreds of years old (the biggest lie of all).
I said they might be only about twenty years old: thirty,
perhaps. 'Yes!' he said. 'They might be thirty!' 'Or less,'
I said. 'Even less!'--the is confused for a moment).
'But the price of a thing,' he went on, his glasses flash-
ing fanatically, 'depends on who wishes to buy it and who wishes
to sell! It depends on the need and passion of the person buying,
and the more he wants the thing the more he has to pay for it!'
A peculiar philosophy, but he seemed to be able to square it with
his conscience.) He then demonstrated what liars both he and
kad
the peasant were (as if it needed demonstzating) by saying that
in fact he hadn't bought his own coppo at all, but---with a
round, shrewd gesture of his fingers---'I s: imply acquired it.'
So we shrugged and started moving off. We'd heard that
through
old dirge too often to even want to hear it rhongnt in politeness.


There was a great silence on the hill. I told him again that
it wasn't really my affair, I'd only agreed to 'treat' for some one
else. 'Ah!' he said with his little glint, 'it isn't for you!'
And then he turned away as well: 'I'd better get the car unloaded.'
Sergio and his wife Caterina came to us in the evening and
sat in our kitchen. We happened to tell him that we'd been
looking for coppi, and about the priest with his trentina di
mila lire: he cried, 'Pots---I've got two of them---at least
two---beauties!" And he laughed: 'Why don't you come to me
first? Everything is on your doorstep, and you go miles away
to argue with priests!'
Tomorrow morning, he went on, we
would walk together to Altapasquale and look at them.
We talked about the Church. He aksed what kind of
church most of the foreign tourists belonged to: the Germans,
Engl lish, for instance. Were they all Christians? Yes, we
said, many of them were Protestants, many Catholics---all
Chris tians. 'How do Protestants differ from us?' he wanted
to know. We said, mainly in the matter of confession:
they don't confess. 'Ah,' he said quickly, in his direct,
intelligent way, his eyes gleaming in a ruddy, lean face,
'they don't believe the priest has a special position---I'
'Exactly,' we said. 'The pope isn't the vicar of Christ in
their eyes---the priest is only another man for the Protestant.'
And: The Protestant believes that every man's conscience is
his own, that he can't go to another man to free himself from
blame but must find his own way, through self-examination.'
At once Sergio cried, leaning forward in his erect way: Then
they're more religious than we are! They examine everything
they do! That's why foreigners seem so responsible C ompared
with us---so polite and thoughtful! Whjereas we think, Oh, I
can swear and behave gadly today because tomorrow I'm going


to confess and purify myself! I know men who think like
that,' he went on. 'Religion is the reason why they're
bad! Can you imagine tha t?'
Next morning he and I strolled along the path in the first
heat of the day. We were talking about dung for some reason,
its use on the soil. I told him how my father had always coll-
ected the horsedung from the road outside f or his garden---in
the days when there were still a few horses. 'Ah,' he said, 'then
your father must have been peggio (worse) than you?'
'How do
you mean?' I asked him. 'I mean, he must have done more work---
he was poorer!' 'Yes,' Isaid, feeling confused. I wanted to
say, 'But I work, too!' But Istopped.
The pots were much better than the priest's, or the peasant's.
They were lying on their sides in the mud by the house where
Sergio was born. We rolled them into the stable-yard and cleaned
them up a bit. The oil had eaten through their bases, but since
they would never be used for oil again, that didn't matter. The
peasant's wife, who has wondering, quick eyes, and a face capable
of the most extraordinary bursts of tenderness and passion (when
she is arguing about the price of her chickens, for instance), said
to me doubtfully, *They're belli, aren't they?'
And Sergio
echoed her: 'Yes, they're nice!' But until that moment they
had been rather shameful junk.
A few days later our friends sent their man over in a
small truck to pick them up. There were three pots in all.
He roped them round securely, and when Sergio asked him what
trees were going to be planted in them he said, 'None.


They'll just be put on the terrace. Empty. As ornaments.'
And Sergio looked wistfully surprised. From being a receptacle
for oil to being a vase for trees isn't such a step: but to
being just an ornament means a step into another world. There
was silence.
Before he drove back again the man had lunch with us:
he has liquidly black, penetrating eyes and a mild way of speech,
reflective and patient. He said there was a feeling of
rebellion all over Italy, but 'vaguet rebellion: no one was
sure what he wanted to rebel against, or indeed if there existed
anybody to rebel against; he just wanted to move---into the
towns if he lived in the country, to another house if he lived
in town. It came from centuries of misuse in the padrone's
prerogative, he said: "We have to go through that phase---
I myself felt rebellion against the padrone once, but I've
passed through that now.' He is paler than the peasants
here, though he used to be a peasant himself: he seems more
delicate, withdrawn, quietly discriminating, and they look
up to him---I was aware of that, when he and Sergio were
talking; they see something different in him, to which they
aspire perhaps. He has the air of thinking life out all the
time. And there is an air of quiet charity about him. If
an Italian has a real transotrmation of experience, which is
very rare, it is always basically religious, I think.
Italy seems the most unfathomable country in Christendom to
me. Motives, decisions, moods are an enormous pool of mystery,


Wen
/to the people themselves. There are a thousand explanations---
Greek, Etruscan, Roman, Moorish, Phoenician, Christian, Gothic,
feudal, Inquisitorial, Spanish, Austrian---far more than any one
creature can know.
Everyone here has something devout in him---Gianni, Sergio,
even Paolo, even Gigi who lives in the village and disowns the
past. They're all quite clear about it: they don't go to
church, nothing would induce them to, but it has nothing to do
with the mystery.
Gianni when he enters a church makes a pleasant noisy kiss
towards the altar when he is crossing himself, as his hand comes
up to his mouth from his breast. When he was fourteen he painted
a remarkable Madonna and Child: they've put it on the wall of
their kitchen, with a little light in front. An amazing sweetness
pours out of the Child's eyes: in the Madonna there is a lingering
grace and forgiveness, something specially gentle that makes you
look up at her again and again. It is a bit stylised---from
centuries of style, and it has a Sienese attention to detail.
His drawings of Christ are exact, stern. He hasn't painted or
drawn for eight years or more. Not enough time, he says witha
laugh.
He looks sad and oddly distracted sometimes: he hasn't
been near this house for three days now. I saw him yesterday
at Altapasquale: he came into the etable-yard With a quaintly
delicate-looking shopping bag in his hand; he was gojng shopping,
he said. 'NO work!' Sergio cried withhis clear, charitable,
objective laugh. 'NO work again?'---then he added: 'Strikes
aren't necessary for you---you're on strike every day!' Gianni


smiled and turned away, then we saw nothing more of him.
His mother is devout in a natural way, though I imagine
she despises the priests like everyone else. She is strict,
with patient, darkly flashing eyes that take in everything
at a glance, with direct intuition; she's half the size of
any of her sons, and they obey her like slaves.
For Gianni, swearing and behaving badly are like assaulting
his own mother. This is what stops him.
Every evening when he comes home from work Sergio's son
Renato goes to the madonnina at the side of the road and says
a quick prayer and crosses himself.
Sergio seems to insist on this as an act of decency and
uprightness.
Signor V. and his family came today for a few minutes.
He owns a large vineyard near Florence, and a wine-ractory.
He told us he was selling his share of the business, as it was
hopeless to try to work and live by the land now. All the houses
on his land were empty, there were no longer any peasants.
And he was obliged to follow the current 'madnesst and move to
Florence, where he will find a city-job. He said he knows men
who have moved to Florence to earn half as much as they used to
on the land, and to live in miserable rooms, but they're happier.
He said that those/who had moved to the city firsto@mong
) A the peasantsb had made most money: that the hunger for city-
life didn't come from miseria; 'People want to be machines now.'
Only in one or two optimists like Sergio---rere men of the


older generation---doss the land not create horror. But the others
feel cheated and insulted. Today I tried to imagine what this
feeling was. I thought of a time when I worked on the land
briefly, in England, to earn a scrap of money. I was digging
turf. I watched the mounds of turf rise all round me every
day. There was a fearful blankness in the field, even when the
sun shone, even at dawn, which I otherwise love. I felt horror
of the blankness, like a chasm. My mind had nothing to grasp
on. It seemed in the wrong rhythm, the wrong time. I hated
the land as if it personally insulted me---as I see Gianni doing
now. I was working with no one. There was no C ommunity:
no farmhouse to go back to, no great fire in the hall; the land
wasn't mine. And so it is in Italy. The dream has gone, perhaps
longer ago tham we think, perhaps centuries ago. There is nothing
precious to cling to---nothing gay, no intimacy. Nothing that
flatters the human creature. And the mind is developing another
rhythm, another time, that belongs to the city.
The peasants really do live like dogs. This is true of
Gianni, of Sergio---they expect no more, but they dream of more.
Only the town can given them the flattery and attanetion they need.
They want a dignity they've always felt thwarted of. This
is what 'modern' means for them, and the reason why they'll take
half the pay, in town.
We went to Colle Val d'Elsa today: there. are typical
mediaeval lanes, intact, with the houses shere and flat on either
side, their walls containing the minimum number of windows, and


those small; and tunnels that disappears far under the houses,
joining one lane to another; and hidden squares which are still
not asphalted and where people Et sit outside their doors
talking, the women knitting. The streets are clean; a massive
villa---occupied now by dozens of families---sits astride the Doad,
dominating two valleys: there is a sense of order and even con-
tentment. Down below is the industrial part of the town, with
tall chimneys and pastel-coloured bloeks of flats: noisy and
crowded, with no order, but not really separate from the old town
and
that perches intact on its hill; giving it life, in some
poshaps.
wey,
Will everyone want to move down to the new part now? It has
happened in Castel Fiorentino: they have left the splendid old
houses on the hill, with their mysterious arches and barred
windows, and gone to embrace the noise and smoke below; what
ago
used to be a wonderful old town ten years, With clean cobbled
streets, is now an abandoned slum. And it will probably happen
in Certaldo, which has the same mediaeval quarter perched on its
hill, with the industrial part below.
And then perhaps, after twenty or thirty years, or perhaps
much sooner, middle-class people will move into the ancient
houses again, as part of a fashionable movement coming mostly
from abroad; they will prefer the lack of traffic, of noise and
fumes, in the old part, and there will be a swing-back; the
cobbled streets will look smart again. And people will move
into the country, inot the old abandoned houses (as we've done):
and furnish the countryside with a dream again.
Yesterday we went to see Sergio's new flat on the outskirts
of the village. It stands a little away from the road and over-
looks a cornfield, with a view of a corner of the Elsa valley.


The walls have to be distempered, the doors and window-frames
varnished, then it's ready. Catarina has never seen it and
refuses to go until they actually move in. Her excuse always
is, with a dark, Lahing timid look, 'I have too many chicks!'
'Always chicks!' Sergio cries with a laugh.
He was anxious to know what we thought of it. There is a
bathroom with green tiles and a flushing lavatory, even a littie
spray, and next door there's a large kitchen. He plans to put
them
a bench in the corridor with cushions, to sit and talkingjin the
evening, when the kitchen is too hot. The building was clearly
done with care: there is even solid wood for the doors instead
of the usual veneer-covered compensato; and the design is pleas-
ant---humble and gracious. It was done by an old friend of his,
he said: no architects came into it, Which is perhaps why there
wasn't anything silly in the design, and nothing botched about
the Work; all the money went into the building. He was relieved
when we said we liked it.
'What a calamity if you hadn't!' he
said. There's nothing to pay for twenty years---no taxes, rates
of any kind; a special government concession, this. We stood
gazing out of his wondows. Soon he'll be sitting on a real
lavatory, lying in his own bath, putting on lights that are
strong enough to read by, gazing at television. I tell him,
'A man with his own house is a king!', and he says, 'Yes, yes!',
his eyes fixed on me with a tremendous fierce enthusiasm.
We left him in twon and drove back alone. He came to us
later that evening and said with a beam, 'The town's a beautiful
thing!' He said he'd been in the café on the square watching
television. 'You find out what's going on in the world!'
And he added: 'Here---of coursel---one can breathe good air,


there are things we all need here, but it's outside the world,
we're cut off!' He didn't want to be right insidedthe town:
he just wanted to see it when he opened his eyes in the morning,
and to hear its noises; he wanted to be able to take a stroll
into it, after Work. That was why he'd chosen a place on the
outskirts.
Outside his new house, just before we left in the af ternoon,
he pulled a great bush aside and said, 'Here---1ook!' It was
a wayside shrine, and we were amazed to see that it was the same
Madonna that stands at the side of the road here, Our Lady of
Auntolns
Pancole. 'A good sign, don't you think?' he asked. He'd only
discovered it after he'd bought the land and planned this house.
So he felt he'd done right.
He has been on strike for three days: the mezzadri peasants
struck several weeks ago, unsuccessfully, and now it's the land
workers. Theytre asking for a seven-hour day, Which means a
forty-two hour week as Saturday is a full Working day, plus a
rise of threehundered lire a day. They say they think they'll
get the rise but not the reducgtion of hours. Sergio believes
that the strikes will go on until the government produces a
aud Here
le vislence.
decent plan for the land,
may
Gianni returned yesterday, looking quiet and numbed.
Vines
He said he'd been working nearly all the time, on the maize.
He hardly smiled.
real
The work tears him from his/life, which is still in darkness,
forming: he talks from a great distance. A day's idleness is
enough to bring him to life again. For the peasants all round
etan
this is justya taste for idleness.


Sergio said last night that he thought the great shame of
the Italian countryside was still the mezzadria system, though
he and Gianni's family and Paolo and Gigi are free of it.
Tuscany, he said, a marvellously rich and fertile land, is being
abandoned like the desert, because of this system. People won't
work land that doesn't give them a decent living. He himself had
a good employer, So he Worked hard and willingly. But the big
house on the other side of the valley, where we go to fetch our
drinking water, and the group of houses called Altapasquale,
are still mezzadria: 'The people Work like dogs, yet their lives
are at a st tandstill!'
One of the padroni, nicknamed zampa--
paw or hoof---because of his limp, never keeps accounts, and always
pockets the yield from any sale. His part should be forty-seven
percent, but it Works out at nearer seventy or eighty percent;
Aemaindes
the rest had to feed two families (about seven people) who do
all the work. On the other hand, some say that this is quite
untrue, and that Zampa is a good man, and that to do more for his
peasants he would have to run the land at a total loss, that is,
find money elsewhere to finance it. (In fact, thefgood' padroni,
like Sergio's, derive their money from other sources and live in
'But why are they all absentee landlords?' I ask. 'Why aren't
there men who not only own the land but keep the accounts and pay
the wages and arrange the sales, house-repairs, machinery---reel
landlords?' 'Ah, you mean the fattorg!' he replied. Every
padrone had a fattore, a man Who administers several pieces of
land and takes a percentage for his services. He is What we
would call an agent in English; farmers in our sense don't exist,
or at least they are very rare. The fattore or agent is absentee
as well: he invariably lives in town, ak least howadays.


Padrone, landlowner, means signore, gentleman, in Italian:
that is, somebody who doesn't work.
Just as the peasants abandon the farmhouse, so the landowners
abandon their lovely villas. High and low despise the land.
We begin to see the difference between the mezzadria
families and the others---like that between light and dark.
Whenever we go to the well on the other side of the valley we
stop and talk at the big house, Where there are two mezzadria
families; we've spent an evening with them, we drink their vin
santo. But we don't know them by name. They always seem bowed
in work. They are shy, speechless and remote, though slowly
they gain confidence with us. They don't present themselves to
yet
us personally and individually go: they neither enquire our
names nor ask too many questibns. Only the lovely child, the
youngest boy, do we know hy name.
And you can see the difference in the cattle, too. The
bull at the big house is bad', and has to be castrated soon;
the oxen there are tied too close to the trough and look---are--
overworked. But at Altapasquale the calves look innocent and
undisturbed, as the pe ople there do. A sense of panic and
drudgery seems to accompany mezzadria---transmits itself to the
beasts.
A dream no longer surrounds this house for us, now we've
lived here some time. It's real to us, untouched by dreams of
any kind. I remember how we cahe early one morning, before we
moved in, on our way back to Rome, and stood in the tiny court-
yard looking down the road; the Whole valley was just waking up,
and the spring-light sparkled; there was perfect stillness, and


a few birds sang in the woods above the house. The courtyard
enclosed the house perfectly: we could imagine sitting in a corner
of it, in the blazing sunlight of an afternoon, for tea; the 1gght
would glitter on the windows upstairs. But now we only go
there to draw ra inwater from the well; the courtyard is a work-
place---for oxen, chickens, bags of grain, empty demijohns, carts
and ploughshares, Gigi's motor-cycle and our car. As for our
rooms, they are flatly real,too---the place where we Work, I
eat, of sleep. Gigi goes to and fro outside all day; the dog
barks at the ozen and frightens them. The country looks the
same as before---vast and serene; but there, too, is no dream.
It only enters you; it isn't a matter of sight or pleasure, or
indeed anything felt at all. The silence of the country at
night is the silence of your own sleep: it isn't the scene of
hopes, desires, memories. There is no country idyll. The
delight of English countryside isn't there: nothing like Bavaria,
the Tyrol, Carinthia; no dreams and follies have been weaved,
life hasn't been drunk deep and recklessly.
Yet the stupendous valley lies there like a garden specially
made for you, which sometimes you can hardly bear to look at, it
has such a dignity: not a pleasant or restful garden, in the
intimate sense; no roses, except the wild ones; no hum of takk
sitting
that you might hear on a Provencal farm, with people seated round
a table; only needs are served here, and perhaps not all the needs,
either.
We've lost interest in comfort---the little rituals of home
that meant so much to us in Rome. Only in Rome has a dream been
made. Here we hardly go in our tiny sitting-room. We're either
working or at table, eating. The kitchen is Where we live,
leaning over the table, a bottle of Wine in front of us, in the


dimness, with a shade drawn ovez the Window against the sun-
light.
Sergio promises to take us to where he works, several
kilometres up the road, on the other side of the valley.
'You'll say it's beautiful!' he cries. But for him it's just
there. Yet we feel the same, now: no positive delight---even
in the shattering early-morning light that pours down on the vine-
yards and cornfields opposite; there is only the touch of it on
one's skin, and the glow that lies right inside you; you aren't
separate, which you must be for delights. The Bountryside prod-
uces you: its sun brightens you, a dark sky darkens you. You'ee
no longer aware of your place in the world, quite: there is
only work in its purity; and one part of the day leads to the
next unawares, as things grow in the fields.
Only the priest provides a dream here: he.has made such
a monopoly of it that humble dreams and follies haven't spread
and coalesced among the people naturally, to make delights.
Nature bestows, defends, enriches. There's only her to lean
on. Well, she seems quite reliable.
Another strike t oday, this time of the peasants again,
the mezzadri. They are all collecting in the town as usual,
and there are endless rows of motor-scooters outside the south
gate.
Went to Florence. I had a strange impression that city-
m terr
people haven't full human presence. The city is alive for A
behall.
tha/ Their eyes, cheeks, chins, not to say bodies, aren't
quite developed. The restaurants seem only to symbolise tne
eating. Cities are mad congregations now--stampedes,


at deadlock. Perhaps they'll become death-traps of disease:
just as the Plague was the climax of the towns.
If you live in a city you have to forego self-government.
You don't know where you're being led. This is how it seemed
to me.
Early morning: the sunlight pours down, fresh and glitter-
ing. I empty some ashes on the dump outside the courtyard.
The dog lies half in the shade, where the fledgling-pigeons are.
There is the sound of bees. The whole valley lies dreaming.
In any other country this would be an idyll.
Gigi will take the fledgling-pigeons down soon, before they
can fly, and wring their necks and eat them roasted.
Yesterday three men came, dressed in town-suits, With C ollars
and ties. They stepped out of a car and after some murmuring
advanced towards the courtyard. A telegram had arrived at the same
time, and my wife was downstairs signing for it. The dog, attached
to a long rope that extends just to the edge of the courtyard,
started barking like mad. The three men drew nearer and s tood by
what would be the gate if the house wasn't falling to pieces.
One was young and plump; another slim and very dark; and the
one between them was rather shrivelled and tired-looking---he was
apparently the leader. He spoke first, with the muzzle of the dog
close to his trousers: 'What is this dog doing here?' We stared
and gaped at the impertinence. Caterina, Sergio's wife, was in
the house and came on to the balcony with me. We watched my


wife gather up the doges line and draw the dog inside. The
three men then advanced, their faces guite expressionless.
Some rapid thoughts went through my head: were they police?
had they come to arrest somebody? had we done something wrong?
They advanced like Italians sure of their power. The leader then
stopped in the middle of the courtyard and, looking up at us--
he had decided to treat my wife as a shadow, and her removal of
the dog as a duty---said he understood a peasant came to the house
every day, and what was his name? Catarina answered him with her
Griji.
- Gigi
childish half-smile: L Where was this peasant now? He'd gone home,
she said. Had he left a key? She didn't know. He then advanced
a few paces further and said, taking a piece of paper out of his
pocket, 'Voi poyete legere?1---can you (plural) read? Caterina
shook her head and said, 'No,' in an intimidated way. He turned
to me: : 'E Lei?'---and you? I said with a touch of irony, 'Yes,
I think I can read,' and the other two made agreeable noises
through their noses, like henchmen. He then extended his piece of
paper: 'Perhaps you can read this, then!' I went downstairs and
took the paper from him. It was signed by the owner of the hoase
and said, 'These gentlemen have my permission to enter the house.'
I tried to hand the paper back to him, not quite understanding,
but he held up his hand: 'No, you can keep it.' There was a
silence. He stdod there. The others stood there. I stood
there. The thoughts were still in my head: had something g one
wrong? were these police? had the owner, hitherto a friend,
gone mad and decided to throw us out? I returned indoors with the
letter: after all, they seemed to know What they were doing, so
Icould leave them to: And we vent on with our lunch upstairs.
But they continued st tanding there. Caterina remained on the
balc ony. Then the leader called up: 'Has the letter been read?'


She came into us and repeated the questiong at which I shrugged
and said, 'Why, yes!' 'They want to see you again,' she said.
This time---I had my mouth full of the best risotto we'd made
for mon ths---the fury broke in me and I dashed down with the note
in my hand. 'This is addressed to no onet' I said. 'Secondly,
I think you've been very discourteous, you've no right to ask
educated people if they can read, or question the existence of
my own dog in my own courtyard, I've rented the house and I'm
paying good money for it, also the law---Italian law---forbids
you entry without my permission, you haven't asked my permission,
the landlady's permission isn't enough!' etc etc.
At this---
rush
said in more or less one meuthftl---there was much shuffling and
scowling, and he replied that he hadn't knownt was acquainted with
Italian law.
But, I went on, all this having been said, he could now enter
the house courteously, with my permission, which I now courteously
gave. But he turned away at this, sweating profusely. No,
it was all right, he wouldn't come in.
So they went off again: the young man---at a safe distanee---
called out to me that the signore had only asked if we spoke
Italian because he knew we were foreigners, and secondly that the
dog was dangerous---era scritto in faccia, danger was written in
its face.
A most mysterious incident. Caterina said she thought the
shrivelled man was il maestro, the village schoolteacher; and
meanwhile we had rec ognised the slim man as the local bank-manager.
We realised they must have come to view the house for a possible
sale; or perhaps the schoolmaster was an assessore for mortgages---
we knew thw owner wanted to get one.
All at once we seemed to have had a glimpse into the lower


Tuscan seams, where fascism lay. He realised what a superficial
part of fascism politics had been. To this day, in Italy, a
fascist can be recognised at once: there are several types, but
they're all clearly recognisable. It may be a walk, a way of
lifting the chin, a peculiar defensive and hurt arrogance, or
a brilliance and dash With a dangerous edge---for some of the
cleverest people were drawn to fascism; or sometimes it's a sort
of faded competence and authority, or bitterness. They are of
the schoolteacherts generation---the over-fifties.
Yet I know that, being Italian, this man is forgiving and
gentle at some point. The terrible thing is what he could provoke
others to do. He provoked me to anger: could he provoke me to
dreams? What did he provoke as a young man? The Italians have
had a dangerous genius since their natural genius was broken three
or four centuries ago. He had the petty fascist irony---a small
man picking and digging at the world. Fascism was only a game but
the rest of the world took it in earnest, for or against. A
flick of the wrist and twenty-five million people were dead.
How ready we are to feel, The police have arrived---the van
iswa aiting outside!
I noticed their fascist technique, So common among the mi ddle
class in Italy: the sudden arrival, the arrogant slam of car-
doors, the chins pushed forward, the threatening voices. Yet it's
a game.
We were told yesterday that the reason why there are so many


vipers this year, especially in the woods, is that the peasants
no longer keep herds OB pigs. As the land is abandoned, and the
pigs that remain are kept in stalls, the vipers thrive: they are
a delicacy'for pigs, and their sting has no effect on them.
At one time herds of pigs were left to roam in the woods. (This
is a tiny effect---dangerous for us---of a great change. What
others will there be?)
We met the owner of the house today and she told us we'd
done well to send the three signori away. Her daughter had
written the note, she said, and then had come to her most shocked
afterwards saying we'd refused him entry. 'I'm So glad,' she
said, 'but don't tell my daughter so!' It was true---he is the
local schoolmaster; an unpleasant individual, she said. In
any case, he had offered her too little for the house!
She speaks with tired eyes that flash dramatically now
and then, opening her mouth wide to enunciate her syllables.
Her expressions would have been the same six genturies ago.
Her face, sallow and drowsy, her mouth drawn down with permanent
sorrowing introspection, is in the early frescoes, the Work
of the so-called primitives. When she wraps a scarf round
her head to go to church, she makes it seem like a cowl.
The village has hardly changed since the fourteenth century:
its prosperity suddenly ceased, and it fell under the heel
of Florence, because it loved its own internal quarrels too
much.


The Sienese are so like the French---quick, intelligent,
proud, with a touch of their tenderness. I'm surprised to see
them sometimes actually looking into each other's eyes, in the
light, post-Ref ormation way.
ORR o
seal
les
Atz the
Bee-monastery today with a guide. The friar,
who is like a man out of Boccaccio, with a vast belly and his
sleeves rolled up, hardly able to breathe, told us, 'Let him (the
guide) take you down to St. Jacob's---there's nothing interesting
there---but it's quite nice the way the sunlight plays on the
alabaster Windows. The nuns will give you the key.'
And inside this church, which still has the look of a pagan
temple, built in the middle of the elewenth century, we found
lown.
perhaps the most extraordinery thing in the gillags. There
behind the altar, faint and almost gone---as if by its own will---
was a wall by Bartolo di Fredi, the Christ white and delicate,
with such an unbelievable tenderness that you couldn't take
your eyes away from him; the Madonna presses her face close to
his, he lies in the last agony, his face contorted; their faces
are pressed so close, they have such a tearning expression, that
they could be lovers; they have such a tired and truthful look
that it could have happened yesterday, you feel the crucifixion
as it was, the terror; and also the simple grief.
The guide waited patiently at the door, wondering what the
devil could be holding us so long; he'd shown us the alabaster
windows after all.
As I say, the colours are almost gone, more than they are
in di Fredi's fresco at St. Augus tinets in San Gimigneno; there,


the wings of the angels seem to beat and make a wind in the
background, behind a rapt crowd, and Christ, his-mouth-oper
yeerningly, stands close over the dying Madonna, holding a child
in his arms. The Madonna seems to shrink into death, frail
D/J and tinyo er
a d
uudder
couldn't unders tand why Christ was holding a child; I supposed
it was Christ the child, in flesh.
After dark yesterday we went up the hill to the mezzadria
family, above Sergio's house; their place is hidden behind cypress-
es and used to be a monastery, with a great nat tural courtyard in
front. There are three of them, a couple and their daughter;
they were still Working in the darkness, getting the forage into
the stall. This is the hard part of the season, When first the
grass has to be cut and then the grain: the wheatfields have
already turned yellow, with the first real heat, after being olive-
grey for so long. In the dark stall, behind the flanks of the
oxen, we talked about conditions. They were leaving at the end
of the summer like everybody else, the man said. 'Soon the whole
of the countryside will be empty, then Where will the food come
from?' He knew of a great podere up the road where eighty people
or more W ould soon be leaving. He himself could no longer work
eight hectares with his wife and daughter alone, and looks after
the beasts as well. The owner of the land is good to him, but
that doesn't reduce the Work: they will go to a smaller podere,
of two or three hectares, still on mezzadria. The Woman leaned
in the doorway, a rake in her hand, and said that she W ondered
at the food people would soon be expected to eat. The animals
no longer lived properly, and this meant that the meat was bad:
who knew if itswasn't harmful, too? She didn't believe in


allevamenti for chickens, the broiler-houses: she could tell
shees)
a broiler-house bird at once. All their birds, she said---
they'd had nearly a thousand at one time---were healthy and free
to0h
to roman where they wanted to. We went upstairs with them and
sat at table while they ate their late dinner. Their daughter
told us that at a baker's near by an inspector had found a great
sack of plaster, used in the flour to make up weight. Many of
the bakers use starch, she said, to whiten the flour. Was that
why there were so many C omplaints today, among people like them-
selves who seemed to live and Work healthijy---c omplaints of the
liver and stomach and kidneys? The penalty for putting OE's
blood in wine to give it colour was six months' imprisonment,
but what about all the other chemicals they put in? If you
drank trade-wine you could feel it circulating round your st omach
ina burning way: this was the acid they put in. It really did
burn your insides, and the result after ten or twenty years of
dri nking C ould be imagined! Real wine never made itself felt in
the stomach like that. If it warmed you, it warmed the whole 6f
Yon.
Tourl edy
Gianni is lost agai in in the Whirl of Work. He came for a
few minutes this morning at seven, and he Won't be back from work
until ten or half-past this evening, When Lorenzo will pick him
up on his motor-scooter at Altapasquale. The harvest is just
starting: the wheatfields are golden, and many of the fields
in the valleys have already been reaped. Everybody is up at
four now, and to bed not much before eleven, after a quick dinner.
Today is St. Hohn's day, and we gave Gianni a present of
three tiny books of reproductions, Dufy, Cezanne, Breughel.
He picked up the Dufy first and said quietly, 'How simple the


drawing is.'
We went up to his house yesterday and had salami and Wine
with his mother and Alberto. She leaned over the table, tiny
and black, with her blazing eyes, and told us that she had no
appetite these days, she had to force the food down. There was
too much work---she always felt better in the winter for that
reason. We promised to show her how to prepare a vegetable broth
for the day, as a basis for wholemeal-soup; then she could absorb
enough substance towork, without really eating. But she won't do
it; the poor don't change habits. She hasn't a tooth in her head,
and won't go to the dentist to have new ones fitted; she eats
on her gums, which are now nearly as hard as teeth. Alberto
was her best son, yes! Lorenzo and Gianni were both birbanti---
rascals. Gianni was also a serpente, snake: he was never so happy
as when he wasn't working! He wanted to find a profession, but
What? The poor creature! Poverino! He had to work in the
fields to bring in a little cash, but he was too bright and clever
for that work!
Gianni keeps asking me if I know of any better work for him.
Well, we'll go to Rome together soon, and see if there's anything.
I suggested he should try at one of the airports: good money,
the illusion of constant flightz, the presence of forgigners---
perfect ferment for the Italian soul.
I talked with an American immigrant in the villege-squere.
She's doing Italy like a tourist, though she was born here, in
Ancona: an art-historian. America is 'young', she said, a
young nation. America has the problem of whether she williever
'grow up'; the people are 'children' and they 'need Europe' so


badly.
All the old stuff, I thought.
She also gave me her version---the one she'd learned to
qualify for the oath of allegiance, she said---of how America
became indepdendent of England and why. A group of English
pioneers settled in Virginia: morally, America came into being
with that act; yet it continued to be taxed by the English king,
at a great distance, and fought for its independence against
overwhelming English forces.
I looked up the history of that period later. A group of
Puritan English gentlemen settled the country as colonists; their
first struggles to establish themselves were shielded by English
colonial troops---particularly against the French, but also against
the natural dangers of unpioneered country; when they were safe
and established, taxes for the maintenance of these forces were
still expected in London, without representation in London, which
a large section of English opinion thought unjust; a rebellion
was staged against the tiny and bored English force, with French
help this time. I had the impression that the war of independence
was fought as much at Westminster, by men like Burke and Fox and
Wilkes, as in America; only weak forces were kept in America
because of George 1l1's weak conviction.
America as a 'young nation': but she became a nation long
before Italy or Germany did. Perhaps she meant young ethically---
whatever that may be.
Italians and Germans go there, and perhaps find freedom
for the first time in their lives, and think it started


there. They come from countries which were basically rural
even in the Thirties, and find 'modernity' there, and think it
started there.
The cathedral at Siena: people pottering about and peering
at stones, pillars, frescoes, inscriptions, the famous pulpit by
Pisano etc. They all look SO hard that it seems impossible for
them to see anything. Better to close one's eyes in this strange
and mystical church.
We went to the Etruscan tombs behind Cellole. A narrow
path that was clearly ancient went along the side of a wooded
slope: there were long ruts in the cobbles as you see them at
Ostia Antica and Pompeii, made by wooden wheels. A peasant told
us that we had a walk of two hundred yards to the tombs butthere
was no dign of them. It seemed charac teristiclly Etruscan---to
hide like that. A path went off right, turning back on itself,
and my first feeling was that its unobtrusiveness, suddenly slipping
away from the road between trees and bushes, meant that it led
to the tombs. The road we were on had the same mystery and
quiet as the approach-road to Veii, where the Etruscan Apollo was
found: the path hugged the S ide of the hill in the same way, and
you entered a special immensity of countryside, with a deeper
silence, as if marvellous things had gone on there, at the dawn
of life. The hills rolled away to the sea with increasing
light. The sea had been much close then. You find pure sand
there---you can pick it up and it will leave your hand clean,
like the sand of a beach.


We got to the end of our ancient road and found a tall
villa among cypresses; and then, under a great wall, thoroughly
enclosed and shletered like something in a child's tale, there
were a few mediaeval houses huddled together. The place was strange
and ecstatic, with towering, dark trees, some of them lime-trees
in blossom, which one hardly ever sees here. We asked an old man
where the tombs were, and my guess proved right---they were at the
top of the unobtrusive path.
So we walked back. The hill where the open tombs lay
looked rather sad: there were only holes in the earth, as if
a number of shells had exploded there; some of the holes had
rough steps leading down to them. An air of sacrilege. There
were no paintings. In one or two you saw the complete form
of the tomb, bared of its sarcophagi, domed, with a raised bank
of earth round three sides. We found pieces of hard terracotta
which must have been from statues or buildings or tools. As
always in Etruscan places, there was a sheltered valley, locked
from the outside world. We wondered where the town had been,
and guessed that its site lay under the villa and the mediaeval
houses, which now bore the restful name Buon Riposo; the spot
seemed hallowed---with an ancient security about it that seemed
to address us directly.
A group of American women and girls in the square at Siena,
from a tourist bus. The girls bewildered, timid; the women
stock-still, seemingly immovable. These are the people the
immigrant calls 'children': on the contrary, they have a terrible
maturity.
They seemed to shed a light on the square---a sense of
clarity and directness. A sort of blond light among the dark,


natural Italians...
The Americans are wide-awake---wonderfully
so, and too much so. They make the Italians seem passive: the
Italian rhythm of acceptance, as against the American one of gett-
ing things done, creating life as you go along. These Americans
make it seem that life is only a basic material, to be wielded by
each person according to his desires. So they seem broken away
from life as well---watching it in some way, a little frightened
perhaps. They seem far more subtly Christian than the Italians,
more morally Christian: another reason why they shed a sort of
light in the square---a morally searching light. They're good in
the way Italians never are: they're good by conscience, and by
principles SO deep that you can see them in their eyes and the
shape of their mouthso
They make me feel safe, standing in the square: they're peaceful,
unegotistic; they don't push, live for themselves. They make
the natural Italians seem closed in their desires. Italian girls
are like flames---they burn at the touch (I don't mean sexually)---
in comparison; dangerous material---they W ould exact power from
the smallest sensuous thrill they gave. The Italian girls,
passing confidently and easily, seem unscrupulous compared with
the Americans. They aren't friends; whereas the Americans
seem hurt and, above all, unwordly; it strikes me suddenly that
America is the most sp iritual nation in the World---even their
gadgets are a moral expression. These American girls would
offer equality in their sex, first and foremost; they stand the
same height as the man; they choose their sex, as they choose
everything else. But the Italian women fall into it by passion,
or suffer it, or use it. The Americans gave me a wistful year ning
for Anglo-Saxon society---sO light, objective, optimistic. They're
creating life as they go anong---their vigour lies in this, and


their impenetrable sadness: their suicide.
Yesterday evening we strolled down to Sergio's to tell him
we were going away for a few days. We found his brother's family
with him for the harvest. The atmosphere round the house was
dark and heavy. Only Sergio himself showed a little spirit.
They hate to show themselves bowed by work. He came to the foot
of the outside stairs with his brother, as if to warn us silently
not to come in. The evening-meal was just beginning. It was
dark now and they'd just got in from the fields. Caterina
didn't call down to us as usual, and the rest of the family sat
huddled on the steps at the top, in silence. I thought of the
harvest-time in England, Germany---the flares at night, the
excitement of working late, the food and drink in the fields,
the smell of the hay, the lovely painted carts. Sex and flirting
are associated with the harvest; there are long traditions of
harvest merriment, it is the crown of the farming year. But
not here.
We heard Renato call down to Sergio with a growl to come up
and eat his food. And as we were walking away we heard Caterina
sh out, her mouth full, 'Maiala, why can't you come when you're
called?'
They all sat down to eat; not to feast together, but
just to eat. In a few seconds it would all be over, they Would
be on their feet again to prepare for the last act of the day---
throwing themselves on a bare bed.
Sergio's brother had a word for it: he said, This is an
ugly moment for ust---e un brutto momento. They had to sell
the grain at prices lower than they should be, he added: the
millers abused the situation and took advantage of the sudden
great supply. Everything is bald, degutted; dog's work.


We'd only been away four or five days but everything
inside the cool, dark, closed house looked strange to us. It
had all lost its smell. We put the chairs out on the terrace
again, started the refrigerator Which makes the lights blink
and fade, opened all the shutters. Gigi said it had been
hot---in somma, he added; he always says this, with his peculair
bull-like duck of the head; meaning by in somma something like
'more or less'. There was no relish in getting back: there
were just the facts; the things to be done. But gradually
the nerves began to take their silent comfort. We found ourselves
staring before us again, across the massive Elsa valley. The
that
nerves seemed nearly fibres, we could feel in our bodies, physical:
theyare getting sturdier all the time. The silence enters into
the body slowly. It comes down the hill like the wind, through
the woods, a cool breath rustling the trees.
Most of the grain has been cut now. Sergio's ia in sheaves---
what they call barche, meaning stacks piled rather like Arab mud-
huts, the ears pointing inwards, to protect them from the rain.
Our own grain hasn't been scythed yet: Gigi is always last,
being alone. Most of it will be done by machine, leaving
narrow rows which the wheels can't manoeuvre because of the


vines and olives dotted everythere.
We'd been away for a 'rest'---a few days by the sea. After
the first day I caught a chill and spent the rest of the time in
bed. The resorts were crowded and sticky, with cars clustering
the narrow roads like a city. Luckily we lived inland, close to
the mountains. After my second or third bathe my ears closed up
in a strange way. Perhaps it was a defence against the noise.
With every hour I heard less and less. In a panic one night,
not long before dawn, I heard bells in the farthest distance
and realised that in fact they were just down the hill, usually
deafening. I leapt up, shaking my head, which brought back a
little hearing in one ear. And that day I went to the doctor.
He produced a magic pill---in this case, a suppository---and
said that the congestion was caused by a combination of sea-water
and cataarh from the chill. I wanted him to syringe my ears
with warm water, but he said it wouldn't be necessary. The
world looked strange to me, because dumb---a strange, unhinged
world: I could see people's faces all the more clearly; their
naturally distraught expressions, the heavy pouts, eyes that
strained and squinted. My comfort in those few days was hanging
round the bookshops. I came back every evening with a little
pile of books Which I put all round me on the bed, in an effort
to keep sane. Nervous diseases will perhaps grow in our World:
there may even be nerve-plagues. The causes will not be ascert-
ained: from being too general and too numerous. Diseases like
herpes, with its strange and vague pains, may spread like the
common cold, as wrecked city-crowds congregate more and more,
even in the summer, in the fumes of their own cars, feeding on
manufactured and semi-manufactured food, and recovering from the
collapses with a manufactured antidote. Each country may ha ve


its plague in accordance with its character: Germany, from
the remorse and self-horror in the young; England, from neglect
of the body and bad food; America, from abstraction, shere
detachment; France, from excess of savoir faire; Italy, from
the imitation of foreign life (therefore, because an imitation,
the least of all).
In my bedroom I looked at the packet the doctor had given me
chemical
and was aware of a lot of xtasxirat names. He said it would
cut out the cataarh. I hadn't asked him for a magic pill, but
it was second nature in him to give me one. I left him as deaf
as I found him. I stuck one or two suppositories in my backside
and a few hours later began to feel a good bit Worse than before.
In fact, I felt poisoned, all the way through. I hadn't taken
drugs for years, and was surprised at myself for having suddenly
accepted one for a mere chill.
Chills should be indulged and
given way to: they are the body's excuse for taking a rest,
and the body should be obliged. And I knew my body: at least,
I felt I did, after years of learning patiently. Above all,
Iwanted my blasted ears cleaned out! But I couldn't get any-
body to do it. They suggested s ticking things into me---inject-
ions or more suppositories---or taking a strong drink and going
to bed, but the ears were never mentioned. And I got deafer and
deafer. A YEhudi Menuhin record, where he plays the Bach solo
sonatas, nearly brought them back again, by shere marvel and
splendour. But next morning I was as deaf as before.
It was a Sunday morning: : I was lying in bed---the sunlight
looked sickly as it does when one is queer---and suddenly, in a
moment of revolt, I jumped up with the words in my head, 'I won't
have a spell put on mel' I felt as if I were on a tropical
TOP.66


island where the tribes lay spells:
O8 S
enotheT-hOuse, mp-the-valtey, Anyway, I shaved myself and
made an immediate appointment at the local hospital. In a
few minutes I was there, with the doctor waiting for me, his
eyes like a boy's, and a nun at his si de. 'Ears?' he asked,
and I shouted Yest with a dumb smile. 'This way.' And to my
delight he actually sat me down to look at---my ears! He shone
a light into them.
'cômpletely bunged up,' he said.
'Effect
of the sea'. Then, to my further delight, the nun bore a fam-
iliar semicircular tray towards me, to hold under my ear, and the
doctor took out the familiar glass syringe. And then, lukewarm
water: squish! And ah-h-h-h! All three of us said, Ah-h-h-h!'
together. I could hear! Hear! I could héar the W orld! I
him
wanted to hug him and dance then round. Endless tiny pellets of
wax came out into the tray. Then the other ear. Again, I could
hear! Hear: Hear! Like bells across the valley. I was free---
free to walk about in the world, not peer at it any more like a
visitor! And my body felt better, too. The chill was still
there---after all, I was resting by the sea---but what was a chill?
Back in my bedroom I packed at once, ate a bit of lunch, and drove
off. Right away from the scene! My wife followed by train.
Back here, where the tiny courtyard lay in silence and the
rocky path up the hill seemed to look a little reproachful...
Later that evening, after dark, when everything lay in the
night-hush, I heard Alberto come up the road behind his two oxen.
The wheels scarped and rumbled over the stones. He cried, 'Va!
Via! Va: Camina! Cam-i-na! Va: Forza! Forza!', some-
times in a soft voice, enc ouragingly, and then with sharpness as
the wheels took a steep incline. He said, 'Va,va, va', in a
strangely deep and absent way, as if his voice came out of Etruscan


times. I followed him up the hill, hearing his soft cries
and the scrape of the wheels all the way. Half-way up I me t
Gianni and Lorenzo on their way to the village by motor-cycle,
and when I told Gianni I'd been in bed most of the time he shouted
in a burlesgue way, waving his arms, 'You should have stayed here
with us! You're better off here! We have aria pura---and peace---
we're free from diseases here---don't leave us again!' He'd become
thinner in the last few days, and his face was bronzed. All their
grain is in now. He said the work had cost him two kibos of
weight. And now they were off to enjoy themselves. The air was
soft all round; the village-lights shone on their hill, like a
crown held up. I walked on up and came to their house just as
Alberto was turning into the stabelyard with his oxen. It was
now past ten and Gianni's mother was still working, bringing in
fovage
forgee from the fields. The bull-calves made a great din When
their mothers walked into the stall, and the fattest of them broke
loose from his chain and fed at the nipple: Alberto indulges this
and gives the beast an affectionate smack on the rump---'He's fatter
than the other one,' he said, because he gets more complimenti---
more affection---and 15 always manages to get free!' If an animal
didn't get proper affection, he said, it didn't put on weight
properly, and its meat was much less choice.
After the oxen were haltered to their troughs he had to help
bring in the forage. The electric bulb failed 9 in the hot, dark
stable, and they used a candle. Then there was the cutting of
the grass at a circular scythe worked by hand---first the soft
clover and maize-leaves, for the young, and then the coarser,
dryer grass for the grown oxen. Alberto turned the wheel while
his mother fed the grass into the chute, in great armfulls,
plunging forward with her whole tiny body, that only seems skin


and bone. Alberto was elated, a bit drunk, and swung the
wheel carelessly, telling his mother that the grass was no good,
too dry! He'd been working at another podere all day, and this
seemed to have excited him: he almost never goes to town.
His face is long and striking, in the stark Etruscan manner,
not good-looking like Gianni's. When he's dressed up on Sundays
in a spperb suit, with everything in perfect taste, he has such
a ommanding presence that you might think he was an actor, with
his dark, oily hair and straight back and eyes that flash; only
his bad teeth, and the fact that he talks all the time out of
shere awkwardness at being drssed up, show that he's our Alberto
after all.
They gave me a glass of wine and piled me up with fresh eggs,
and I began to walk down again.
In the meantime our dog, which was on heat, had escaped, and
I had to walk up and down the hill in the dead of night calling
her name and peering about among the bushes and trees. I went
to the top of the hill where Paolo lives, in a rambling, tumbledown
farmhouse, but didn't go into his C ourtyard for fear of alarming
him and also perhaps getting some gunshot in my ear. Then I gave
up and came down. The result would be a litter of mongrels---but--
oh, well! I went to bed. And after an hour or so she appeared,
with a mean, yellow-looking half-breed in tow, Paolo's 'hunting
ale
dog', trailing a long chain that sounded like the prisoners in
Fideliogin-the-husir,
I felt hot from wine, over-tared. The nightingale who always
perches close to our bedroom window made his familiar call: one
long, soaring whistle, and a few aarbles, then S ilence; just the
beginning of a song---never more; he brings enormous comfort--


the world is suddenly calm.
The moment I heard his brief, and endless, call I felt
better and fell asleep.
I remember walking down to the sea from the road one evening,
near Ancona, in the war. The column had stopped and the trucks
were all drawn into the side of the road. It was dusk, and I was
surprised to find the sea so close, and a smooth, deserted beach.
Everything seemed impossible to me then, except what was. I had
a peculiar sensation on that beach which made me linger. I can't
even tell what it was now: a sense of the exotic perhaps, of
independence---of some adventure I couldn't name but which belonged
to me intimately. I had only taken a few steps and was quite away
from the army, quite alone. I think we were coming up from Greece
to join a new attack. I thought it might be a premonition of death.
The sea was smooth and quiet; the beach seemed such a luxury---
'seaside' meant a crowded place for me. Or perhaps my body had
the premonition that it would be here again, a few miles from this
spot, some years later. For a moment I was quite alone, as if
in tune with my identity as it would be after the war. But my
mind didn't believe for a moment that I'd ever see Italy again.
My first visit to Rome was short, pursory: that was strange--
not to know that I would make my home in the city. I hardly
looked at the city itself. Yet the seed must have been sewn
then.
Otherwise why did I go back---herdly thinking? (as everyone
goes back to Rome).
The seed was cast so deep. perhaps, that
my mind knew nothing. I stayed at the hotel in the burrow of


streets in the Spanish quarter, on that first visit in the war.
The thing to do was to ask the hall-porter to fix you up with a
woman for the night. All Rome was copulating. He fixed up
myself and afriend: we had to travel to the outskirts of the city
in one of those tiny war-buses which consisted of a canvas box
built on to a motor-cycle, so small that you couldn't stand up in
it. I went alone to do the arranging: I was surprised at my-
self---at the methodical way I arranged our pleasures; we Would
bring the food and wine, enough for four; I saw both girls and
approved. And in the evening we went. Those outskirts mus t
have been quite close to the Vatican: the city was much smaller
then. There were tall blocks of flats that stood alone: they
seemed to me exotic and beautiful, like rocks in a st range,
mystical, glittering ZOO of humanity. The W omen had a flat, well
furnished. One was serious and delicate in her movements; the
other plump and giggly. We sat round a small table, eating and
drinking without appetite. Then 9 with a little wine inside us,
tke men -
we,began to find the maid more attaractive than either of the
women and, to their horror, and the spellbound outrage of the
maid, made advances at her. She was usheradand hurried out of
the flat. The night was distraught and ridiculous. I had in-
stilled in my friend a horror of the clap which had begun---I was
so fluent about it---to exeerise a real terror over me. So
neither of us did anything, to the bewilderment of the W omen :
t there were four people aching with desires, on a hot night,
lying with the very person who couldn't satisfy them, while the
mysterious and smiling city lay outside quite dark and silent.
That was a strange beginning for a'city. Yet I felt happy in
the morning. The light was clean and sparkling as I'd neve r
seen it in my life before. It gave promise---with the bustle


in the street far below---of W onderful events.
At half-past five this morning, soon aftercwe woke up,
there was a fierce storm and a tremendous wind swept through the
house. We rushed about closing doors and shutters, and getting
things in off the terrace. The dog was terrified and kept close
to us. The water cascaded down off the roof in a great chute.
Our rainwater-well filled up again in no time. There were blind-
ing flashes of lightning. Then, as we lay in bed waiting for it
to stop, we heard the first bird sing, and the clouds began to draw
away. Sergio had gone to work at four, though it was Sunday---the
strikes have delayed the harvest and make oveitime necessary---and
we watched him tramping back at seven soaked through, his food-
basket still full. Gianni came down later and said he'd been soaked
from head to foot. He'd been building barche of wheat-sheaves and
couldn't leave them before the 'roofs' were on; he had wrung the
water out of his clothes. At four that morning, when he'd started
work, the sky had been clear and there'd been bright stars; dawn
brought the storm. He said he hadn't arrived home before one in
the morning from the cinema, and then he hadn't been able to sleep
because of the great heat and the mosquitoes: he lay smoking, then
leaned out of the window; now and then he gave his brother Lorenzo
a good kick, he said, for sleeping so deeply.
It still isn't real July weather. The usual heat hagn't come,
although there are bursts of wet scirroco-heat that seemf to come
from the sea. The coast this year is hotter than inland, in a perm-
anent scirroco. Yet the Val deElsa should be one of the dryest and
hottest regions north of Rome. They say that half of Italy's grain
has been lost this year, through the abnormal winter and the heavy
spring-rains.
One of the oxen here is sick with tuberculosis, and Gigi
has had to sell her at a loss of forty thousand lire. But she
is still there in her stall, looking delicate and apprehensive.


The padrona complains about it in her singing, wan, mediaeval
way.
Tle padrona
stel has been putting a fine story about that this house is
a 'villat or even a palazzo'---for which we pay a pittance.
Since we are foreigners, people find our living here incredible:
foreigners are signori who expect bathrooms and polished wardrobes
whererer they go. I scotch her stories by saying we are 'camping'
here---it's just like being in a tent; since camping is an admiss-
ible foreign pursuit, -understood, When I explained to a
shopkeeper yesterday that far from having a bathroom we had no
water and little electric light, and no lavatory to speak of,
he seemed relieved: he'd been worried that the general conspiracy
to charge the foreigner fancy-prices might have been undermined.
class
Nêturally, he likes to keep us all on an upper-caass level:beoause
justigiés tris prices.
abter And it makes him feel safer. 'If,'
he said, 'you'd like a really nice place another years, in Assisti,
four rooms with a bathroom, kitchen and all conveniences, I have
it. Furnished as well. No camping there.' I askdf him how
will
maked
much it would be and he made the classical Italian reply, which
never differs so much as by a word, in whichever province you
happen to be: 'Ah, quealo non posso dire---that I can't say.
But certainly we would come to some arrangement..."
The July weather has settled in---for the moment. The
rocky path up the hill is beginning to look blinding white, and
the cicadas are louder, echoing across the valley. But there
is always a cool, balmy breese that comes down through the woods
from the sea (without that the Etruscans would never have settled
here). This breeze is cold sometimes, especially in the evening.
Unusually so, even in the heat. There seems to be another weather


interfering with the real Italian weather.
When I walk up the hill I scan the path in front of me
for snakes. The vipers can go right across your path, as they
can't see or hear. A dog will stop short when it is aware of
a snake on the path, and sit down, quite still. The heat makes
the walk uphill slower: the dog plods along with head drooping,
tongue hanging out. There are greatvyells from Luciano at the
foot of the valley, egging his oxen on while he shakes about in
his seat: 'Dio buono, camina! Madonna troia!'
Yesterday we saw the fattore of this land: he is to be the
go-between for the owner of the house and us. There are mis-
understandings about when to pay the rent and to whom, about the
pozzo nero, the 'black well' which means the lavatory, just a
hole in the floor, and lastly---the biggest bone of contention,
on which I refuse to yield---the bill for 'disnfecting' the
house, that is whitewashing it previous to our entry, which she
would like me to pay. As Caterina says, 'It isn't as if you can
take the Whitewashed walls with you when you leave.' The fattore
told me with a clear, confidential look that he was sure he could
settle matters properly. I think he underestimates his padrona.
paid Yum
Anyway, Iper/two months' rent and left. She is setting up a
great moan about the sick ox, he told us; it should never have
happened, she says. 'But we're all losers on that deal,' he
murmured. 'And she's right, misfortunes shouldn't happen.'
On Sunday we walked in the hills beyond the woods, which
always remind us of the Isle de France. It was just after a
storm. There are rarely two or three days without a storm


now. Sudden chills come into the air, like the currents you
feel in the sea sometimes. The sun isn't safe as it usually
is from May onwards. The sky can cloud over in a moment.
The path winds between cornfields and lava-rocks and saplings,
and emerges at the crest of a hill from which one can see a thickly
wooded mass of hills, falling into a deep valley. It always
seems as if no one has ever really,been there---not since centurtes
ago, at least. In France or England that path Would be full of
reminiscences---Louis XV had once passed there with his mistress,
it used to be a stagecoach road in the time of Jane Austen, Henry
Vlll loved to hunt there, the Scots or Burgundians were defeated
there after a battle lasting three days, a charter of freedom was
signed there... But here, if there is a touch from the past at
all, it is classical. And so you have a sense of pure countryside:
tkal is mote
nature Worked over me
MMICE HOTe perhaps than any other in the
world, and yet bare. There has been no aristocracy, except one
which plundered the land. No magic has baptised the paths and
woods, except in ancient times.
No picnics---no tender little ceremonies. Gianni's brother
Lorenzo said we must come up and have a merenda with them, perhaps
at the edge of the woods. Merenda is a lovely Word, at least it
sounds lovely: meaning snack or picnic. But nothing would be
done with tender relish. We would snatch at a lump of salami and
drink a glass of wine, probably standing; and then make off.
We sat in Gianni's kitchen a few days ago and ate a few mouthfuls,
washed it down with some excellent wine; and afterwards I suddenly
thought, 'Well, we've had the merendat' The Italians are so
ancient, not in time but in feeling: it is their quality, always
was. They're ancient like cicadas or salamanders. There isn't
real tender regard for the human creature: no flirtation, delight,


folly---and these make up the picnic.
Sometimes I think that Italy is nothing but classical:
the Renascence, certainly the baroque, seem nothing. Florence,
Siena, Parma, Ravenna---the towns of the Renascence: nothing.
Tuscany is as bare as any other part of Italy: only the towns
are like jewels, set in the plains. There hasn't been magic in
the country: except before Christianity.
Perhaps this drive for the town which they all have now is
ancient. The town provides the only meaning, always has.
There aren't the great country houses that you see in France
and England. They haven't determined the shape of the land.
When you find them they are closed and hidden---turning their
backs. They don't frown on to a valley like the (Schloss.
They don't stand clement and mild like a Queen Anne house in the
Cotswold country. Their touch hasn't entered the people.
The Etruscans had the magic.
Letters from New York---bright, thrilling, crackling wi th
work and prospects. The promise of heaven on earth.
This Wilts us secretly: a bondage. Like the Second Coming,
which never came. There's to do here and now. We can wait---
we think we can: but our bodies, nerves, can't be kept in abey-
ance.
ho promises, no Veyad.
This is the Etruscan---'here and nom,) Did the Italians
inherit this? They have no 'beyond'. No truncation of life
into past and future: into time. Emember how indifferent the
Sicilians are to time and age. Is that classital? Is that why
the Italians have no reminiscences? their past and future are the
now? And so their earth doesn't change: in speaking once it


spoke for all time? Were the Etruscans Italy's baptism?
From our 'Isle de France' hills we saw a great wall sticking
up from a wooded valley, broken and jagged, surrounded entirely by
thick undergrowth. And beyond it, where there were fields, lay
what they call the 'old castle', a group of farmhouses perched on
a bare hill. Paolo's brother lives there, we are told; he also
is a shepherd. And there are ruins. But what ruins we Can't
make out. Is this strange towering jagged wall, suddenly thrusting
out of the bushy woodland, part of the ruins? Is it ancient or
mediaeval? The map tells us nothing.
We decided to drive there, or as near there as we could get.
It meant taking the road to Volterra and turhigg right. There was
another road, an easier one that went direct through the woods from
would
here, but we #a/ never been able to locate it; people talked about
it vaguely, nn the way they have in the country. so we took this
dominating
obvious road. It climbed up and up, exerleoking the strange and
stirring hills below Volterra, that sometimes look as though a
massive freezing wave had passed over them and ruffled them. Mist
and clouds floated in the valley. There were thick, dark woods,
and then bright fields, all laid out like an immense map as far as
we could see. At the top of the hill we asked for Castel Vecchio
and were told we'd passed it: there was a path to the left which
we hadn't noticed. And we drove back down the hill carefully.
There it was, going surreptitiously away from the road at an
angle, sloping down between trees. We noticed a shepherd at the
cormer, his face much like Paolo's, and guessed he must be the
brother: then we drove on slowly. The path began to hug the
side of a hill, with a small valley on the other side, in exactly
the style of an Etruscan approach. And I began to feel the su nlit


happiness I always do on an Etruscan path: a special golden
sensation, as if one-were at the edge of a great event. As
always with an Etruscan path, nothing ahead could be seen:
but suddenly we came to a vast opening, and S paces. There before
us, shining on the crest of a hill, were two farmhouses, and
beyond them were rolling hills as far as Castel Fiorentino, on
the road to Florence. We drove up to the courtyard and asked
two peasants who were sitting outside, leaning on their sticks,
'Is this Castel Vecchio?'
Yes, it was. Were we after the ruins? they wanted to know.
Yes, we were. Ah, well, they were further on, along the path
that ran at the side of the house (also mysterious, and clearly
a continuation of the other andéent path), and it had to be done
on foot. A car would be no use. The path went through woods,
over rocks and streams; and it took about three-quarters of an
hour, before one reached the 'towers'. What were the so-called
'towers'? Ah, that they couldn't say: But certainly they were
interesting for those who understood such things. There were
holes in the ground---tombs, people said. 'They must be Etruscan,'
I told them. They shrugged, and one of them said with a smile
that he'd never ventured inside one: he was always afraid the
roof would fall in, and also, there was danger of vipers---they
lurked intholes, under stones, and he wasn't in a hurry to be
bitten by a viper! Once, he said, a lawyer---a small, fat man---
had spent a month there looking at the ruins day by day, a book
in his hand; and when they'd asked him what there was of interest
in the towers he only said quietly, with a smile, 'You wouldn't
understend---non capite, voit' We must come another day, they
said, because it was already too late in the aft ternoon; it would
be dark in an hour or two and it wouldn't do for a cristiano to


get lost in the woods! And they made faces and laughed.
was Paolo's brother there? we asked. Yes, he lived there, and
he'd just taken his sheep up to the road. We explained that
we lived near Paolo and got our milk from him. Then we must be
I U
the foreigners Who'd taken the house at thefoof of the hill where
Paolo lived? Yes, they'd heard! Apparently the news had got
across the vast, pathless, wooded valley, to their isolated post.
Then they talked about the war. Moroccan troops had been
there---fearful fellows, they said, who cut off ears and never
spared Germans when they caught them---they cut their throats
from ear to ear. English and American troops had also been
there: they had bartered wine and eggs for tinned food and
sugar. A German had stayed up a tree with a machine-gun for two
or three days, until the English or Americans brought the tree
down from under him.
They spoke as if the war had been the last thing to have
really happened there. And the place seemed not to have changed
a stone since then. The troops might have been there yesterday.
They talked about them as if they were still young, still the
same troops, only they were somewhere else now. They talked
about the Morrocans and their French officers as if their faces
were still before them. The silence was immense on that hill-
side: I suppose one startling event Would fall into that SI parkling
immensity and be enough for a lifetime. Youth, they said,
is unmindful of things in war: boys lose all sense of family,
and homes, crops, other people's belongings, are meaningless to
them.
It was getting chilly and the sun had started to go down.
We would come back another day, earlier. As we drove away they
Perhafn
sat with their eyes still on us, calm and
We seemed
(eis
inquisitive.


to them only another aspect of the wer-experience that had
fallen into the silence yesterday or twenty years ago.
A letter from the padrona---an answer to my conference with
the fattore. Will I please not take our business to 'third
parties' to settle? But I shall. The Words run close together
in one round, breathless scrawl, as if from centuries of cajolement
and legal wrangling. She won't specify precisely what she thinks
I owe her, over and above the agreed rent: if you define your
position too closely you can't move out of it later. A Wise
Italian instinct, this.
When we go to see her she talks about the Pope, or her son,
or how intolerably untidy her daughter is, or about the religious
experiences she has had; she saw her son fall---the image sudd-
enly crossed her mind when she was standing before a madonnina---
and later that day she found he'd had an accident. She talks
rhetorically, opening her mouth wide, with flashes of humour and
irony. By the time she has finished we are all tired and too
hungry to think about bills. We've been wrangling miadly for
two months now. Some ddep Italian wrangles go on for five,
fifteen years. Sometimes they go from one generation to another,
abolishing time.
Sergio told us that to get to the 'towers' we needn't take
the road to Volterra at all: we could walk from a point just
beyond the woods here, where a narrow path cuts straight into
the hills; this must be the mysterious path we've been after.
It means a difference of one or two hours walking, he said.
So yesterday we tried it. We packed up some bread and
cheese and wine and drove to the nearest village, then took the
rocky path into the hills behind: he'd told us to go as far


as a villa that stood alone in its podere. We found the
villa and left the car in the courtyard, at the end of a drive
of cypresses. Then we spotted someone to show us the way---
the peasant's wife. She was nursing a child on the grass,
surrounded by tiny ducklings. There were two ways to the ruins,
she said, one stright through the woods, and difficult to keep to
because of the undergrowth, and the other a real path all the way
that would take at least two hours. We could see the ruins pro-
truding out of the woods on the next hill, jagged and split.
They seemed remarkably near. In the Winter, she said, the path
through the woods was easy enough because the trees were bare,
but in the Si ummer you needed a guide: on Sundays her husband was
available but today he was working. 'Anyway, I'll show you where
it begins!' she said with a smile. We walked across the forecourt
of the villa; a Roman family owned it, she said, and came only for
August each year. The shutters were tight closed, and the walls
flak and
were in good order; the fields were perfeetiy still all round;
and the villa with its mellow, painted walls, and tiny balconies,
gave it all a touch of splendour and grace that had perhaps always
been there, from the time of the Etruscans.
The path was almost invisible and it meant treading through
thick bushes the whole way. What about the other path? we asked.
And she pointed it out: wide and well-shaded with trees. It
would take too long, but we decidedcto try it. It looked so
inviting, sloping down between the trees. A scirocco had si tarted
and the sunlight was very misty and yellow; the usual cool
breeze from the sea had dropped. A few clouds were forming.
The path went shere down towards a dried riverbed, like a Tyrolean
valley except that the trees were less tall. Embedded in the
pathiwere boulders and the polished roots of trees, which some-


times provided a stairway down. We were soon sweating.
There was hardly any air. The dog rushed along excitedly,
yawning and puffing.
The stones in the riverbed were covered with shining mud,
yet the moment you touched them with your foot you found the mud
turned to dust at once. There was a great silence in the woods,
with the occasional flap of Wings and the cry of a bird, and the
endless rattle of the cicada.
At the riverbed we collected sticks to walk with, and an
ascent started, through darker woods than before, the boulders of
the path mottled black and grey with lava, and large smooth
pebbles now and then. We wondered if this had been a modest
roadway in Etruscan times, leading from one valley to the other.
Storm-clouds were forming in land and there was the hushed sound
of thunder in the distance. It wasn't likely that the storm Would
come to us as the walether was clear in the direction of the sea.
The trees grew smaller as we went up, and the vegtation became
thicker on either side, with the sun gleaming through the leaves on
the jagged path. It reminded me of biblical countries---I couldn't
place exactly where, but it had something to do with the light,
a certain dim yellow sparkle that fell through the trees, a sense
of dawn, but dawn in history, something exciting that had happened
collectively long ago, With the glow of a wonderful story told at
night: Babylon, perhaps; the arch of Tesiphon; the orange-groves
near Tel-a-Vivg Haife that send out their overpowering fluffy
scent; the mountains of Kurdistan, the Lebanon; a Syrian wadi
where there were only gleaming boulders as dry as bone, and the
1.c) rolling desert as far as one could see. It reminded me of Lake
Galilee, as one looks shere down on to it after a sudden turn in
043 alio
lers
the road. And there the Mediterranean glitter---Algbers, the


squalid Philipville, Bizerta.
At the top of the hill we seemed no nearer than at the
beginning. Then in a clearing we suddenly caught sight of
the towers. The tallest of them gleamed in the light like a
ruined temple you might come across by the sea in the south,
from Greek times, its tracery near the top still faintly
visible; and it had that light, dusty fineness of great age.
Yet at the same time it didn't seem ancient. Mediaeval, perhaps.
But there was something marvellous about the place itself: the
dense heath clung all round it, and hid everything at the base.
We were still a long way from it, and the path had trickled out,
taking us in the wrong direction.
At the side of the tallest tower we could see a squat build-
ing, its four walls intact, only roofless: the pointed end-walls
showed that it wasn't classical; it could have been a priory,
a chapel. The tower' could have been part of a castle-wall,
the round watch-tower at one corner. A ruin from ancient times
would have sunk further into the earth: but these stood their
original height, we could see that.
We plodded on, and every glimpse we had of the towers sh owed
that we were going further away. At the end we found ourselves
once again at Castel Vecchio where we had talked to the two peasants.
And we knew that the path leading from there to the ruins was
another good hour's walk, over very rough ground; the evening was
already drawing on, so we decided to return home and try it again
early one morning, taking the path that cuts st traight through the
woods, for which we would need stout shoes and sticks.
If there was anything Etruscan over there, besides these
mediaeval ruins, it was right that we should have to fight for
it: the Etruscans don't like to be fathomed.


Paolo brought us milk yesterday that went sour at once. This
followed an affable conversation with him; the more affable we are
the more we lay ourselves open to be deceived. Here is your pagan,
intact from ancient times. He goes about his lonely devices on the
principle that they're invisible. As he can't see into your mind
he supposes you can't see into his.
I remember a Greek village under a dry, gleaming hill of boulders,
again in the war; I stand on thw ooden balcony of a house with an
interpreter, looking down into the street which is covered with pebbles
like a beach at the sea and has no pavement. We have been searching
houses for arms. To my surprise a pretty girl of my own age is stand-
ing below. She is blonde and slim, with a delicate, rather French
face. I speak to her, and she answers in French. The interpreter
is ribald: he is an old, pot-bellied, razzled man. She tells me,
gazing up mildly in the sunshine, surrounded by the silence of a tree-
less countryside, that she lives in the nearby city. I promise to
ome to her home. Then she is gone. The interpreter says he has
never seen her before. How she can have come from the city, without
a car, in war-time, we don't know. He says she must have walked---
with a dirty laugh. But the road is lonely, through foothills, un-
paved, and there are partisans and brigands about.
I meet her at her home in the city. This is a large house near
the bay. At the door downstairs I am shushed quiet by a maid---she
puts a finger up to her lips, then draws me by the hand up two or three
flights of stairs, in darkness and silence. At the very top we emerge
into the open air again. It is the roof and she whispers to me to
stay there. Then she leaves, closing the door behind her.
I wait there for some time. Not a sound or movement comes from
the house. I can't even hear the city outside. The night is quite
dark. Then the girl appears, swiftly, with great mystery, suddenly
opening the door and standing before me, like a blond shadow. We


talk in whispers. Can she come down to the square? I ask. No.
Can she walk along the quay wi th me? No. Can she invite me into
her house? No. I shrug and wait. But she can drive out to the
village wi th me, she says. I nearly jump with astonishment. 'I live
there,' she says. Live where? In the village where we first spoke.
Her family has a tiny house there; she can invite me, quite alone.
Not tonight, however. I must take her to the village the following
morning, and come to visit her in the evening.
She was to be in the villege-house alone, except for her maid,
who went everywhere with her. She gave me an exact description of
where the house lay. I was to find the house without asking passers-by
I walked through the vi llage in the dead of night, passing silent
groups of men, and found the house, down a little incline, perched on
the side of a hill. She and the maid were waiting inside. The maid
was sent to bed, and we sat the table together, in the dim light of an
oil-lamp. I made approaches to her, but every aj pproach brought me a
smack on the face. Yet she immediately provoked me to approach her
again. Every movement on my own initiative, even a movement of my
fingers, br ought me a'fresh smack on the face. After an hour my face
tingled and was as red as a radish. But I kept on smiling. When I'd
had enough I staggered to the door to leave, and to my astonishment she
said in a hoarse, bitter voice, 'Some people can never finish what they
starti' I've asked myself again and again wha t the meaning of this
experienc ce was.
Reading Erasmus. He calls it 'this raving world'. He and


Thomas More shared the same hope for a time, of an impending
marvellous civilisation. Thomas More was beheaded by the
English reformation (1534), Erasmus swork was ruined by the
German reformation (1520 onwards).
I glimpsed a possible civilisation at a concert in London.
Or was it Salzburg? The faces were young, quiet, inquisitive,
even when they were old.
We saw the Duccio panels in Siena, placed in a kind of
sealed room with curtains and conditioned air, under specially
placed lights. Rather like a mortuary. The attendant explained
some of the'colours to us: gold meant faith or holiness; gold
thread or a cloak of gold separated the disciples, Our Lady and
Joseph from the others; purple was the colour of royalty. The
had been
colours, he said, were ground from precious stones. He added
that one could spend days on each panel unravelling its symbols.
We stared and listened. Duccio was called 'the Greek' sometimes:
and there is a late-Greek finish to his work. None of the turmoil
of Fredi: it is all symbols and scholarship. The fixed, bright
colours seemed to have found their destiny in this sealed, artificial
room.
I was glad to get outside, and as I predicted to myself while
insi de, I couldn't remember a thing of What I'd seen. Except the
lovely expression of a Madonna panel, about which nothing had been
said.
The attendant had also showed us a needle behind the main
panel which records the entrance of each person by measuring the
increased humidity, and makes the necessary adjustment to the
atmosphere. Apparently, the panels have been rescued from


various churches when they were hidden in side-chapels or behind
altars. Then they were gleaned, most of them. They would have
done better to stay there, in their intimate corners, half-hidden,
rarely noticed.
local
Our, art-restorer says that these attendants are chiacchieroni
-gas-bags---and that 'some' of the colours 'might have been'
ground from precious stones perhaps'.
He also told us that he'd been responsible for bringing the
Bartolo di Fredi frescoes to light in San Gimignano. It was about
thirty years ago and he'd been paid five hundred lire for the whole
work. He said I was wrong to think that Christ was holding an
image of himself as a child, in the St. Augustine fresco: he is
holding the spirit of the Madonna as she dies; the spirit, departed
from the body, was always represented as a baby in arms with a halo.
He said he didn't know anything of the mural we'd seen in St.
Jacob's, the tiny convent-church. I described it to him warmly, but
he still shook his head. He said it was certainly not a Bartolo di
Fredi, but probably from the same period, the same Workshop.
Some hideous atonal music on the portable radio. Like
having your tooth pulled. This is what we get for being in the
intoxicated grip of German music for so long (in the grip of the
Germans for so long?): the impasse produced by German abstraction.
No more danc ing or singing, nothing intimate, not the slightest
rhythm from the life we know: just clatters produced by the mind,
on a striking mathematical basis.
Gianni's lips show signs of ungoverned passion in childhoo d.
It was the first thing I noticed about him. His lips are actually
the shape of lips closed hungrily round a nipple: extra flesh


has formed on both sides. Today he mentioned it and said he
was going to have a little operation some time, to remove the
extra skin. He said with a laugh that he'd taken too much milleg
as a child, and had sucked sugar or thumb in between times!
This morning he brought down a live chicken and a basket-full
of marrows for us. Gigi says, trying to make a laugh out of it,
that we're spoiling him, by always taking him in the car. Renato,
Sergio's son, said yesterday---not realising What he'd said until
he'd said it---that Gianni occupies the 'dog's place' in our car.
The girl up the hill, who lives along with her mother and father,
in a slough of work from dawn till dusk, gets moral about Gianni:
'Even signori have work to do,' she tells him. 'Why leave everything
to your mother?'
We took our bread over to Luciano's family this morning far
baking: they have an oven outside and our two loaves will go in
wit th theirs. They all gape at the wholemeal: Why isn't it white?
Yet they grow and cut and thresh the wholemeal grain themselves,
in the fields they ploughed with their own hands; they will take
it themselves to the 'mill' where it will be smashed about until
robbed of taste and value, wh en they will get it back looking like 7
french powder! They say wistfully, *Who knows if it's our grain
we get back?' Of course it's quite a deal for the 'mill': they sell
the rest of the grain back to the peasants as chicken-food and as
wholemeal flour to reinforce the ox-forage in the winter. All the
old stone-mills have been closed up. There isn't one locally.
The weather strange again. Every afternoon at roughly the
same time there is a storm with lightning that darts straight down
on to the fields, with deafening claps of thunder. The rain is


sudden, brief and torrential. Then there is a clear eve ening.
It happens regularly every day---a fine, hot morning, the storm,
and then the serene evening sky.
There was a slight erath-tremor along the coast a few days ago.
Gianni told us that a streak of lightning gad come within
four or five metres of his mother when she was bringing in some grass.
He himself was standing by the house, about ten meters away, and it
struck between them.
The noise was immense. He asked her when
she got back to the house if she'd been frightened and she said,
'No, I didntteven see itt' He spoke about her in a musing way.
'She would have been frightened all right if she'd seen it!'---with
a laugh. He probably didn't tell her about it.
Last night, an opera in the village square. During each
interval there was violent harmering and sceneshifting: lacking
a curtain, they had hit on the ugly device of shining arc-hamps
in the faces of the audience, so that we should be blinded.
There was a woman-conductor wreathed in a tight black gown
down to her feet that made her look snaky and bizarre.
The effect of her conducting was to make it seem like a schobl-
performance: she appeared with the main singers at the end of
each scene, like their school-mistress. Her movements were
round and graceful, and sometimes her hips moved in a dancing way---
like in a foxtrot. She was competent and clever. It was Verdi,


but minus the drama: a shell. We nodded and dozed. In the
ballroom scene the chorus knocked together like farmers bidding
for livestock: the men's idea of aristocratic fun was to tie
paper streamers round the necks of the women, who then bared
their teeth in an aristocratic laugh While they W ere being thrott-
led; the conspirators were dressed quite inexplicably in shiny
green night-dresses and sleeping caps, like old W omen out of
Dickens, with swords and daggers underneath. In the minuet
they formed a crowd so that you couldn't see the dance itself---
for the good reason that it wasn't going on. Whenever the tenor
got applause his face broke into a delightful boxer's grin.
The music was all there: but the conductor seemed to be teaching
it to the orchestra as she went along, morally---here were the
notes, this was how it was written, and this was how it must be
played; obvious! When she did interpret the music it was
'emotion', showing-off: but luckily she got tired of that very
early. The soprano sang like a peasant-woman calling her chickens;
in passionate moments she was like a peasant-woman being tickled.
When the tenor was dying at the end the chorus looked on like a
queue in the post office. The thing dragged on until one in the
morning. Gianni was with us, dressed to the nines. Two seats
ifal) away was the fafttore who found us this house---he shouted 'Brava!'
after one of the soprano's arias as if she'd just bought an OX for
half its value (he admired her without thinking her honest). The
smell with which evefyone here is impregnated---Sergio, Gianni,
Gigi---of sweet grass, oxen and volcanic soil, drifted across the
audience from hundreds of men, mixed with cheap oigarette-sroke.
All the people with W indows looking on to the square had their
lights turned off, but of course they had to look for things
urgently now and then, in the Italian way, and every few minutes


a light went up self-effacingly and then out again. Flags
were draped out of the windows across the stage for the last scene,
and incomprehensibly one of them was an old map of the Atlantic
coast of America with the word Boston written across it. At
curtain-call the stage was a chaos, the principal characters mixed
up with stagehands While the applause was going on. The bass,
who had got the biggest hand of the evening, had his thermos flask
with him and was busily opening it. Poor old Verdi: but perhaps
he would have enjoyed it. They got the music right, more or less.
Being Verdi performed by oxen, there was something natural about it:
but of course oxen have no sense of drama.
It made me think, 'No sense of aristocracy, no art.'
Aristocracy means the ability to show yourself naked (that
is, in any state): to be a living and walking denial of original
sin.
More reading about the Humanists. John Colet, Thomas More
and Erasmus in the sixteenth century wanted the 'restoration of
theology' after centuries of thinking in symbols, allegory, number,
that is, thinking in the Old Testament way.
The Humanists, in the course of two centuries, brought the
middle ages to an end: they did it by reviving Greek and Roman
texts, but equally by reviving the New Testament, that is, the story
of Christ. Humanism---or the 'revival of learning' or the
Renascence---was a kind of victory over the Old Testament, by
means of the ancient world.
Basically the Humanists found in Greece and Rome freedom
from the darkness of a predesftined life: a release from the
Second Coming. Greece and Rome supplied a relief from the
doctrine of original sin.


Greece had pointed to Christ. Greek sta tues were lifelike
(and the basis of our art, through the Renascence) not because the
Greeks wanted to imitate the human figure but because, for the first
time, the human creature could be a god. For the Egyptians gods
were animals or effigies, but for the Greeks, in a dawn of new life,
the human body depicted and repeated in every detail that of a god;
the most private parts were depicted with loving care, in the statues;
all sense of sin and stain was absent; the body is for the first
time a marvel in itself.
And Christ seized on this when he said---almost the only words
at his trial---'ye are gods'. It was as opposite to the doctrine
of Adam's fall as necessary. And we, perhaps, have been engulfed
between the two. Christ produced for us a kind of struggle between
that first Greek sense of marvel in the human creature, which he
inherited, and that doctrine which described the creature as naturally
stained, the Fall described in the Old Testament. He said that
even heathens, criminals, whores, even those Who weren't Jews had
the breath of God in them. It was this that broke the calm of his
own society.
And what we call Humanism was a revival of that first sense of
marvel, as a new support for Christ. It seemed a revival of pagan-
ism---this is what it was sometimes made out to be, and what it
sometimes fell into---but it sprang first and foremost from a new
sense of Christ. Hence you had the maximum classical scholarsh f ip
and the maximum devoutness in the same men. They were 'Huamnistst
because they repeated Christ's revelation of the human creature:
and the later epochs of 'equal rights' and humanitarianism and
philanthropy flowed from them.
This is why the Renascence of learning in Italy was the
reformation of religion elsewhere. It brought in the literal


and rational reading of life, and miracles, indulgences and
priests' mumbo-jumbo naturally suffered.
Another strike of the mezzadri. There were dozens of
motor-cycles outside the town-gate. They are asking for some
form of peasant-ownership: the state should take over the resp-
onsibilities of the landlord. Gianni and I passed a field where
the grain lay uncut: the thick, golden ears were drooping;
perhaps twenty or thirty thousand lire were lost there, for a
day's work.
Gianni came in the evening and gave us a little speech on
the need for agrarian reform: the grain-production in Italy had
gone down unbelievably in the last few years, he said; as more
and more people left the land, and there was less wine, wheat,
barley, oil, corn, livestock, so prices went up; as a result the
workers made more pay-demands, and this sent. the prices up still
further.
End-result: Chaos! He said we needed a system like
in Russia, where the state controlled everything. I said to this
that the state could be a cruel landlord, too: with which he
pr omptly agreed. (Once he has made a speech he will often agree
with the opposite argument: the speech was only a rhetorical
exercise which mus tn't be interrupted---like a statue, which for
the Italian must be martial or monumental, to mean anything.)
Nobody seems to want to buy the hundreds of hectares of
abandoned land. Paolo the shepherd, for instance, dreams of
becoming a butcher, whereas with the money he has saved he C ould
buy a good piece of land which would never lose its value. The
fattori---the agents who in any other land would be the new class
of landlords now---are simply entrepreneurs who have flats and
houses in town and want to stay there.


Italy had a weak and divided aristocracy, which also preferred
to live in town. Much of England's stability came from her arist-
ocracy keeping to the land.
The Italian countryside aches for another dictator---bene-
volent this time and without connections in Germany---who will fix
prices and create a stable market. Dictatorships seem to hold no
terror for the Italian: every men we know locally is a member of
the communist party, or says he is; it has become the mark of
social decency. Its appeal is above all 'organisation."
A lot of reading these days, closed in my room.
Christianity is all an intimate story of one mang a laying-
bare: first Christ, then St. Auggutine. (Because Augustine's
work was Confessions it was the basis of Churoh-theology. Nothing
short of that would have done.)
The truth puts us on the path to knowledge, not knowledge to
truth. Truth is a state in ourselves, not a body of facts.
The dress of truth may change a million times. Truth is the light
first established in us by the Greeks.
For truth, we only have to lay ourselves bare: for the
untruthful knowledge is always an encyclopedia (teducation");
thus the nineteenth century (the climax of the reaction against
intimacy or laying-bare of any kind) was the period of encyclopedias
and massive collections---'world-knowledge $
You see that light in the first Apollos and Athenes; you get
it in the Greek sky, even now; you had it in the Etruscans, who
brought Greece to Italy, to the north; a kind of golden joy---
that broke through the middle ages.
The Reformers of the Church grew out of the Humanists by
8 strange process of contradiction: given the new stature of the


94 - louse
human creature, as free, they wanted, this freedom EseF to root
predestined
out the stain of, guilt; thus they combined tie two opposite
doct trines, or tried to.
Original sin changed its meaning under the Reformers:
in the Church it had always meant the natural fate to which men
were condemned---sickness and death; but the Reformers turned
it into a self-destiny, in each man, to sin.
Reformed original sin was thus a peculiar combination of
predestination (men C ondemned to sin) and free will (they sin
by their own choice). We, the products of reformed society,
have exactly that feeling---of being both more imprisoned than
those before us and more free.
If you couplé Christ's 'ye are gods' (that isk you have the
power to create your own lives) with the conviction of original
sin (that is, you are stained in your intimacy), you produce---
out of an unworkable contradiction---the desire to creatre a new
life free of stain: that is, to re-form it. Thus, the Reformers
of the sixteenth century st tarted from an acute consciousness of
original sin.
What we call the middle class sprang from Puritanism.
The
ordinary merchants and shopkeepers of England in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries were the backbone of the Puritan tradition:
that is, they showed a desire to remake life by industry and thrift,
leaving as little as possible to original nature.
The industries that they slowly brought into being were an
effort to clean up natural life: that is, to create abstract
conditions in which intimacy languished. This is why industries
started in England: it was the land of undivided reform.
America seems to me the climax of this determination to


re-create life. She began as a moral idea---an implicit
criticism of the rest of the world, the 'old' life. Then she
developed as a land and home, like everywhere else. So there
are always the two Americas---the moral society and the actual
land. And frequently the two clash with violence (sometimes in
the same man). Every wave of immigrants helps this contradiction
by reinforcing the moral society (with their hopes and dreams) at
the expense of the actual land.
I thought of the immigrant I'd met: how she turned American
history into a moral struggle, a 'progress'. In the same way the
Victorians in England distorted history into a 'progress' from the
time of Henry Vlll's sacking of the monasteries, the first act of
tullnoh.
reform
or re-creating life. Only Disvaali sxprsed
We think of the Victorians as vigorous and full of beans.
But if you read their books you find a strange lack of stamina and
consistency, and great ambiguity of values. This applies as much
to George Eliot as it does to Jerome K. Jerome: in fact, the more
serious the approach, the greater the ambiguity. The world seemed
too much with them. They had great public energy---hard work,
thoroughness, will and enormous driving ambition---but real quiet
(the fibre of thought) was lacking. The last writer you had it in
was Jane Austen. After that, in Thackeray, Dickens, Hardy,
Wordsworth, Tennyson, you get a broken World. They seemed not
quite alone enough, yet terribly lonely.
Their tone of speech
wavers between virtuous public comment and private uncertainty.
They aren't sure of the powers of silence any more.
That was the height of our own moral society.


I watch the pigeons outside: the two squabs are dark and
soft-feathered, and are fed by their parents until they have a
breast full of food. They are then ready to fly. They pester
their mother to bring them food as before, pecking at her neck.
But she refuses. And they are constrained first to fly, and
then to begin pecking of their own accord---to 'do their own
shopping', as Gigi says. Now how would they re-create their
lives if they wanted to? Could they improve on that routine?
Could they depart from it? What could they do but interfere
with it? It would have to end in suicide and madness. The
first to suffer would be the young. The work of re-creation
would have to start from the checking of impulses.
A town has to be in the country, to be alive. Once the
separation takes place, from the country, it no longer has any
thrill or glow. The culture has gone. It becomes a city.
This is what I felt in Siena the other day: the walls of the
narrow streets are dark with car-fumes now; the traffic has
abolished the connection with the flat, still, waterless country
outside, that gave Siena her mysticism and sullen ferocity.
There is no more authority. The light of the countryside
has to flood the dark rooms and the cafes; it has to shine down
into the courtyard of the Chigi academy, hot and uninterrupted;


its sounds and smeels have to penetrate. Let go of that
authority of the timeless, and life quickly falls to pieces, as
ours is doing: the face loses its repose, the supply of divinity
is cut off. You ma y get a bit of delight as a child, an adol-
escent in these towns. But time is a cruel master.
We've elected ourselves morally and civilly into being
Cgodso. Two thousand years of Christianthy have seen to that.
But the god has gone out of our bodies and nerves. We're
re-formed, but something went wrong.
pletg
Originally
The town was the monastery enlarged. There was the thrill
of thought in lighted cells, in the darkest countryside.
For a moment, at dawn, even the hugest city ackowledges
another authority. Then it succumbs to time again.
Yesterday we drove to the sea through Volterra and found
a scrappy bathing-place called The Little Boat where the beach
had an amazing brilliance, like white bone shining in the sun.
They've made a pleasant dark restaurant of wood, low and wide
like a plantation-house. The sun was misty and burned quickly.
And the usual storm came up inland, reaching us in the early
afternoon, with a little rain. As we were strolling along the
beach a young girl came up to us from a convent-group and said,
'Per penitenza siete di carnagione bianca'---as a penance, you
have white skins---then hurried back to the other girls With a
giggle; and when we returned they were all saying their Ave
Marias solemnly.
Suddenly, this afternoon, on the radio, the grave and
Hally
terrible tones of Beethoven. As if we'd not been, serious before.


The storm this afgernoon brought more rain than usual and
less lightning. The heat is all inside the house now. The
storm seems to move from place to place every day, according to
a timetable. First, while the sun is still strong, at lunch-
time, there is the first distant rumble of thunder: we take in
everything from the terrace---chairs, tablecloth, cushions; then
the sun gets mistier and hotter, as the thunder draws nearer,
in the course of about an hour; and the storm itself breaks
sluggishly, with perhaps only one or two fierce moments. The
clouds lie over the valley until early evening, when sunlight
returns for the last red glow. The effect of the rain is to make
a thick heat-mist the next day, which hangs in the valley in the
morning and turns the village into a shadow, hanging on its hill,
burnished slightly by the sun.
When we came back from the sea today there was still sunlight
here, and no rain had fallen. The courtyard was a blaze of yellow
light, and the tall cypress outside was like a great black cone
against the brightness of the haystack.
Paolo the shepherd came by with four sheep and tried to steer
them into our empty pig-house with a stick: they were too fright-
ened and one escaped, but returned from alarm at finding itself
alone. He had to carry them in one by one, holding them by the
rump and the scruff of the neck. And there they stayed, in dark-
ness, with hardly room to turn in, all night. I put a t in of
water in, and they drank thirstily, with a long, noiseless, sucking
motion. In the morning they were loaded on to a truck with other
goats and sheep---thrown roughly in like bags of grain. They are
for tinned meat, being sick animals---so Paolo told us.
Gianni senses our concern about the sheep and laughs at us.


The chicken he brought us last week is still walking about
the couryard alive: our excuse is that we want it to lay eggs,
but he says it's too young, and probably male. The other hens
resent the newcomer and take a peck at it now and then.
When we were settling down to a meal after Paolo's visit
with the sheep Gigi called up to us and the dog started barking
like mad. When I went on to the balcony I saw the priest stand-
ing below at Gigi's side. This was his first visit, and we hadn't
met formally yet. He has the tiny cura to which this house
belongs: his village is a kilometre away, a cluster of houses
which are the colour of the earth, ancient, on top of a hill.
uvuld
He saw we were eating and said he wouldn't disturb us, but,wait
in the courtyard until we were ready---there was no hurry. He
spoke calmly and quietly, with timid glances of the eyes. He is
a pale, thin man in his late forties, and moves in a strangely
pained way; he is more like a monk than a priest. Sergio had
told us that he was the son of a peasant, and had worked in the
fields himself as a child; and was good---so good:
We insisted on his coming upstairs, and he sat with us at
table on the terrace, with a glass of our wine in front of him.
He had brought us a bag of pears, the first ones of the season,
small and green, from his own trees.
One of the first questions was, were we Catholics? No,
told him
Protestants. 'But the same Christ,' I added. I satd 'Prot-
estant' really meant we were in---that we found ourselves in---
a kind of 'historical situation' we were powerless to alter.
History had cut us off from Rome in such a way that while we
felt at home in an Italian church we couldn't belong. I des-
cribed how the old churches in England, because they were now


reformed, were nearly always empty. He told us he'd been
reading a book of meditations by a Dutch priest that afternoon,
in which it was said that to try to bring the different churches
together was tan act of God'. (I felt that this was what had
brought him round to our house) In the ecumenical council in
Rome, he said, they were discussing the possibility of the queen
of England agreeing to the status of political head of state while
acknowledging the pope as the head of Christianity. He spoke in
a strangely S impleway---as if the queen would in some way be for-
given her past; and Protestants, he hoped, would be 'received'
into the church, again as if they would recognise their errors,
and see the natural superiority of the
as their leader.
pope
That would be wonderful,' he said, to bring all the churches
together'.
He looked at the wholemeal bread we were eating and asked in
a curious way, 'Is that special bread?' I think he was quite
prepared to hear that it was a queer Protestant dish. We told
him we had it baked for us, and mixed it ourselves. 'Invece noi---'
he said, 'now we, on the other hand, have a different habit:
we eat white bread. We're used to it.' And there seemed no
way, for him, of ever eating anything else.
When we got to the dessert-stage we asked him to join us,
and offered him some peccorino cheese andone of his own pears:
to our surprise he said calmly, 'I'll try your bread---just a
little slice.'
I went and cut him two varieties---one baked
at the village shop and the other and-the-otirer from Luciano's
farm across the valley, where they have the outdoor oven.
But he didn't like either; he said they tasted of the "seed'
of the wheat. It had happened in Italy, he went on, that at
one time people had eaten a darker bread, but then after the last


war the Americans had come with their pure white bread',
and everyone began to prefer it. That, again, seemed an irr-
evocably thing: the richest country in the world had set its
seal on the rightness of the thing!
By that time Gianni had joined us---with a polite nod at
the priest and 'Buona sera, reverendo.'
'Yes,' Gianni said,
'I believe white bread is lacking in vitamins---it has none of
the substance of theirs---!, pointing to the wholemeal on the
table. 'Our priest doesn't think so,' I said. 'No/the priest
tic) replied, 'It's a question of habit---bread for us is white, and
I don't think we could ever get used to the other.'
Gianni was restless in his presence. He kept looking across
the valley in a yearning sort of way, as if for freedom.
The priest gave him a kindlyo but constrained and perhaps wary
smile whenever he spoke. Gianni got up from his chair frequent-
ly and 1Yoked over the balcony, lit a cigarette, tapped his foot
on the ground. 'Gianni is seen at church very little,' the
priest said with a smile, pale and quiet; 'I don't think he's
been since a child---?' And he turned a questioning look at him.
Gianni smiled charmingly and said nothing. I broke in With,
'But he's religious! Gianni's religiousi8 'Oh, yes,' said the
priest doubtfully.
'He's good. His mother's a fine woman.
She's really religious. She's done everything for her children,'
and he gave Gianni another quick look.
He then returned to our first subject and said he was inter-
ested in what Ida said about our finding ourselves in an 'histor-
ical situation'. He gave us what seems to be the official Ital-
ian version of Henry Vlll: that this king had asked the pope
for a divorce from Catherine, but of course the pope hadn't been
able to grant it; and then through 'patriotism' Heiy had cut


himself off from Rome and declared himself spiritual head of
England.
lic)
Only ten or so people come to His Sunday-morning mass, he
told us with the trace of a determined look, as if he'd long ago
got used to the hurt this offered him: and he felt himself lucky
to have these ten, he added. Even fewer came to his other church
in the hills, where he holds mass two hours later.
Clearly, he can't understand it. He seems to try to, his
head a little on one side. The Christian story is so clear to
him: why should people want to offer it offence? It seems a
story of respectability for him---touched with simple grace and
goodness. Obey and offer respect to those above you. And all
round him there are people who refuse to do that.
He asked us if we'd met the family up the hill, the C ouple
we rarely see, with the daughter. Yes, we'd met them, but they
were always sunk in work, I said, having eight heatares of land to
look after. He paused, as he nearly always did after a statement,
and
as if to let it enter his head slowly and painfullyk then be noted
down. 'Ah, yes,' he said, they have a lot of work. Too much.'
Then he added, 'Now they're religious people. They come to church.
They're good. Very responsible." Yet to me they seem less good,
in their hearts, than other people here. I nodded non-commitally:
after all, how could I know? But my impression remains.
We must come to see him in the evening, he said, to sample
his wine and his fruit. And he would take us round some of the
little churches---one of them went back nine hundred years. He
cmucigix
had a fourteenth-century attar of wood in his own church, he said,
which we must see.
We felt settled in a strange way by his visit: as if he'd
brought us the first dream. After all, he was the first person


of leisure we'd spoken to in this countryside. That means
books, a little thinking in the afternoon..
Only the church
has a dream in Italy. It governs and administers the power to
dream. And so, at this time when the Church is cut off from
people, there is no dream: the land lies waiting and very still.
Only the tiny church, and the pastor's house hugging it like a
miniature villa, without that rather stern look of the farmhouse,
is a possible starting-place for idylls, fancy. So we felt
rested: it was like belonging for the first time. Even if he
comes to look on us as 'unreligious', we shall still belong,
in that intimate category, looked askance at with kindly eyes,
like Gianni.
Then after he'd got into his tiny car with the last goodbye
he pushed open the door again and called out to me, 'Here!', in
his slow way, as if waiting to be rebuffed; 'I've brought you
something to read.' And he gave me three magazines, two of
Which dealt with the past life of the new pope in a rather insip-
petikes
id way. Partly churohy partly state-politics, all mixed up
together in a dirty mess of propaganda that a duck W. ouldn't
swallow. I flicked through the stuff later, smiling and scowling.
These are the people who've wrecked the Italian countryside.
The landlords and the peasants are equally impoverished, while
the cities (notably, Rome) are rich: yet this is an agricultural
country. Are these, also, religious people? Well, they could
be, but in that case so could all the peasants who never go to
church and who W ould like to spit in their eyes. And did our
priest vote for them? Yet he knows the details of the disaster.
He's the son of a peasant himself.
cah
What can he offer Gianni? I mean, what could he offer
Gianm
Gianni that/ te wouldn't scoff at and disdain? Well, his own


frailty and goodness.
These are enough, perhaps. But apart
from that only old maid's tales: such as that if you spell God
with a small 'g' you are showing Him disrespect, or that if you
stand on your feet and say the angelus at twenty minutes past dusk
you are more religious than S ome one who doesn't.
It is because of Gianni's goodness, and Sergio's, and Luciano's,
and Gigi's, that every church in Italy hasn't been rased to the
ground. And it is due to the goodness the Church has given them.
The Church is at the climax of an internal reformation: its
mumbo-jumbo, its petty hierarchies, its dogged philistine ritual,
its club-morality, have to disappear to save the story of Christ
from being lost, that is, from becoming an item in the encyclopadia.
It isn't that people won't bedieve in God, they can't. The
sky is---well, mathematical.
That's simply how it is for us!
Another strike of the mezzadri. Gianni came in and told
us about a big meeting he'd been to in Siena, organised by the
communists. And he gave one of his speeches. He said that it
was right to work, and work hard, but to work hard when there
wasn't a crust of bread at home was wrong! (A bit out of date,
this, considering that people are better-off than they've ever
Was it right, he asked me (sipping a vin santo to prepare
his tummy for the gigantic meal he would send down an hour later at
home), was it right that the man who cultivated the land and did all the
work should give half his produce to someone who did nothing? Here I


hammprid;
I said that the mezzadro system he Worked under didn't seem so
bad, as his employers took none of the produce, and less than half
the proceeeds from the cattle; but he only smiled at me conniv-
had been
ingly and went on. The speaker at the meeting, he said, wES/
molto in gamba, very capable, and knew as much about the rural
situation as any peasant: he had told them all, with some humour,
about the tired and overworked OX that started its journey in the
Marche at a hundred and fifty lire a kilo and ended in Rome at one
thousand, five hundred lire a kilo and renamed 'veal'; 'Marvellous
the transmigrations that take place nowadays!' he had said. And
then there were the taxes and levies on the land that went into
the government coffers and never came out again: millions upon
millions of lire had been put into a 'fund' to provide the peasants
with pensions and medical benefits, and to modernise the land,
but at the end of this month the government would have to account
for this 'fund* and how it had been spent, and the government
couldn't! The 'fund' had been lost by a certain Secretary-
General---a nation's agricultural future had been 'lost'!
jhaln) Where they had been lost, those millions? into whose pockets had
they been lost? had they been lost into nice villas in the country,
with swimming pools and servants, into various 'land-modernisation
schemes' which were private in nature, and benefited only a handfull
of rich and unworthy people who should be dragged before the bar
of law and indited for the equivalent of treason?
No wonder, Gianni said, that 'we communists' had such success
at the last election, when things like that go on. 'And the
Church can't help us! They just follow on. Now they're reforming
themselves---because they've got to.'
A Wonderful humanity plays on Gianni's face sometimes, when
he gazes into the distance.
The light was almost finished as he


talked on the terrace, and the valley below lay still and
below
shadowy. Luciano who was passing on the road, called up to us,
and we stood talking to him. He'd been to a reunione in the
village, he said, connected with the strikes. He has been ill
recently with kidney-trouble and looks thinner, less like the
'brigand'. He spoke in a tired and disgruntled way.
The sudden access of gravity and seriousness, hearing
Beethoven for a moment, was due to the fact that any theme in
Germany, any line of thought or continuity, comes from one man
in his lonely efforts, so that he almost seems to talk to God.
There is no form outside him, only law. He has to make it all
himself.
We shudder at him like we do 1 Pronteaf an enormous chasm---
he is nearly nature itself. He's at the edge of madness, at all
times. He dare not lean back---into the vacuum. The German
is an inpiration that derives not from before the Englightenment
only, not from before the Renascence only, not from before the
Christian conversion only, not from before the Roman empire only,
but from the depths and barbarian nature of Europe herself.
He is like a terrible guarantor of our health, while the
Italian is the witness. At the slightest chance he becomes a
force; and is beyond our recall.
The ancient societies of England and France come from the
Jorat
predominance of the friars, the long schblastic tradition that
was fragmentary elsewhere: here was the seed of their aristoc-
racies.
In the churchyard of St. Bartholomew's, behind Smithfields
where heretics were burned, schoolboys used to go in for disput-


ation as a game; one would outdo the other and take his place
over the crowd.
Reading about grace in St. Augustine. He says it isn't a
reward. That is, you can't will yourself to the truth. You give
way to it. And, in fact, this is the basis of effective will.
Will isn't forcing and questing. But this is what it
became. And grace did become a reward in Christianity. You
said prayers for it, you made good resolutions to achieve it.
one.
It was an abuse of the original theology, but a logicall It was
forced on the Church by the people perhaps; they had no time for
subtleties. If you claim that the human creature is by nature
stained, he will want to struggle out of it, especially if you aap
it by telling him he has free will.
This quest plunged us into false time---marked out by past
failure and future hope (grace), so that we are stranded helplessly
between the two, ticking off the seconds as they pass. We've been
robbed of present time---of here and now---by religion, of all
things!
The corrupt man often seems nearer the heart of things than
the moral or reformed man. He has a better rhythm. His corrupt-
ion has something timeless and natural about it. We remember his
body, his plump, red cheeks perhaps, the way he puffs and blows
when he gets up from his desk, his quick glances.
Morality scathes and burns, in the midst of riches: not in
spite of riches but in their midst, because they are its main
physical aspect. The moral society has riches as its main spirit-
ual power: it tries to convince itself that power and riches are
ever the reward of goodness... It is the false spiritual power
that burns and tortures the young. Victorianism spared hardly
a croner of England: you can't go a mile in the country without
seeing its ravages---in people's faces, too: the legacy of a
new life that was going to clean everything up, with permane ent t


riches.
If you try to re-make life from top to bottom you must
expect a reward: and the reward can only be in life. Quickly,
the world has to be remodelled---take the stain away! Nothing
can remain uninvestigated.
Grace means the truth, or freedom from shame. Really, it is
a state of reminisenece. It can't bein time.
We have to search for it in depth, not backwards and f orwards
in time. It means a state here and now, like a source that can
be tapped under the earth. It isn't a new condition, or the crown
of effort, or the prize of old age: it can be plucked at any time,
by the simplest act, that of laying oneself bare.
But if we live in time---if we put all our hopes on time,
that is, on the gradual unfolding of a reward---we make grace a
hope: a reliance on the future. We continually postpone ourselves.
Our lives are continually lost, every second, on a moving belt of
time that never ceases.
Real spiritual power transcends time (that is, behaviour):
taugar
Buddha, for instance, stowed JICHME E
his pupils E te simply
holding
helt up a flower-- --that was his lecture for the day. But the
moment holding-up-a-flower became accepted behaviour, it would
be false power, that is, condemned to time. Buddha's power. was
that of timeless ness. He brought timelessness into the room.
At about ten the other night, just after we'd gone to bed,
I felt a tremor under the earth that lasted ten or twenty secondsP


at first, half-dozing, I had the illusion that we were still in
Rome and that this was the rumble of a lorry in the street below,
shaking our palazzo; then I realised we were in hushed country-
side.
The next day we heard that at dawn there had been an earthquake
in Yugoslavia killing, according to first reports, about five thous-
and people.
Later there were reports of earth-tremors along the Italian coast
close to France.
Sergio told us that Luciano and his brother, with their
families, are also leaving this valley. Their old padrone---
whom they call a crook, while Sergio calls him ta nice old stick'---
will be left with a large house and a podere of over ten hectares
with no one to work it. He asked Sergio despairingly today, 'What
can I do to keep them there? I haven't the money to employ workers
by the day. Where canf find another family? Why are they mov-
ing? I'll give them anything! But I can't give them my blood!'
And Sergio's answer was, with his broad optimistic smile: "Town's
the fashion now!'
We spent the next evening with Luciano and his brother but
they said nothing about it. We talked about the last war.
Suddenly Luciano burst out with, 'The trouble with Mussolini was
that there was only one of him! There ought to have been fifty
thousand Hussolinie:0reople need to be told, do this, or backs to the


wall! Omhen you'd see them fly!' And he flung his brother a
resentful look. His brother, who is tall and thin and said to
be 'nervous', replied in a mild way, 'Oh, you know, Mussolini
made a big mistake getting mixed up with a German madman, and trying
to create a world empire.' 'That's right,' his wife said, 'he
ought to have put Italy in order first.'
When they leave---and if no one takes their place---neerly
the whole valley between here and the village, apart from the
podere belonging to Altapasquale, will be abandoned soil, used
for sheep-grazing at best, if the shepherds don't all decide to
move as well, like Paolo. For miles around the vineyards have
begun to deteriorate. There are almost no young people working
on the land.
dae
Luciano looks more and more discontented. When we strolled
over there this evening at dusk we found him lying on a grass bank
by the house, silent, slumped there. 'Hullo,' he said softly.
'We've just eaten. I'm taking the cool air.'
I can't understand why they don't go to the padrone and make
a deal with him: the padrone would agree to almost anything.
Luciano would do it, I think, but his brother insists on moving
m tgetker.
to town. They're well-known for not getting o
Luciano's brother talks about industries as if they will
save everything: he asks, why can't factories be built all round
the village? why are there regulations limiting factories to the
outskirts, just to preserve the villages panorama? Because of
tourism, we say: because factories can be put anywhere; and
because they're ugly, wh ich the villege-panorama isn't. 'But,'
he goes on, 'I'd like to know something, and I've heard the point
discussed in the village, in piazza, how is it that people can


plant as many trees as they like? Pines, for instance. A
whole forest of pines has been planted just outside the village
in recent years, and this has begun to obscure the panorama.
Why is that allowed and factories not?' Pines and splendid
panoranas aren't a contradiction, we say, but factories and
panoramas are; pines can by cut down, and they don't pollute
the air. 'And then,' I add hotly, 'We've destroyed enough al-
ready: Where I was born there wasn't a tree in sight, and the
sky was always dark with smoke, and people were supposed to live
like machines!'
But this is lost on them. They simply gaze
Cer
at me. Industries mean il progresso: they are inétrohangeable
words for them. Unlike the English labouring classes, who fought
industry step by step and smashed the machines, the Italians await
it with excitement. Only certain people in the middle class see
the danger-signal.
Sergio asked us to come and see his new flat again, this t: ime
are
in honour of Caterina's first visit. Now the walls RXd finished
and the doors are screwed on.
When you ask Caterina what she feels about moving she never
replies, only shrugs and makes a slight puzzled smile. We took
along a bottle of spumante as a surprise for them, and when they
were looking through the rooms I opened it with an enormous pop
which brought them hurrying into the kitchen. It was sticky
and undrinkable muck, aerated sugar-water, an Italian 'champagne'
that was never near a vineyard in its life. The explosion was
so loud that nothing natural could have produced it. I suppose
what we pay for goes into the nation-wide publicity to make it
the poor man's idea of the right drink to celebrate with. of
ourse, it no more warmed our hearts than a laboratory-experiment.


Caterina was doubtful all the time, peering about the place
at the bright new taps and shining tiles and marble floors and
light plastic shutters; and when Sergio asked her at least to say
a Word---in his erect, laughing way, his head thrown back stiffly,
reminding one of warriors and emperors in ancient times---she
simply averted her head, still with a half-puzzled smile. And
she wanted to inspect the other three flats in the place, to see
if they were better: she came to the conclusion that they were,
though Sergio's rooms have the best view and the best air, and are
on the ground floor. Just before we left she found a tiny defect
in the bathroom, and Sergio gave her an admiring look, saying he'd
passed it over a hundred timeso"
From one of the windows overlookig the valley he pointed out
Altapasquale far in the distance, shining red. And near by he
pointed out a small, fairly modern house: 'That belongs to a pilot,'
he said.
'He's leaving the house and he's going to let all the
land---' His hand swept across half the valley--- 'go to waste.t
He doesn't care!'
Caterina seemed faintly distracted and sad on the way back.
The bathroom, she complained, was 'sO small' (never having had a
bathroom in her life before, even a bath). She will hardly use
it: rarely take a bath. I think she means that as figura---as
a toy to display---it seems yo small.
What will she do without her chickens? After we dropped her
at home we heard her calling them lovingly, for half-an-hour or
more, as if to celebrate her return. She has over a hundred
chickens there. She cuts grass in the fields opposite our
forker tablic,
house,/and walks by with a load on her shoulders every day. She
was born and brought up in the hills behind the woods, at an isolated
farmhouse, and she seems to share its remoteness. Perhaps she


never discouraged Sergio from buying the new place because she had
notidea of any life but the one she lives: now she sees before her
a different world. Sergio and Renato are the ones with the town-
dream. But it means nothing for her to bring in water on her
shoulders---two cans hanging from a staff, or to build a fire of
faggots for cooking. The town-flats save work: but in truth
they're only a dream. And she hasn't dreamed it---only Sergio
and his son have.
We promised our priest that we would go to his Sunday
morning mass and did, with Gianni. The church is tiny, no bigger
than a barn, overlooking the hills that go towards the sea.
The fifteenth-century crucifix he'd told us about hung over the
altar, blakk and smooth like ebony. There were six people in
the CC ongregation, all Women or girls, and nine wi th us; and there
were two boy-servers, sacristani, with white smocks shoved untidily
over their ordinary clothes.
Our priest looked even more like a monk than before. He
spoke softly and remotely, as he does in conversationa his face
pale and a little distraught. One of the boy-servers has the
job of reading from a scrappy pamphlet in his hand, describing in
Italian every step in the mass: he says, The priest now says a
prayer of gratitude... To your knees... We will now say
together... Stand up. The pater noster, on your knees...
Stand up. The priest now offers the bread and wine, which turns
to the flesh of Christ. On your knees.' He read it in a halting
way, like an illegible shopping list, and every time he made a
mistake he looked up and turned a most delightful broad smile
towards one of the girls in the congregation, as if he'd done it
for her, to please. Sometimes there was a long pause While the


priest, half bowed at the altar, turned and whispered to him
what he should read next, and there followed long seconds of
page-turning and fi inger-licking and shrugging and sighing;
then, in the shopping-list voice, 'Let us pray...' For an hour
or more we were bobbing up and down like corks.
There was no religion, except once when the priest prayed
silently. Perhaps this is because he's really a monk in feel-
ing. He hasn't the easy power of communication that a priest
needs. I saw for the first time that a priest mustn't be too
meditative. I remember an old English priest, at a Christmass
mass in a tiny barn of a church in the Cotswolds, opening his
sermon with, 'I've given my leg a nasty bang again. I went right
down the stairs this time, and stopped When I got to the bottom.
Every time I move a pain shoots up my side,' and there was a murmur
of sympathy from the congregation; he had a plump, red face and fine
eyes; we were clustered together in that dark barn, cold from the
snow outside. He had the glow of religion, wh ich drew us all
together.
Afterwards we walked round the empty church and our priest
showed us the vestry. He told us that the crucifix over the
altar had come tothe village in the last century---the local
priest had boughty off one of the Napoleonic troops Who were pass-
ing through. No one knew where it had been st olen from originally.
In the vestry we found another crucifix which he said was made
of plaster and inartistic'. But if anything it was nicer tham
the other one, and we found it was made of wood; only a thint
layer of plaster had been laid on it, to take the colours.
He showed us his vestments, which were surprisingly splendid---
a whole wardrobe of them; and there were magnificent brass
candelabra. He gave me more magazines, with their veneer of


fake concern: in one of them, an attack on André Gide as
'shamelesst; a scurrilous paragraph on a man 'who calls himself
a. communist, yet has a chauffeur'; andia diagnosis of communism
in Italy' which mekes no mention of the agrarian problem or the
fund which is supposed to have been 'lost'.
He showed XE an archway of red bricks outside, in the wall
of his house: the relic of a mediaeval hotel, he said, from the
twelfth or thirteenth centurfes, when the little track we were
standing on, now (onlyusealoy oxen, was the road to Rome; probably,
at that time, it went from monastery to monastery across the
hills. The t: iny village lay silent all round us. We paid a
visit to his house and met his sister.
There was a pleasant cool
hall and a bare room with a television-set at one end; no books
or easy chairs, no sign of thinking, which is the best decoration
a house can get; the kitchen, as always, was the centre of life,
with an old chimney in which you could sit---"There,' the priest
said, pointing to the inglenook with the slightest ripple of
enthusiasm across his face, 'is where I like to be best of all,
in the winter.' And his sister affectionately dusted some chalk
off his sleeve. We had the feeling that his mind lurks somewhere
behind in the shadows, undeveloped; not one idea seems to have
gone right through his life, changing him; not a habit has been
dislodged or challenged; he seems an easier dupe of publicity
than the peasants round him. This is what they like about him---
his 'innocencet: and it means they can discount him, and need
not fear him.
He's numb ed: something has been erased from his account of
life.
For the first time in many days it hasn't clouded over in the


afternoon or rumbled with thunder in the distance. The
heat-mist (which began to spread a harmful fungus among the
grapes) has disappeared and the day is clear and still, with
the first faint suggestion of autumn; the sunlight glitters like
water. We can see right across the valley as far as the hills
above Siena.
The OX with tuberculosis is still here and refuses to put
on weight, in spite of bran and wholewheat and linseed added to
T her grass diet. She has sueH a sensitive, wide-eyed air. She
dislikes being alone and is against being moved around, and all
Gigi's efforts to sell her have failed. It's more economic to
try to mend her: so she stays. The bther oxen are bought and
sold, but she stays. She eats little when she's alone in the
stall, but the moment another OX returns she eats heartily again.
I think she knows our sounds, too---the dog, the car, the sound
of the cans when I bring water from the well. She wants a real
home. Now she has two other oxen with her: they do the work
and she's a guest. This morning I went in and sp oke to her, and
she looked round in her Wondering, slightly fretful way, the whites
of her eyed showing. And she made me a sort of grunt, after I'd
paid her a special compliment. Two nights ago we were away, and
apparently she didn't eat in that time: but half-an-hour after we
were back, with our familiar sounds, she pu t back several loads
of forage. When I told Gigi yesterday that the classical treat-
ment for tuberculosis was plenty of open air, and that it was ridi-
while
was
culous to expect the creature to mend i she Vere kept in darkness
night and day, in the stifling stall, he shook his head quietly
and said, 'Well, you see, it isn't our habit to keep them out of
did Reep
doors.' Partly this means he would feel ridiculous if helzops


1b7
partly
her outside;
but
B he doesn't want to treat
her as a living creature at all. It seems to me that the peasants
hide from considering their animals as 1l creatures, because then
tey
there is the obligation of considering what kindness ett owe them.
Gianni sat in the back of the car and gave me another speech---
on whoes this time. He said he hadn't touched one since his army
days. There were three reasons against having a whore: first,
they cost money; secondly, you had to wear a contraceptive;
and third, they didn't give a damn for you.
Later on he strolled up the hill with us, and the three of
us sat at the side of the rocky path, in the stillness of the
afternoon. Round us there were sea-shells of every size, some
of them barely fossilised, so that you could break them in your
hand, just as if the sea had been there the day before. Yet the
sea is over eighty kilometres away. At Gianni's house the earth
is a flaming red, so remarkable at first sight that you have to
gasp. He tells us that this was due to the pearth being buened
by lava in the prehistoric eruptions. We've seen the same flaming
earth near Siena, but in the plains, so that the lava must have
flowed there.
Our rocky path could have been at the edge of the
sea at one time, raised by a volcanic eruption; some of the sea-
shells are buried deep in laval stone. We found a sn1, complete-
ly fossilised.
We talked about these things until we were giddy---the ice-
age, the vast animals that stalked about, the volcanic eruptions,
the earthquakes that threw up whole mountain ranges. It was
warm and sunny, and we gazed drowsily across the valley. Gianni
said he'd seen lots of films on the subject. He jumped to his
feet and showed us how a dinosaur looked as it disappeared slowly


into a crack in the earth. 'Pauroso!' he cried.
'Fearful!'
His eyes seem blue when he talks like this, though they aren't:
they seem to have the sea in them. He looks Etruscan, as I
imagine the Etruscans. And, strangest of all, he has their slight
his
smile on his face, naturally, in repose. If you sculptured F head
it would have the same smile as the Etruscan head---as the
le Apollo of Veiio for-IEtEnCE,
When you think of those dark, cold ages before the human
creature, you see we're one people: the Etruscans were only yes-
terday.
Gigi told me that he'd been called to a kind of conference
by the padrona: she said she couldn't continue the farm as it
is now, with him taking two thousand lire a day while producing
nothing like that in yield. He on his side said that not only
was he unable to manage all the Work alone, but he must have other
hands, particularly in the wheat-harvest and the vendemmia.
And she was still angry at having a sick OX. He must sell it,
she says, sell it quickly, quickly. But instead he sells one
of the others, because it is pregnant, and has bought another two
for little more than the same price.
The tiny podere here yields a modest amount of wine, oil,
wheat, fruit and vegetables every year, but not enough to
transporting,to the market (though of course the Wine and grain
are sold), nor enough to pay the taxes on it; certainly not en ough
to allow for improvements. Like most Italian owners, she is
reluctant to spend on improvements in any case. The sale of
the oxen probably covers Gigi's wages---just. She says she will
leave the land to go to ruin like everyone else. Gigi asks her
T in that case he might rent the land for his own use on an annual


basis? But she won't hear of it, as it would only bringbher an
annual forty or fifty thousand lire. But he may bring her round.
She will be forced to it, perhaps. All the abandoned land is
being let in this way, gradually, to individual peasants: the
peasants will return as owners, and So perhaps the land will re-
adjust itself.
Both owners and peasants seem to derive a strange malicious
pleasure from abandoning the land---perhaps as a kind of ancient
revenge on each other, though it ruins them both.
They seem frightened to think, either side. Nothing could
be sillier than having a podere which is hardly more than a large
field devoted to a dozen different crops, fruits and vegetables,
yet dependent on one man alone, without machinery; and, to cap
this, two or three oxen which need a mountain of forage twice a
day and leave the stall for perhaps half a dozen times in a month
for a few minutes. If the whole podere were turned over to wine,
say, it would be worked by one man, and would yield far more, even
at the present low prices that genuine wine (as opposed to chemical
wine) is fetching.
Of course, the multi-crop podere is designed to supply a
family, since ancient times; and perhaps it will return to this
after all, as the peasants become owners or leaseholders. Machines
and one-crop farming go hand in hand, the one making the other
economical; but machines are useless on the small, hilly, crowded
podere, besides being a disproportionate expense. So perhaps the
two systems will go on side by side, the one for local supplies,
the other for national.
All this is farmer's thinking: but the fattori here are living
in town on their perc entages and fees, and not thinking atvall.
We asked Sergio why Paolo the shepherd didn't buy a decent


piece of land at the present throw-away prices and work it all
himself, instead of getting a shop in competition with a dozen
other better-experienc ed men, and he said, 'Because the land is
dirty work.'
Apparently, Luciano and his brother did go to their padrone
with a proposition.
This proposition, naturally, was that he
should give them a higher percentage. But he threw up his hands
and said that even at present he could barely pay his taxes or
buy the fertilisers, the sprays, the copper-sulphate, keep the
machinery in repair, mend their roofs; at a higher percentage
he would have to sell everything up at once! But he agreed to
buy them a tractor, which will halve their work in the summer and
spare the overworked ozen: apparently, if you lay down thiérty
percent of the price of any improvement on the land, the government
will loan you the rest.
A speaker in town said that our civilisation now depends on
having a cohesive agriculture, that is, a real country-life agai in.
The Anglo-Saxons turned the countryside into a factory: the result is
disgease, degeneration of animal vigour and stock, the poisoning of
the earth and, above all, the breeding of vast city-populations


detached from the realities of life. The answers have to be
different from the Anglo-Saxon ones: based on what men need,
mot on Puritan calculations of 'economy'.
The fattore came yesterday on behalf of the owner and
peeped into the downstairs rooms. The owner, he said, is
negopiating with a peasant-ramily to take occupation in January,
and to rent both the land and half the house. Gigi will rent
part of the land after all, and work in with them.
We're doubtful if it will work out, and the fattore seems
doubtful, too. It may be a sort of political move to get us
to take the whole house over, but I don't think so.
The wheat is all being brought in from the fields in sheafs
and laid down where there is a flat, sandy space outside, to form
a massa, a gfeat round stack with the wheat-ears pointed inwards.
Then, in a week or ten days, the threshing machine will come round
to the farms one by one and the grain will be beaten from the straw,
which will be pounded into blocks and stacked under the cypress
tree.
The fields are cleared in rotation, everyone helping the
other in neighbourly groups.
They start soon after dawn and go
on until past the light. The equivalent of our Harvest Home
comes when the machine is actually here: a long table is put in
the barn (here it will go into Gigi's kitchen) and twelve or fifteen
exhausted people will sit down to eat, with plenty of wine.
I don't think it will be a real celebration, though.


What a difference from the German farms. The marvel
of Germany is her immensity, as if the gods still walk in her
mountains---as if they might suddenly step down. It lies in
the farms with their ancient spreading trees and long-roofed
wooden houses and towering stacks and horses with massive, polished
flanks: a stupendous robust vigour that takes your breath away.
The Germans are supernatural, too---wood-gnomes, elfs, devilsg
nymphs, sirens, magicians. Politically we always let them build
up their stupendous power again because we're intoxicated.
Do I dream the Etruscans? But if they never existed they
would be the same: in their name we're haunted by something;
they're inside us. But we can't hope to clarify it, which means
in some way to fix it.
Time develops---that must be its illusion for us: that
we're moving all the time towards death. But life doesn't
develop. Epochs don't develop from one to the other. All
illusion. They simply have different lives. We yearn for
what we have lost from a previous epoch, and call progress what
we think we've gained. But there is only a turning and arguing
of life, towards no end in time. We have an end, but it serves
us now---in depth, so to speak; we keep it before us but only


time gives us the illusion that we shall attain it; the moment
we have it we have moved somewhere else.
We live at the edge of timelessness and seem to fall it into
it now and then, perhaps to prepare BXE change in ourselves, before
our reappearance in time. But these changes don't accumulate
towards one definite end: that definite end, if it exists at all,
is ourselves; we change in order to attain the dream of self
which we hold before ourselves all the time; but the moment of
attainment can never come, otherwise change Would cease and we
would be fixed and limited; the end we go towards isn't in
time; it doesn't await us at the end of the illusory corridor of
time.
We need time to measure our little universe by. But in
placid,
the outer space lies timelessness, still and yiaiex like Buddha
with his flower.
This is why people---not only Christians---pointed to the
sky for God. They were right.
For us to believe in God (the presence in those placid
spaces) he has to be a possibility in ourselves. There must be
a trace of timelessness in ourselves. We used to measure our
lives by the light, the falling of one day into the next, one
teal
seas on into the next: that was) time. But now we have the
ticking clock, measuring the tension into Which we have fallen,
in a sefies of moments that pass into the next as soon as they
occur, in an endless dying motion; we brought the clock into
hi b.
being, for our particulat psychology. At best we fall into
timelessness when we sleep, for an hour or two: the luxury
of knowing it alert and awake is denied, I believe, to millions
of us. I know it has been denied me; glimpses of it were


vouchsafed to me
God can't be planted in us. He can't be pointedout.
The weakness of St. Thomas Aquinas's argument is that he puts the
causes within our grasp: he describes first causes. But causes
are always second. That is, they're always in time. To be causes
at all they must be: they produce an effect, S omething we understand.
Our little hands and eyes are geard to a tiny portion of the universe,
enough to get along with only.
All we can do is lay ourselves open to the timeless, which we
know is there. First we have to destroy evidence of time as we know
it. The ticking clock isn't real.
Do the woods show evidence og time? They show time of day,
time of season.
I feel like a man picking his way through ruins.
I remember prayers in childhood, pressed against my mother's
st omach, my eyes closed: a prayer for the safety of our relatives
and for 'soldiers and sailors, tinkers and tailors, gran*mas and
gran'dads...' What an ancient prayer that mus t be. It seemed
to me that my mother found God by describing him to me in those
moments: in closing her eyes too she glimpsed the timeless.
But it wasn't a real possibility for her: it wasn't the truth
of the bustling streets outside, the clang of the tram, the exciting
glow of shoplights on Saturday nights; the two had nothing to do
with each other.
We're lost without the mediation of Christ. I mean, a
glimpse of the timeless isn't enough; entside, in the bus tling
streets, you have no evidence of it. There is nothing to cling
to. We can only cling to what we can understand. We can't


understand the timeless: we need a story in time. And Christ
is the only one to have given it to us.
He said we achieved God through intimacy. It had hever been
heard of before. For mostof the Jews of his time God, was attained
socially--- va i bis through knowledge, behavtour, intelligence or
position. The Law dominated everything, comprising in itself both
h. h. God and society. Even the disciples didn't know what he meant
when he said that whores, fools and criminals were creatures of
God. Moses had said long before, 'Pray in secret': but he had
addressed a holy people, whereas Christ addressed all of us--
fools, criminals, slaves. He inherited the Jewish intimacy from
Moses, and gave it to the rest of us. His story is like a mirror
of the timeless, if we could but look at it behind the clatter of
time which the Church has set up.
If we can forget the Church we have a last chance. perhaps
of religion... But they have stained all these names for us---
'Christ', reternity', 'God'---with thetr time.
Knowledge neve er develops. Each epoch only synthesises
what it needs to use. All progress is a rake's progress: you
only hear of it where money is being made.
There is no hope. Better not wait for it any more. God,
like civilisation, isn't in the future. It is now, if at any
hopiing
time. Looking for him in the past, telping to achieve him in
the future, is only our way of denying him. We are like people
who look all over the house for what we can only know if we close
our eyes. He is here and now, only.
To recapitulate: if you put him in the past or future you
make your present barren, and drive him away as fast as you look
for him. He is the present, or the presence.


Looking for him is therefore a state of the most chronic
doubt, which can never cure itself.
I mean by God 'the silent guide'. We would rarely be aware
of this si ilent guide without Christ.
The sudden idea that there is no silent guide gives me a
sickening sensation: that we are dogs lost in a storm, thrown on
a rubbish heap when we die.
Now, a few seconds later, nothing could seem to me sillier
than the last sentence. It shows the danger of 'thinking', as
that goes in the post-Aquinas world.
We are in the hands of a guide so strong that we give up
everything to him---we dispose our food to his engineering, we
have no part in the beating of our hearts, our livers eliminate
our poisons without our permission, we yield ourselves to his
mercy in childbirth and he guides the blind child to the mother's
breast; and if we're not fools we never take a step in life wihout
be ing given a sign.
And I say there is no guide!
The fierce, growled G-a-h-h-h-h! from a shepherd outside as
he passes with his flock. A cry that goes right through your
stomach: no 'thinking' there.
It turns out that the 'peasant and family' negotiating to
come to this house is Luciano. He was helping with the whaat-
stack outside this morning and told us.
The priest stopped me in the village this morning and gave me
more literature, with a bag of fruit from his own trees, plums
and pears. His goodness makes him press everything on me, but


at the same time he gives the magazine a wistful look, like a
child at a sweetshop, not having read them himself yet; and I
accordingly tell him to keep some. He had his book of meditations
with him and said he'd found a passagedealing with the 'schism*
in England, when Henry Vlll sacked the monasteries. He stood
fingering through the book, looking for it. But he couldn't find
it and said he would show it to me when we came to watch his
television one evening. Tomorrow is the feast-day of the village
saint, with a sung mass and lots of flowers everywhere, and he
recommends us to go. There will be an orchestra in the cathedral.
I'm sure he feels we're ripe for Rome: that is, we're civic people
in his eyes. He thinks us good. But he wouldn't think us good
if we weren't civic.
Gianni sat on our terrace last night in the darkness while
we cooked a chicken for him. He and Lorenzo, with Renato and
three others, are going to the sea tomorrow (the saint's feast-
day) and have hired a car and driver. He and Lorenzo fuss like
old women: should they take a small suitcase, how are they going
to get all the 'luggaget into the car, what about plates and knives
and forks, will they need salt, should they take wine? It makes
it exciting, like a trip in childhood; their talk makes the kit-
chen glow fabulously. They are to leave at half-past six in the
morning. The chicken is roasted in silver paper---we tell them
this is a good suaculent way. Ours is the only gas-oven this
side of the valley. Otherwise it would have meant building a wood-
fire over at Altopasquale, where they are all still busy stacking
the wheat.
Gianni gave us a speech about women: Tuscan women were much
reasiert than those in the south. You could get friendly with


a Tuscan woman: if she liked you she made it easy for you;
you might be together for three months or so, and part without
once 'going to her house', that is, getting engaged to her.
In that time she might let you be intimate with her. But if
she did you warned all your friends not to think of her as a
possible wife: you said, 'I've been with her. And for her to
go with me she must have been with plenty of other men, too.'
You will tell your friends about her in any case, because whenever
you have sex you boast about it afterwards, you expose the W oman
involved. More, if the woman has permitted intimacy this rules
out even marriage between you and her: intimacy before betrothal
is the death of a woman's reputation.
I listen wi th mild and even cheerful disgust. Pagan talk---
no real sex in it. Even our sex is a Christian act, it seems,
spark
even our illicitf sex. It is freedom, seeing the aprk in someone
else. The Italian has been robbed of the secret of sex, though
not of passion. Even the Church was powerless to rob him of that,
At half-past six this morning they still hadn't gone. I
strolled up the rocky path and there were festive sounds from
below: Gianni calling, Renato asking something urgent. At
last the car-doors slammed and there was a great collective shout---
the day seemed all space and su nlight, with that special gleaming
magic of a voyage---and they drove off. Ciao!


The first touch of autumn, in the midst of the heat:
thoughts of music, chilly courtyards with the sound of traffic
outside, snow in Salzburg, glowing lights in the windows of the
Mirabela palace. Why do I think of Salzburg so much? Perhaps
as a town that escaped the reformation and the counter-reformation,
and evfolved naturally.
A letter from New England---we must come, settle down for
a time. I would know where everything was, from all the loving
descriptions: the piano in the parlour, the television in an
upstairs room so that you can watch it lying in bed. I know
the garden, the black tulips, the house as ricketty as a shell
in the wind. Sometimes I sit and think about America, wonder
wh at 0 it would be like, as if going there would be redundant and
unnecessary. 'New? England. How do you make a new England?
a new dream? How do you make new what was never tangible and
never fixed, what was a light in men's eyes? The Puritans had
such a simple belief---that they could make new lives by moving
thyee
tRB thousand miles! They hoped to leave original sin behind!
The Atlantic seems barren to me: a silent stretch of water
between two factories, the no-man's-land of a Utopia. Compare
the Pacific---a sea of islands, tropical mists, sunsets, becalmed
waters. Yet there are islands in the Atlantic, no less.
The Atlantic held that civilisation could be pounded out


of iron. The English gave up everything to America after the
last war, includi ing their own dreams, because they had swallowed
(perhaps invented) the nineteenth-century idea that civilisation
is power.
Civilisation is the outer form of our intimacy, which we
never really attain: the moment we do, it becomes formula (that
is, form turned into power). In what we call a
civilisation there was always a struggle for form, which we take
afterwards for form itself, though it was never achieved; people
always fell short of it, made poor shots at it, excelled at it.
The mark of civilisation is that people are creating it all the
time, from their intimate selves. But in the moral society they
cease to do this: there is really no discussion, only the victory
or defeat of moral imperatives, and vehement and brave denunciations
of power or the retaliations of power. The formulae are so clear
and predominant, in the moral society, that they make amy effort
at intimate form impossible or at best pathetic. I believe this
is where we are today.
Thomas. More's Utopia described not an ideal society but
the furniture no society could do without. But the attempt
to lay out the requirements of civilisation only achieves the
moral society, not civilisation at all. It creates a formula
but not a form, since form springs from the intimate collaborations
of the moment, not from thought. Our aristocracies were recogn-
ised and loved because they showed this form in the way they
walked and what they wore and how they smiled and lifted their
heads, that is, in their intimacy. Their actual power could have
been blown away in a moment at any time in the last five hundred
years by a decision of the people. Sometimes that happened.
They no longer beguiled and fascinated people. But the effect


of an aristocracy in its prime is to create worship. Power
follows on.
We take ancient Greece as meaning a complete civilisation,
the basis of our logic and art, but it was a handfuli of great
men addressing barbarians.
A quintet came from Siena and gave us a concert in the
courtyard of the museum, by the stone stairs that Dante often
climbed. Behind the quintet, under bright lights, there was a
mural that reminded me of the Bartolo di Fredi we'd seen: a
Madonna with the same helf-closed, gentle eyes. They played
Shostakovitch, which we thought would be a bit of Russian factory-
music but wasn't at all: it made a kind of dumb appeal; it
had a certain hurt misery. Like the bear I saw being teased
by Kurdish tribesmen once: whimpering, with the same hunted
appeal.


More thunderstorms, with heavy rain: but at dawn now.
The other night we watched a cloud hanging over the Sienese
hills, under the full moon, with lightning flashing inside it
like a storm-scene in a play. The valley with its endless
groves, the olive trees and single vines like shadows, look
haunted and in a peculiar way ravished. We could even see the
village in the lightning, perched on its hill like a piece of
carved rock, gaunt and unbending.
In the dead of the night the valley is solstill that it
seems the most unbelievable madness to suppose we could master
it for a moment.
Yesterday our priest took us to the tiny hill-village of
Colciano, where there are only two families left, and a shepherd.
It was stormy and the wind swept across the muddy path under
the church. The road to the village rises steeply between
wheatfields and cypresses. The biggest house there lies aband-
oned, its windows shuttered and barred; not long ago there were
fifteen people in it. We could see right across the valley
south of Siena, with small hill-towns here and there; Don Amigo
pointed out the towering jagged ruin that sticks out of the earth
near the road to Volterra, and told us that in the middle ages
it had been a look-out post commanding the whole valley, when


there were endless wars between Volterra and San Gimignano.
We were to meet the priest of Colciano and he came out,
calm and smiling, as soon as he heard the car. He looked like
a peasant, but one advanced in ownership: shrewd, thoughtful,
erect, determined, with no spare flesh on his cheeks, and nothing
worn away by care, either. Don Amigo looks frail and unheal thy
beside him, a bag of bone and sinew. The church-house was the
only one in good repair, and we peeped into a pleasant-looking
study---actually his 'office'---as we passed. First we had to
see the church, bare aj part from a copy of an altar from Siena,
with a Madonna and child between St. Michael killing the dragon
on one side and St. Peter on the other. The walls were painted
(cement underneath) in imitation of the black and white stones
of the Florentine and Sienese cathedrals.
The priest C omplained
in a voice hardly more than a whisper that the rain came in from
the bell-tower, and showed us the streams of damp down the wall.
The Wind was so strong, he said, that there was no way of stopping
the rain penetrating: there had never been such weather before,
and he believed that the tower had never been put to such a test.
But he didn't seem much interested in the church, and waited
outside for us while we looked round. He was aching to talk
politics, and the moment we were all in the open air again he
pointed to the abandoned house near by and said, still in his
whisper, 'There were four families there not ab ove two years ago!'
He added more loudly, 'They're all going awaym all the peasants.
This will be a dead village soon. And why? Economic? No!'
His face became sharp and fierce. 'Psychological! It's all
psychological! They want the town, they wam t the industries---
they think they do, at least!'
Our priest nodded palely, seeming
to only half-listen. 'Soon there'll be a crisis!' the other man


said. 'And God only knows if we'll pass it safely! Not in
our country only, I believe---but everywhere!" Take meat, he
went on: the production is going down swiftly, the stalls are
lying empty; with the land not being worked to full capacity
there isn't the forage to feed the animals, even if there is the
labour to look after them. So the butcher's shops are open only
four days a week now in some places: soon it might be only two
days, then one, then---! But there could be such plenty as to
make one go green in the face just thinking about it! If, for
instance, the valley below produced a hundred thousand quintalti
of wine instead of a thousand or ten thousand, the wine could be
sold more cheaply, in bulk, perhaps even for half the price it
was sold at now; the work would be inc omparably less, and so Would
the overheads; the dozen separate poderi that this land at present
comprised were a dozen luzuries weccould ill afford. And with
low prices we could make the countryside habitable again. He was
about to demonstrate how this W ould be when Don Amigo replied in
asoft voice that, yes, people were drifting into the towns now
because they found life more tamusing' there, and---. But the
other priest pounced on him with his sharp look, touched with the
slightest of grom smiles, 'No, no! You haven't understood!
Let me explain. There is no cinema up here. Agreed?' Yes,
our priest agreed obediently.
'Well, then, we put a cinema
here! But at fifty lire a seat instead of one or two hundred.
The result is that not only do people in this village come to
the cinema but those from the town are attracted as well,
because it's half price, for the same film, and perhaps in a
better auditorium!' Our priest nodded: yes, he understood the
analogy. 'Now, then,' the other man went on, 'put your fields


under a prgramme and you cut your prices automatically: The
demand is there---the supply's only a matter of intelligenoe!"
To which Don Amigo nodded palely and said, shivering in the bitter
July wind, 'Let's go inside, shall we?' And the other man led
the way, swift and erect, his head forward, still buried in his
theme. The room he led us to was cool and silent, with lace
curtains over the windows and a heavy velveteen cloth on the
table; there was a large straight-backed armchair covered with
bright cushions at the head of the table, 'for the bishop if he
ever came'. And he offered this to my wife with a gracious
gesture.
As soon as we were seated he began again, 'Everything
comes from the earth---there's nothing you can mention that
doesn't involve the earth at some stage in its production---s0
if you abandon the earth you abândon your life!' His eyes
glanced about the room, sometimes blindly and sometimes piercéngly.
Outside, the wind howled as, might on a winter's night. And our
priest sat meekly by the table, rather rigid, gazing across at
his friend---whose S oul he fears for, perhaps. And then the
other man launched into the famous affair of the 'lost' agricultural
funds: five hundred miliard lire (about three hundred million
pounds) collected in taxes from the countryside cannot be traced!
'Perhaps a fifth part might be recovered, but the rest has dis-
appeared---some say into the secretary-general's pocket, some
say into various government departments which happened to be in
debt, some say into new industrial schemes from which certain
ministers stand to profit!' Don Amigo deprecated this, raising
his fragile, bony hand for a moment: 'Is that quite certain?'
he said. 'Yes!' the other priest shouted fiercely, at once,
his voice ringing across the room in a strange passionate scream,


quite different from his whisper at the beginning. 'It is!
Quite certain!
The department can't account for five hundred
miliard lire! And they call it a government! Robbers!
Ladri! Ladri!' And he pounded the table. 'They should be
brought to law!' he went on. 'There should be the severest
penalty for stealing from government funds---which means stealing
from the people!' Our priest's lips quivered a little at this:
'Oh, dear,' he murmured, 'mistakes are bound to happen. Of course,
there are scandals. They happen in every country.'
'But five
hundred miliard? A mistake? A mighty mis take that was!
You'll be telling me it was lost next. The man had the cheque
on his desk and it was lost under the blotting paper. It was
no mistake! It was a design! It was a deliberate criminal's
design---to steal from the people. You're simple, Don Amigo!
Tu sei troppo semplicet'
Our priest put his hand up again,
shrugging slightly, but be made no reply. 'Mistakes aren't
bound to happen!' the other man went on. 'But they will happen
if they're not punished! The maximum penalty, that's what it
needs!' 'I suppose, ? our priest answered to this, his lips still
quivering slightly, 'people should be killed, like they are in
Russia. We don't want that!' 'But it isn't only in Russia
that people are punished for that sort of crime! It's England,
France, everywhere in the civilised World---the maximum penalty
for stealing from the people!! Don Amigo turned to us with a
little smile---'My friend has rather strong opinions.' And he
added, 'He works on the land himself.' Apparently, the other
priest has a large podere, of sixty or seventy hectares, and he
has followed his own doctrine thoroughly by putting the land
under a programme. The result is, according to bocal peasants,
that he's making a lot of money.


I told him about our own podere, that it would soon be
abandoned like all the others; or with luck it might be rented
for a paltry sum every year. Wouldn't it be best to turn it
over to one crop, I asked---say, wine? And his reply was, with
a mysterious and rather excited smile, that it was all a question
of money, and the people who owmed land invariably had no money
or else were. unwilling to put it back into the land. You needed
money to change the crop in that way, he said, because you needed
time. If you wanted to turn it over to oil, for instance, you
had to wait twenty years for a good yield of olives. And Wine
would take at least five years. The reason why all these poderi
have a bit of everything, he said, is because they were designed
to provide all the basic needs of both the peasant and the owner:
laks) in fact, he added, although the mezzadria system is psychologically
unpopular at the moment (because the peasant has the impression
that he gives half his produce to an idler), it is the best agric-.
fair
ultural system ever devised, for fairness and efficiency. The
actual dividend reaped from this system by a good landowner is
about six or seven percent of the produce, after taxes, equipment,
new plants, repairs have been paid for: about the same percentage
as business men get on their capital. He himself, he went on,
paid out eighteen thousand lire a day in wages, to eight or nine
workers: he had no mezzadri. With large poderi, producing massive
supplies, the mezzadria system wasn't possible, he said. But
the country might return to it. After all, people had left the
land in great numbers twice before in Italian history---once in
Roman times and once in the middle ages, and both times they had
come back. What he couldn't underst tand was that young pe ople
should actually want to give up the marvel of a healthy body!
'How marvellous,' 1 he said, his rather narrow eyes shining, 'to


be out there under the sun, With things growing all round
you! What could be better than that?' He quoted two brothers
he knew---one worked in the valley below, and the other in a
factory in the nearby town: and when you compared their faces,
he said, it was like C omparing a piece of dried chalk with a plump,
ripe fruit! And in the end that would all be paid for, in
disease, and poor human stock. Food supplies would deteriorate,
in quantity and quality, as the unhealthy factory-product replaced
the natural one. The countryside had to be made exciting, he
said, and unfortunately a government of robbers and liars was
inc ompetent to do anything except line its own pockets. Don Amigo
then turned to us and, quoting the namebf a high government official,
said, 'Now there's a good man. A real Christian, with some excell-
ent ideas,' T at which the other priest nodded ironically, with a little
twinkle in his eye, and said with a laugh, 'The biggest liar of all!
As we got into Don Amigo's tiny car again he watched us calmly,
his arms folded, a slight satisfied S mile on his lips. He was so
different from our Don Amigo. When he talked about how marvellous
it was to stand under God's sun he gave me a sense of religion.
Whereas our priest makes ita dim spiritual affair. Yet the
peasants only respect the Colciano priest in a gingerly and distant
way; they laugh with him, they certainly admire him, but Don
Amigo is more their idea of What a priest should be---they say of
him, 'There aren't a hundred like him in all Italy.' Sérgio tells
us of the Colciano priest, with a laugh, that he likes his women:
'Watch your W ife when he's about---no woman is safe with that
prelatet'
On the way back Don Amigo murmured, 'Yes, it's true What he
says. The government have a plan for the country now, but it's
too late. We needed it long ago. Now everybody has left. We


have a proverb about the government, we say they closed the
stable door after the horse had bolted.y You see, there are no
amusements in the country. No television, no cinema or bars---
often no electricity." And he added sadly, 'Even for country
priests it's boring. There isn't really enough for us to do, you
The same evening, a long argument with Gianni. The night
was stormy and rather cold. It began by his asking a question.
He'd been talking to one of the peasants emplyed by Gigi, who
claimed that the white smoke from the chimney at St. Peterts,
when a new pope has been elected, means that God has made his
choice. At first we didn't understand him, and he repeated the
stages of the argument carefully: 'First, when a pope dies a new
pope is elected. Right?'
'Well, then, cardinals come
to Rome to elect him.'
'And when they vote their papers
are put in a stove and burned: if the smoke outside, which can be
seen from St. Peter's square, is black, this means the election
has been/successful, in other words, that the cardinals haven't
agreed on who should be pope. Correct?'
then, did Christ do the selecting or the cardinals?' And he
stopped. We were S till no nearer to understanding.
He tried it again. 'Who exactly elects the pope?' he
asked. 'The cardinals', we said. 'Yes, but suppose three
cardinals nominate one man, five another, ten another---What
happens then?' 'Well,' we said, 'no pope is elected: they
couldn't agree among themselves. And they have to agree Abefore
the new pope can be made.'
'So the pope is made by the cardinals?'
Gianni asked. 'Yes, of course!' 'And not by Goa?,
'But how by God?' we asked. 'Put it this way,' he said.


'How does the black smoke come?' 'By the paper', we answered.
'The election papers.' 'And the white smoke?' 'By straw, to
show that the elction was successful.'
'So what makes the differ-
ials)
ence between the black and the white smoke is different material---
something different in the stove, not the same papers all the time?'
'There,' Gianni said, 'you see, I was right. I argued
with that mam for an hour this morning. I didn't say I knew he
was wrong, I just said I thought he was, that I couldn't believe
him. And it seems I was right. You see, he said that when God
came across the name he wanted for the pope he turned the black
smoke into white miracutously, and then everybody understood what
pope
HERN he wanted.'
The peasantthad got very heated about it, he said, and had
told him that there was absolutely no doubt in the matter---his
father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather before him had
all said the same: and no question of the fact had ever entered
his head before, until Gianni uttered his doubt.
We then, somehow, got on to politics. He said that the
agreement just made by America and Russia and England not to have any
more atomic tests was a great step forward. I said that it wasn't
anything of the kind: it was a hurried agreement to try to stop
other powers essentially, Germany) making a stock of bombs and
thus threatening the division of World-power between America and
Russia: that is, it was a desparate attempt to freeze the present
balance and prolong the political power inherent in possessing bombs.
Also, it only put on pa per what facts had already accomplished:
namely, that both America and Russia had more bombs than they needed,
and that further production of them was wasteful and meaningless;
and, secondly, that further atomic tests were equally useless,
since no quicker or more effective system of blowing up vast areas


of the earth could be devised. Therefore, nothing was lost
militarily or politically by either side in the agreement; and
they both gained by being called saviours, in as spurious a public-
ity as ever existed under nazism. Both the men Who had reached
their agreement had been responsible only a year before for atomic
explosions---though they now said that explosions caused unknown
damage to crops, soil, air and living creatures. It hadn't suited
their political advantage then to stop the tests, and their humanity,
which was now much publicised, had then been absent. Also, I said,
there was one test they still needed to carry out, and this was the
underground test, and this hadn't been covered by the agreement:
presumably, when the underground tests were no longer needed we
should be told what unknown damage they had done, too.
Gianni said to this that any disarmament was good, to which
I said that this wasn't disarmament at all; if anything, it si mply
confirmed the possession of armaments in the hands of two powers
exclusively; I added that in fact not. one form of armament would
Hat
be given up, and this was quite understood between the two powers.
But Gianni insisted on using the word disarmemént, and we got to
a kind of deadlock. I called him a dupe of publicity fhegets
heme ersist-p
and reminded
him that one of these saviours of mankind had only a year or two
ago exploded twenty-one bombs of the most dangerous air-polluting
kind on twenty-one successive days, as an act of propaganda.
I said that disarmement of atomic weapons would begin as soon as
missiles were ready for war-use: at this Gianni let out a yell
and a laugh, and cried, Surely you don't believe that missiles
are for military use?' I asked him what he thought they were
for and he said, "Tofaiscover another planet.'
When he was going he said, 'At least, with these atomic


tests over, our weather will improve,' and I said, 'Don't be so
sure the bad weather isn't caused by missiles, and Won't get Worse.'
The storms have gone and the weather is clear and sparkling
as it usually is much kater in the year. There are supposed to
have been earth-tremors in Tuscany, the Romagna and Emilia, but we
felt nothing. Somebody told me that at the sea he watched three
separate storms from a hill, close to each other, like clouds with
dozens of fireworks inside them.
The last few days have been full of the sound of threshing,
like a strange beast coughing regularly.
The towering red machine
with its chutes and turning cables visits each of the farms in
turn. It came here and filled the air with a fine, pleasantly
smelling dust, and in the evening two tables were set up in Gigi's
kitchen. We ate pasta with meat sauce, then chicken and fried
veal, with some of last year's wine. The talk was mostly soft
and desultory, everyone being exhausted. Gianni's job had been to
stand at the taps where the grain pours out, and to measure it off
in sacks so that it could be sent straight to the miller without
further weighing. The worst job is standing on the stack and fork-
ing the sheaves on to the moving chute, because you get the dust
in your nose. Five workers go round with the machine, and stand
watching while the work is going on, sometimes adjusting the cables:
mlo
one of them fixes the wire-staves into the straw-chute, so that
the straw comes out in pounded blocks. There is great awe of the
machine: it excites and captivates everyone. They serve it
hurriedly and willingly. The men who bring it try to look like
magicians, because this is how they're regarded. They peer into
the thing mysteriously and professionally, saying nothing, while
pessants
the ethers hurry round in a flattered way. The noise enslaves


people, too. It means hope, movement. Like roads, it seems
to promise freedom.
The cooking was done by Gigi's wife, and the meal passed
quickly, without the slightest merriment, only munching and quiet
talk, and chuckling. When it was all over we took Gigi's family
back to town and sat in theit tiny flat for a few minutes. Both
their sons had come: polite, reticent youths, with hardly a trace
of the peasant any more. Gigi has brought them up well. They
all have a town-delicacy, the girls as well, though they haven't
been in town more than ten years.
The town is more colto, everyone
says---more 'cultivated'.
Their kitchen is spotless and looks
out on to a roof two metres away. His sons work in a wood-factory,
and helping on the land is a penance for them, a descent into the
past.
The night was clear, but with storm-clouds gathering inland.
Most of the threshing has been done in the Worst weather, with rain
and bitter winds.
Gianni C omplains about the 'heavy' meals at threshing time:
a special meal at a different house twice a day---chicken and
pasta, with steak or veal. 'I can't stand so much meat!' he
says temperamentally.
Then, 'Stanco, stancol'---he's tired.
And he throws himself down on our divan and promptly falls asleep
like a child.
He barges in from the CO urtyard every hour or so in the
morning, whistles outside, clowns, sings, walks up and down our
stairs with a humourous, half-anguished restlessness. When he
fidgets his mother always shouts, 'Vagabondo! Haven't you Work
to do?', and whenever he asked her a question she saréams angrily,
'Madonna cane! Che vuoi, li gid?t---what the devil do you want
down there?


Last week he told us mysteriously that he'd found a job
driving a truck to Florence and back for several days, and that
we wouldn't be seeing him. He had to leave before dawn the
next day; but at half-past six the following morning he was in
our courtyard again---the truck had broken down'. When would it
be ready again? gesked him. On Sunday. But on Sunday it turned
to Monday. Then it seemed forgotten.
But oneday, perhaps when the summer is over, he'll suddenly
appear and say, 'I've been truck-driving for a week!'
Sometimes he goes from house to house in the valley, talking,
sitting. I walked with him to Altapasquale yesterday and he
suddenly lifted up my hand and walkedjalong as if we were a royal
couple in a Tudor play, his steps long and light, While the peasants
chuckled at us. His imagination is quick and subtle. Sometimes
our talk is fiercely hilaribus, so wild and yet perfectly coordinated,
in replies and answers that are rapped out in a strange, mad logic,
that we seem to have rehearsed it beforehand. He imitates anger,
haughtiness, indignation, while talking C omplete nonsense.
Nearly every day is dull again, with brief, light falls of
rain. There isn't thunder any more, but the land broods under
the thick sky. We went to the sea yesterday and along a narrow
strip of the coast there was hot sunlight, like a blazing corridor
down the sando
Now there is the annual fever of ferragosto: August 15 is
called the Feast of the Assumption, but the time belongs to the
people, really to their paganism; it brings out an ancient restless-
ness. Best to be in the cities at this ti ime, as they are empty
and silent.


Some reading about the Reformers: Henry Vlll's first act
was to seize the hospitals, and having thrown out the poor give
them to rich men. That was the end of hospitality. After that
you couldn't throw yourself on any man's mercy: the chill, friend-
less streets we know began---Newcastle, London, Ohio.
Supplication for the Beggars, book of reform by Simon Fish,
advocating the confiscation of church property, got to Henry Vlll's
notice through the rich men round him. 'The more hospitals the
worse,' Fish said. The Reformers were also against vestments,
'dainty singing', candles.
One of the Reformers in Henry Vlll's time advocated that the
priests be stripped naked, whipped in the market-places and then
'wed'. As the final punishment---intimacy!
This is the first crisp touch of autumn: it makes us think
mn datk
of Rome---the glow of lights inthe early morhing. When it rises
the sun shows bright red trees in the woods above us: they have
turned quite suddenly in the last few weeks. Yet this should be
the hottest time of the year.
Yesterday we sat at the top of a hill near by and watched the
threshing below, in a courtyard, the same machine that came to us
a week ago. People fed the chute with sheaves in the same unrest-
ing way, as if hurried by the sound of the machine. Like most
of the hard work here, it is done in a Hind of joyless fever.
It suddenly seemed grotesque to us that the young sh ould choose
the bad air of factories, the deafening hammer of machines, to
this astonishing landscape of plains and hills, under a sparkling
sky.
It was like an English sun, being clear and cool, and the


hills had the breathless, exciting look of English downs, with
farms hugged round with trees far below.
The machine went on pounding with its strange hoarse cough,
while the women hurried to and fro from the house: one could see
their excitement, the unusual way they hurried. The work was
almost finished: the straw was piled into a neat stack the size
of a barn. Then the machine slowly died down, the cables and
chutes were dismantled, the tractor with the engine that had worked
everything was drawn away. The meal would now be ready in the
dark house, and instead of a glowing, memorable supper, that the
children would remember with awe, they would all eat in silence,
or with grunts, smacking their lips and reaching for bread,
and when the last mouthful was down and the cigarettes were lit,
that would be the end, and they would get up to go.
But perhaps that is memorable---the darkness, the smell of straw
from outside, the thick taste of the wine, without talk or festivity.
Perhaps children remember that in the deepest way of all---without
their minds. Even in her vacuum Italy has wisdom. The timeless
is always there.
I suddenly thought, We could easily believe that Christ was
illegitimate, that Mary made a mistake before marriage.'
Or that he
was'Joseph's proper offspring. I began considering some of the
things we have to accept if we accept the Church.
The immaculate
conception is difficult to grasp. We have SO much to swallow that
is difficult for us. Why can't we believe that he came out of
intimacy, from a real act of love between a man and a woman? He had
so much intimacy in himself. Why must we throw his life away


on the barren altar of original sin?
And there are other things: the rending of the veil of the
temple after his death, the earthquake, the opening of the graves,
the physical resurrection, his appearing again to the women, to the
disciples: they all stand in the way.
The four evangelists all disagree about these things. But about
Christ they never disagree. How much have we swallowed from the
world before Christ, without questioning it?
Sumer, then Babylon, then Israel had their versions of the creation
of the earth, the flood; stories of immaculate birth, paradise,
resurrection, original sin.
The Babylonian Adape was a man like Adam, the first creature:
he broke the wing of the south wind in anger, and was ordered before
the high god, who then offered him immortal life; but Adape refused--
he took his father's advice and remained mortal.
The Sumerians before them believed that the gods had creatéd six
types of human creature, out of clay: and a seventh who was weak in
mind and body.
It seems that the sense of original sin gathered with time:
perhaps it culminated in Judah, in the story of Adam's fall, connect-
ing it with the act of intimacy. Adam didn't break the wing of the
south wind, he did nothing in anger---he simply took Eve.
Christ was our first release from original sin. He pointed
not to our intimate stain but to the spark in each of us: that the
lowest of us was the creature of God.
The Old Testamentis the story of the unfolding of God's plan
for Israel: God chose' the Jews as his people, and their story is
one of progress from this choice to their redemption of the world.
They are there to save the world.


And the four evangelists, in the New Testament, wrote
the story of Christ in that same context. It was the only context
lifa
they knew. They tried to give his Passion full historical auth-
ority by showing that it fulfilled Hebrew prophecies, that is,
the prophecies in the Old Testament. And this was truthfully
Christ's context. He had never tried to depart from it, and
he never disagreed that the Jews were the redeemers. Through
him, in fact, their laws and unique consciousness spread through
the Roman empire, to become our civilisation.
Hence, the suggestion of immaculate birth (in Matthew),
Gabriel's appearance to Mary to tell her of the birth of the
Messiah (in Luke).
The Old Testament tone surrounds the life of Christ but
never touches its details. On the details all four gospels
agree. The Old Testament kind of writing is mostly about events
before his birth or after his death (the darkness over the land
for three hours, rocks being rent by an earthquake etc).
I think Bach's St. Matthew Passion is the most complete
recapitulation of the Passion that we have, but I al ways feel
a pause of disbelief at the rending of the veil of the temple,
the opening of the graves: and the music becomes properly
operatic, scenic, there.
Our idea of moral progress---of one epoch unfo olding into
from
a better---comes from Judah: A the belief that God had called
Israel as the redeemer, and that he was unfolding his plan of
salvation slowly.
We inherited that through Christ---like so much else that
is in contradiction to him.
The description of the crucifixion as prophesied and


ordained and chosen by God, in the terms of the Old Testament,
gradually robbed it of achievement for us. We ceased among
other things to see what the Orthodox call Christ the Victor. By
being repeatedly called 'the son of God' and of immaculate birth,
by being withdrawn from men, his achievement has been robbed of
its human marvel.
The Jewish story of heaven and hell, and of the first stained
creature, all came to us through him. St. Augustine wrote, in
answer to the heresy of Pelagius, that unbaptised babies were
consigned to the everlasting flames of hell. But how do we know?
How do we know about heaven? For the Catholics purgatory is
added. How do they know? How did they find out? Who told
them?
No one has told us, I think. God still remains the sum of
all we cannot know.
What were the Reformers but good Catholics, pressing the
doctrine home to its logical and ugly consequences?
Last night, while the sky over us was perfectly clear and
the crickets throbbed calmly, there were continual flashes from
the direction of the coast, so bright that they lit up the roadway
like a full moon. When they ceased for a moment the darkness
seemed uncannily dense.
There wasn't a sound of thunder,


not the slightest distant rumble. It was like continuous
fireworks along the whole length of the coast. Neither of us
had known anything like it. We were walking back from Sergio's
house, and the path was lighted for us the Whole way. At the
same time, on the other side of the clear sky overhead, there
was a storm over Florence, a single dark cloud perched in the
air and flashing intermittently.
It was clear that the sea-storm was drawing inland fast,
but it took nearly two hours to reach us. The silent flashes
became brighter, so that we could see the wooded slope outside
our bedroom-window under a continuous silver light. Then the
crickets stopped suddenly, just a moment before the soft rain
came. There was the first rumble of thunder, but it seemed
muffled, as if high in the air, behind clouds: and this was the
nature of the flashes, too---they were 'summer lightning',
diffused and glowing. There were no sharp crashes, no crackling
or reverberating as in the earlier storms of the year. The
rumblesgot nearer and nearer, until they were almost overhead, with
the flashes going on irrespective of them, and then they passed
inland.
There was suddenly an avalanche of rain, the windows
swung open, the wind whistled through the house, doors banged.
As suddenly it was calm again. The rumbling was no longer heard,
and at the moment when everything was safe again the crickets
began to chirp.
More slight earth-tremors, near Foggia this time.
We took Gianni to Rome for two or three days. We started
out soon after dawn, in clear weather. The valley was just
waking up and the sunlight stole through the bushes and trees


at a low angle. Only that morning had he decided to come with
us. He'd spent all day before trying to decide: his mother
said, 'Go! What's the problem?', but he couldn't make up his
mind. When he went to sleep he decided, 'If I wake up at the
right time tomorrow I'll go---if not, fate doesn't want me to!'
He woke at the s troke of five, and jumped out with a cry, 'I'm
going!' He put on a White shirt and his best winter suit, which
serves for summer as well; and he left the house without a scrap
of luggage, not even a razor. I heard his lorg whistle as he
came down the path and/jumped up too. We got everything to gether
quickly, a suitcase, two fiaschi of wine, some fruit and cheese
for the journey, and drove off a few minutes after Gigi arrived
to open the stall.
At the sea the sky was clear and hot, and long files of
traffic were going north, after the ferragosto goliday. Gianni
sang and joked, and played with the dog until he was bored, then
fell asleep quietly, his brow without a line, his lips in the
slightest of Etruscan smiles, as if gazing at something pleasant
with his eyes closed.
The sea was an astonishing colour, a
flashing emerald, and the surf was brilliant like White petals
that suddenly appear and toll into the sea again. I wondered
that
how Gianni would seem to us in Rome: the city puts everything
so plainly.
Gradually the fresh northern light gave way to the deep,
intimate Roman glow that is like the reflection of an enormous
copper gong in the sky. At Santa Marinella, an hour from Rome,
I foolishly suggested that we should eat at a restaurant instead
of driving on and arriving home hungry. We chose a tiny trattoria
on a square just off the road, with an awning that made its
wooden tables and chairs seem inviting for a moment. When we


glanced ins ide we knew Wha t was C oming: there was an air of
dirt and cunning, enough to stop one eating for a twelvemonth.
The traffic roared by on the road, which cut straight through
the resort, blackening and cracking the red surface that used to
look pretty five or so years ago. We sat down at an outside
table, having committed ourselves to eating before we really knew
what was happening. On the other side of the main road we could
see a pleasant, clean restaurant with white tablecloths and an
awning that made everything look intimate; it would have cost more,
and the food might have been no better, but they'd at least made
an effort to help our need to dream...
The boy came and we put in our oider. Gianni had to have
hisplate of spaghetti and we chose salad, which even a year ago
in Italy still meant a bowl of tomatoes and lettuce and chopped
basil and mint, rubbed with garlic, and is now half a tomatoe
neatly sliced, sitting unsteadily on a faded leaf. We got our
half-tomato, and Gianni's spaghetti al sugo---a 'meat' sauce--
arrived. His plate looked inviting and he made a satisfied grunt
as he dug in with his fork and spoon to mix it: but disillusion
was round the corner---the sauce turned to a watery mixture in
which there were bits of broiled tomatoes but no meat; there was 6e
tiny pellet of meat which looked as if it had been put there as an
ironical gesture. Gianni said, "Joould do better myselfit You
throw a few tomatoes in a pan!' He tried his wine---we had ordered
a quartino to see what hell's brew they'd produce---and made a face.
The usual chemical stuff, he said: the colour of piss, with a
strong peppery taste and the rather anaesthetic touch of pure
alcohol. I took a sip, then went round the back of the place
and spat it out on to the road. Even then the taste clung to my
mouth.


As it was a sea-resort we chose fish, and saw the fish
before it was cooked. It looked fresh enough, but one could
never tell what chemicals could do; one heard stories of fish
being injected... Anyway, we had it grilled, so that as little
as possible W ould be done to it. The oil for the salad was
clear and bright like the fake olive-oil that is said to come from
machine-oil waste and animal-fats, going through an elaborate
system of refinement. Only the tomato was unadulterated, and
there was no more than half of that. The fish when it came tasted
all right, but it had been cleaned and scaled perfunctorily, and
then---on second thoughts--- it produced a strange mixture of
sensations half-way between being not quite fresh and being fresh
in an unnatural way---perhaps it was the rank oil they'd poured
over it. We asked each other if these tricks and guises that
the shops and restaurants go in for nowadays ---the fake-butter
and the cheese made of bonemeal---ere really cheaper in the end.
But for everything there's a cheen little trick you can play---
a powder to make your ice-cream out of, without milk or eggs;
a bleach to make your bread look whiter; spaghetti made with
everything but flour, fettucine chemically coloured; fake-wine,
fake-oil, fake mineral water, an endless repertoire covering
nearly every known food.
Gianni drank the wine, ate his pasta and even told the boy
that the fish was good, though he added when the boy had gone that
he felt bilious. The bread was hard and dry. And at the end
we paid more than we would have done for a three-course meal
at one of the best restaurants in Siena. The owner came out,
looking the part, his skin parched and sallow from over-drinking,
his eyes evil and dull, and asked us if the dog under our table
ate meat; when we told him yes he brought out a thin uncooked


cutlet, apparently too rotten even for a customer, and threw
it on the ground in front of the animal. 'Are you afraid?'
Gianni asked him with a smile, seeing he wouldn't go near the dog.
'Yes! Yest' the man said in his husky wine-voice. 'I've never
had faith in dogs---or in cats, for that matter!i never go near
them. Yet,' he went on, starting to return to his dark, slovenly
kitchen, 'I know they're better than human beings. Cristiani
son tutti cattivi!'---all human creatures are bad. Well, a bad
man's philosophy! I
A family---grandmother, mother and two neatly drssed girls,
excited and sitting upright-- -were at the next table: they drank
'lemonadet---saccharine, fizz and chemical colouring. The place
began to fill up. Three Germans came: one of them, a young
aoman, practised her neat Italian on the waiter, enumciating every
word wi th a clarity that denied the spirit of the language; and
after she'd put in her professional order she added, 'E vino, per
favore'---a rash thing to say in Italy nowadays, without specifying
what kind of wine you want. The couple with her looked perplexed.
The man, thin and tall, jigged his knee up and down nervously;
he was so clearly in a foreign world---la bella Italia. And la
bella Italia would give him a nice headache after lunch and
perhaps a stomach-ache too: but hé would put it down to 'too
much oil' in Italian cooking, perhaps. As the Italian waiters
would all tell him, he wasn't 'accustomed' to it, which W ould be
true enough.
The millions of touri sts every year have made almost any
speculation along the Mediterraneen coast profitable: and now
the madness and the mess, as always, are left over for the Italians.
They have the money and the cars now, they can imitate the
foreigners, they can even go to their pplendid resorts; but,


as always, it's too late. The last Italian simplicity has
collapsed.
You hear stories going round the shops---'Butter has been
withdrawn round here---a family died'---"There won't be any more
of that tinned meat till next week, it was a bad batch, some
people are supposed to have died.'
When Paolo brings down his
sick sheep to be picked up for slaughtering he always says,
'These are for tinned meat.' Boiling renders them harmless, he
adds. And he buys the tins himself, for sauce on his pasta.
The publicity makes it seem all right. Evrybody else is doing
it. They do it abroad. It's quicker. And there is something
magical in the factory. It transforms, sterilises. It means
progresso, the word on the lips of every peasant. Yet he will
tell you himself that il progresso means a fake and even poisonous
product, dressed up to glitter: he sees it happen, as the citizen
doesn't. But he buys it just the same. That is the power of
publicity. The simple people all over the earth are powerless
to change their lives, they always have been. They have to take
what they're given, what everybody else is doing, even if it
theit
frightgue
kills them, even if it gives the children da
terribl
diseases.But at least it isn't as bad in Italy as in the Anglo-
aud
Saxon countries: few people eat in restaurants, there is still
a healthy desire for fresh food.
Our meal seemed fouler afterwards than when we were eating
it. We strolled across the square, which was more deserted now
in the noon-heat, and took a coffee at one of the glittering bars.
A child served us, his face mild and dreamy. And he produced one
of the best coffees I've ever had. We smacked our lips after-
wards and said simultaneously, 'That was worth all the money we've
given to the villain across the road!'


We reached Rome in an hour and found our home cool and
silent, behind closed shutters; also it seemed remarkably clean
and neat after our farmhouse. Gianni looked round in a mild way,
and his first thought was to take off his jacket and hang it
carefully in the wardrobe. We now had the luxury of running
water and even hot water; a lavatory which flushed, electric
light which came on at a flick, and a telephone. It felt like a
pleasant game: something infinitely subtle and refined, the fruit
of long, intimate dreams over the centuries, like the one I'd had
in our village-hotel---the dream of a city.
The straw mats over our terrace, shading it against the strong
sun, were intact; we'd massed all our potted plants at one end
sothat our neighbour could water them from her terrace. But
watering was hardly needed this year: it rained avalanches a few
days before we came, and the mud from the pots was spattered every-
where. I put Gianni in my room, and we all had an hour's rest;
but the roaring of the traffic in the narrow street below kept me
awake. The bed seemed marvellously soft; it was wonderful to
be home, where everything was ours. I lay on the divan in the
big room, picking books out of the shelves and browsing through
them; then I made tea, Joked wi th Gianni. He was quietly
surprised at the number of books I had, especially in my own room,
along three walls: he said, 'They must be worth a lot of money.
How much, do you think?' And he made me calculate how much they'd
been worth at the time of buying. He couldn't believe they were
more or less worthless now. They were bright, well-produced
commodities for him.
In the evening we had a light meal, with the wine we'd brought
from the country. It seemed to clean our stomachs after our
midday experience, and we smacked our lips.
'Never again!'


we said. 'Welll never eat out again!' We took Gigi's wine
down in long, swift draughts.
The dusk came early, a reminder of autumn. There was none
of the usual heat: even with the carpet down in the main room it
was cool. But the air was heavier than in Tuscany: the Roman
air slows and eases; it exerts a heavy but strangely comforting
pressure. And the light was quite different: the immense copper
glow was behind everything. This was Rome's best month in the
year---for walking and breathing: in August the city is deserted
more or less; below, in our own street, there were even parking
spaces. At its loveliest time, in September and October, the
city will be stricken again: no more walking in the S idestreets;
a thick stench of petrol and diesel
tato-treffic
fumeso
day. The man at the wood-shop said to me, 'It's finished now---
Rome's finished! Ten years ago we thought we were hard up, but
we were much better off, if we'd but known iti0 Everybody is out
for
of course, in a city crammed with cars, over six
/cabs
himself) -
hundred thousand of them, this weakness of the Italian psychology
produces deadlock.
There is the same cry everywhere---'The
Italians have no discipline!"
When it was dark we went to our trattoria and found the old
faces. Gianni was introduced, and I was surprised to see how well
he fitted in. And it had been the same in the afternoon, in
our street: he'd met everyone with the same easy and curious
equality---the portiera, the woman at the latteria who always gives
out
the dog cheese and biscuits, Sergio at the wineshop, slim and shy,
peeping out of his doorway. Italian usually meets Italian with
a subdued SC owl, but I noticed they respected him at once.
Perhaps it was due to a certain northern cleanliness in him;
and he speaks loudly and clearly, with the touch of rhetoric


which they admire. He and the owner of the trattoria, Giorgio,
began talking about Rome. One thing I notice is that Gianni has
less gravity than the Romans: everything is a bit of a joke for
him (outside the hard labour of the fields) and he makes a slight
smile whenever he advances an argument, as if it were a jest: but
partly this is his clear and swift imagination, which skirts and
flies over what other people find difficult.
Even so, I could see how he was silently adapting himself to
Rome, as we sat over the wooden table drinking Giorgio's red wine,
in the dark courtyard, among the narrow mediaeval streets.
'The more I know about Rome,' Giorgio said, his sleepy, half-
closed eyes flickering doubtfully, the greater she seems! In
ancient times anybody who wanted to come to Rome could---all they
had to do was to pay the tribute, then they were citizens, free
like everybody else! Rome has always embraced people---taken them
in---even enemies---even the people who've sacked and ruined the
city---she has converted them---changed them!' He talked about
the first Etruscan kings, about Romulus and Remus, the emperors.
Gianni said something about the wolf that mothered Romulus and
Remus, and Giorgio shook his head and said, 'Vou got that from
the films---no, no, you don't want to believe the films!' He
waved his hand in a deprecating way: 'It is possible that Romulus
and Remus were brought up by a shepherd, to whom they'd been
abandoned by their parents, a nobel family perhaps.' Giorgio
gets all his information from the comic-strip magazines; this
makes him feel superior to the films. He sits hunched over a
table by the door of the trattoria reading these nearly all day,
except Tuesdays, when he goes to his father's house in the country
and lies down to read them, holding them above him, in the same
position for hours, wrapt inbiblical stories and ancient Rome


and Babylon and Athenian politics, while his Wife gets the dinner
ready.
I could see Gianni using his eyes everywhere, learning fast.
I couldn't put my finger on it---he was in the midst of a vast,
glowing civilisation for the first time, spellbpund; it seemed to
captivate him so much that it exhausted his nerves; he slept for
hours, in the afternoon as well, slumped on the bed like a soldier
after a battle. And he was quietly helpful---with the washing-up,
the shopping. I was aware of Rome's stupendous presence, her
power over people, through him. She seemed to me the one Etruscan
creation to have survived; and the Etruscan in Gianni was respond-
ing to her perhaps.
Our portiera told us that there'd just been another 'scandal'
about the city's milk-supply. They're always finding dirt or foreign
substances in it. She said she'd had a bottle that week which even her
green,
stray cats wouldn't touch. After a day it had gone igadt
with a fat-
ty layer at the top like grey wax. I've noticed this waxy deposit in
the Roman milk myself: sometimes it pours out in a long stream with
the milk, like mucous, thoroughly disgusting.
While we were in Rome we went to a vineyard near the sea,
behind Anzio. A strange day---wi th the aparkling, bright-yellow,
wet sunlight you find in England and the north of France but almost
never in Italy. Nearly half the grapes had been lost, at the
beginning of their maturity: a hailstorm had stripped the em off
the branches, or frozen them black; the water had cascaded down
from the sky and torn great ruts in the earth, dividing the hills
with new streams that cut right through the plants; no one, even
old men of ninety and ninety-five, could remember such a thing,
or remember having heard of such a thing. We went to a tiny
one-roomed house near by which we'd thought of renting: the
earth from the vineyard all round it had swept across its court-


yard so that the cobbles were now invisible, and had flooded
the rooms, which now had floors of mud. The wind had been terrific.
The olive trees had suffered nearly as much. None of the fruit
had ripened this year: the peaches were still hard, and they were
falling off the trees before their time. The S ight was amazing:
having seen these same vineyards in the spring, we couldn't
believe it was now summer; the air, and the damp, troubled earth,
furrowed in places like the sea, belonged to a hard winter's day
in a land far from the Mediterranean.
This must have happened at the same time as our strange storms
in Tuscany.
It was pleasant being among my own books again. I read that
the emperorg Constantine was suddenly converted on his way from
France to Italy in 312; at least, this is one of the stories.
The Christian empire began in him. Twelve years later he moved
the capital of the empire from Rome to Constantinople, named after
him; Rome, he said, was too much stained by paganism.
Byzantium, or Constantinople, was an attaempt to create the
new Christian society against a background of conversion and not
of paganism. But the emperor took his paganism with him. He
became at Byzantium the 'vice-regent' of God, really the first
pope. Byzantium was an attempt at Christian civilisation: it
faced the usual pattern of rise, dealine and fall. Was Rome's
strength, after this, that she attempted no such thing?
The Church was divided from the very beginning, always by
the same thing---the gendency to make a civilisation on the one
hand and the tendency to make a moral society----a clean sweep---


apr
on the other. The first schism of the church, in which the
Catholics divided from the Orthodox, was due to it. In fact,
the Church was never a unity. The Crusaders appalled the Byzantines
with their ferocity when they attacked Constantinople in the
thirteenth century : making a clean moral sweep of the luxurious
and degenerate capital, they behaved like vandals, they tore the
altars to pieces and smashed the ikons, always under their own symbol
of the Cross; they behaved with the same cruel vigour---and the
same sense of redeeming the world, in Christ---as the Reformers
under Henry Vlll sacked the abbeys, and the Roundheads under Crom-
well a century later tore up the copper graveplates in the churches.
There was always the same crusade, reforming life and reforming it
again, in endless revolutions that look like a permanent sore in
Christianity, which can never stop running.
Civilisation (like Byzantium) is a kind of gala, to cele-
brate: it preserves intimacy. It even tries to enthrone intimacy
in permanent forms---in his old age Constantine had his hair curled
by special artists. The Reformed society, on the other hand,
tries to embody an idea, and in this dethrones intimacy.
The power of Judah was the moral end that lay in each of
her children; but Judah was also the Reformed society (never an
attempt at civilisation) by virtue of the fact that her children
were naturally joined together, like a family. But we can never
imitate that compactness. The natural moral conviction of Judah
can never exist for us: we are conglomerate, a hundred different
races, peoples, languages, joined under one presence. And we
haven't got to the bottom of what that presence is. We think
it is offering us something in time, in the future---in the world.
But it is outside time. It is pulling us outside time as fast
as we plunge desparately further and further into time.


The first complete moral or Reformed society was Victorian
England. Hardly a trace of intimacy was left in England after
three hundred years of Protestantism. The buildings, roads,
even the churches had the same bustling but hollow public look.
The feeling people have nowadays that there is something similar
between the modern American and the modern Russian comes from the
fact that both belong to the extfeme moral society, the one with
the same Puritan root as Victorian England, the other with a
German or Lutheran root (Hegel, Marx). Both are gripped in a
moral system that saps the intimate energies as fast as it tries
to use them.
I was interested to see that the first Christians in Rome
used not the pagan temples for worship (as those in Greece did)
but the basilicas, that is, the ancient lawcourts. S. Maria
Maggiore is the oldest of these. The basilicas were rectabgular
buildings with two columns of pillars and a semicircular apse:
that is, the form of our churches. Christ thus became at once
the new Law: the moral quest was fixed from the beginning.
Only the influence of Byzantium, in the fifth and sixth centuries,
brought the pagan temples into use as well (SS. Cosma and Damiano,
S. Maria in Cosmedin).
Monasteries came into being after the persecution of the
Christians ceased, about A.D. 312. That is, organised and
voluntary austerities replaced martyrdom. Here were the first
attempts at the most intimate reform possible---self-reform.
Reformed society is an attempt to baptise society (an idea)
once and for all. But Rome only baptised men. Was that her
strength and staying power, that she attempted nothing permanent?
from
When we got back tn Rome I walked Gianni up the hill to his


house, where we found his mother and Alberto cutting forage in one
of the barns. His mother was wrapped in a man's winter-jacket,
though it was hot. She'd suffered, she told us, with hardly a
glance at Gianni. All the way up he said, 'I wonder what she'll
have to say? You'll have to tell her everything. I won't say
a wordt' Only when we were there did it transpire that, from
their point of view, he'd come to Rome to look for a job: but in
Rome he'd only letbhis imagination bask---he hadn't mentioned a
job once, except to say that you couldn't have a job in a place
where you had no parenti, no home to go to.
Only upstairs, in theit kitchem, where we drank a glass of
Wine together, did his mother give him a long, silent, fierce and
yet humourous gaze of welcome. 'You've got thinner!' she cried.
'Yes,' he told her, seizing on the possibility of sympathy, 'they
eat so differently in Rome---they don't start the meal with mine-
strone as we do, therefore I got thin!' I told them how he had
turned the telescope on the Pincio towards the dome of St. Peter's
and had picked up a blonde girl with it instead, and they laughed
politely. Gianni sat dandling Paolo's niece on his knee, cooing
at her and pointing out the various dogs and cats that came in and
out. Then he took me across their fields and cut small marrows,
beans, beet, tomatoes, for me to take home. And his mother put
two eggs into my hand. 'He's a birbante!' she shouted, flinging
a glance at hime. 'A wretch! He does nothing! I've suffered
today---going to town, on foot, to get my pensionio He's bad---
everybody says it, even the cat!' Alberto stood gazing across at
her with his head lowered, smiling. 'The doctor gave her some
pills today,' he said; 'it's the stomach.' I told her, 'No,
Gianni's good---he's been good in Rome---you've a good, clever
son!' At which she burst out, 'That only means he's turned you


into a birbante as wellt' At which everybody laughed. *Why
don't you take him?' she asked. 'If you like him so much---
employ him, take him into your home as a son!' She added quickly,
T Are you afraid he'll seduce your wife?'
'No!' I said. 'Well,
then, take him in!' 'He's too old!' I said, laughing. 'He's
twenty-threet'
'What difference does it make? He's got good
arms : You can get plenty of work out of him, if you like him so
much! I don't want him!' and she and Alberto went quickly back
to their work in the barn, he turning the wheel while she fed the
chute with bundles of grass. When I left, Gianni was sitting on
a curbing looking in front of him, very still, and he said quiet-
ly, 'Ciaot'
Next day he asked, could he write a book without a univessity
degree? how much money would it get him? who would correct the
book for him? Or could he paintopictures? Suppose he became a
soulptor---What were the possibilities? Would he gave to go to
art-school?
While he was asking these questions he made me feel that
the Italian imagination wastes and fritters away in a second
enough powers to alter a whole continent. This is the country's
splendour and pain.


Suddenly five goats appear outside under the shade of the old
cypress, brought down by one of the shepherds. Two of them are
pure white. Then more appear, from Altopasquale. They stamp
their pretty, obstinate feet. They frown through their hair and
make their mildly petulant bleat. They are so pleased to meet
each other---it seems they're strangers. They sniff each other
pleasantly and the latest comer makes his 'how do you do' to the
others one by one; afterwards he does a charming mock-battle with
them in turn; they spring up on their hind legs, half-turning in
the air, and come down with a deep thud on their front paws and
clap their horns together. Then they look at each other intimately
as if to say, 'It's good to be here, isn't it?'
A young pig arrives in the courtyard, his new home. He
buries his head in the straw and won't look at anyone: he breathes
hard. The journey in the truck, and his having just been castrated,
terrified him. He lies there, stricken. He buries his head in
a delicate and sorrowing way.
I notice that all young things---dogs, children---gravitate
towards Gianni. He tricks them, jokes, laughs, tickles them.
Paolo's little niece weeps bitterly if anyone says, 'Gianni's


naughty!'
In the podere below the road you can feel the past, how the
vines and the bamboo-stalks in the gully and the mossy boudders
standing in clover and grass, and the rough yellow paths that wind
down from the house, used to lie there in exactly the same way,
only included in people's lives, for centuries and centuries, with
the heat drenching everything, the sunlight golden and terracotta
on the palazzo of Altapasquale. It only lies there like a reminder
now, in its special soothing dip, unowned, though still ina desultory
way cultivated: like a garden belonging to ruins. It captivates
you all the time, with every step you take, and has a different story
to tell at each different time of the day---golden and sparkling and
bright in the morning, mellow and still in the afternoon, cool and
secretive in the evening, with special silent messages from ages ago
when the same one-bladed plough was used.
I can remember the same sensation ten years ago in the country
near Rome, when the heat gripped the earth and vines in a silent
and timeless power that seemed impossible to end. Little traffic
came along the road then. The wine was real: I remember drinking
real Frascati, shaded by trees at a wooden table by the Rome-
Frascati road. And on Sundays the countryside allround lay in one
unity: there was the sound of bells and one heard people's voices;
everything was joined mysteriously across miles of vineyard and
olive grove, in one stillness. But now there are bits and pieces
of experience, and the earth lies there wondering what the next
stage will be.
I noticed for the first time to daypthat there are schrapnel-
marks on our indoor staircase,
On each stone step


there are little chipped dents, more or less uniform. I examined
them and thought it must have been a machine-gun fired from the
top, frantically, sweeping the floor as well, perhaps in the dark.
I remember one of my own signallers coming back from this same
village and telling me, pale and trembling, that there'd been hand-
to-hand fighting, Germans in one room, English in another.
I can remember these farmhouses so clearly: the drawers pulled
out---photographs, trinkets, spread all over the floor. I used to
look through the photographs with fascination.
There would be
broken glass, upturned chairs, perhaps a broken cot. Somewhere
near here, in a farmhouse, I remember dozing in a baby's cot, my
booted legs dangling over the side, a few minutes before we moved
into a forward position. There was a great gash in the roof and
a chill wind blew through. I had a sickening sensation of fear
in my stomach, but it was So usual that I was hardly aware of ito
TCD
Death painted the country wild colours. Sometimes I think
they were her true colburs.
The 'hunting' season has nearly started: the first Sunday in
September. We were woken at dawn by 'hunters' stumping about in
rubber boots outside, with yapping half-breed dogs round them.
They're supposed to be training the dogs to point. But God knows
how this can be done with mongrels, and in woods so thick that you
can hardly walk through them, let alone sight a quarry. They
keep to the edge of the woods, close to our house, as if they were
afraid of the hobgoblins. And they seem to want an audience more
than a prey. They're all towspeople, or from one of the villages.
A peasant has no time to play. They love to stride along a tarred
road with a gun slung over their shoulders, their boots---turned
down at the ankle---making a solemn thudding noise. They pay


twelve thousand lire a year for the licence and are lucky to
bag a couple of hares. For weeks now they've been preparing
capanne, cabins in the woods. But even these are safely near
the road, though the woods are twenty and thirty kilometres deep.
I think they like to keep our house in sight, to feel cosy. They
make extraordinary noises to their dogs, who join in the game and
squeal and yap professionally as if they were reallydoing something.
Like their masters they're enjoying a run, after a week cooped up.
This 'hunting' has an undertone of fascism, though it existed,
in exactly the same form, before fascism. And an inclination to
both often occurs in the same man. I've never met an Italian who
could resist a firearm. It makes a bang (the greatest recommendat-
ion), it can kill without risk or effort, and it endows a war-like
and masculine appearance; the little women cower in the background,
full
supposedly, and the atmosphere is pregant-with danger and menace.
When an Italian shoots he takes revenge on a lifelong sense of being
spupotaal. Fascism was that on a bigger scale.
The first Sunday Will be a pandemonium from dawn onwards, Gianni
says. They will park outside our C ourtyard, perhaps inside, too---
ttvee
motorcycles, cars, scooters, pop-popping Em-wheelers. Nothing
is private unless you put up a notice to say it is, and for this
you have to pay the government money.
I read about the Carthusians of the London Cherterhouse who
stood firm against Henry Vlll: they were hung, quickly cut down.
and then disembowelled alive. While they were waiting for their
turn to come they gave sermons to the crowd, advising loyalty to
the king in all that was not.against the honour of the Church.
Bishop Fischer was beheaded and his body flung 'C ontemptuously',
accordi ng to the king's orders, into a pit.


Henry v1il was a god for his people---even for the people
cant
he executed. We Caot imagine the degree of faith that made
these brutalities possible---either their infliction or their
acceptance. Really, our constitution, our Whole form of life,
is stained by them.
Industries---that is, the violent disinheritance of the people
from the land, and their savage use, with their children too, in
pits and mills---came naturally out of those events, just as German
behaviour this century came naturally out of Luther's violence.
Gianni has disappeared for a few days. He got the truck-job,
apparently, and is driving a load Bf furniture to Sicily, with a
spare driver. 'If he likes it he'll stay,' Alberto says. But
I doubt if he will. There are hard, gruelling hours leaning over
a wheel, in the southern heat. He slipped away without saying
anything. He says nothing about what he isn't proud of: a most
Italian trait.
It occurred to me. that for two thousand years Christianity
has been trying to escape time. In the middle ages time only
existed in the towns: it was necessary for the calculation of
rents, rates, taxes etc; life had to be planned and foreseen.
The timeless seasons no longer governed life there.
The background of the Reformation lay far back in the middle
ages: it was rooted in the eleventh century perhaps, when a
commercial class came into being, a sort of embryo of our middle
class, in the towns. These towns were separate mentally and
physically from the domains all round them. The towns (the
rich) broke the domains (the Church); they did it by trade,
With
by cutting across the domains by roads, sea-routes; the Italian


cops) renascence came out of the new liveliness created by trade.
Hitherto, each domain had been a law and country to itself: its
excess grain, for instance, had been thrown away while there maght
be a dearth of it in a domain close by.
The towns (law, civilisation, art) were in time; the domains
(peasants, knights, priests) were in God, the timeless.
That was a sort of repetition of pagan form: power on the
one hand and timeless slavery on the other. Where did time as a
restless itch come from? Is it pagan? If we look back to What
we call happiness---it might be to adolescence---we find there is
no time: that was a timeless period. If we are sure of being
created, the itch is removed. When we're happy we rest in the
feeling of having been created.
The pagan is a marvellous animal awoken to consciousness:
but he has not yet put two and two together. One might say that
the first clear gestures towards Christ were by Socrates, Plato:
they were putting two and two together; they were S earching for
the form that they knew was there, beyond time.
The weather is cold and dark again, and we're st till in August.
We heard that on the night of the strange continual storm, with
flashing everywhere, a tornado occurred on the coast and rooted
up numberless trees at Viareggio, tore motor-boats out of the sea
and flung them on to roofs. It could be seen approaching inland
like. a vast cloud stretching down to sea-level. I rememb er that
the moment the storm reached us there was a sudden dierce wind,
then, after it had passed, perfect quiet again.
A postcard came from Gianni saying he was sorry to have missed
us: from Messina. His absence makes the rocky path up the hill
seem fixed and barren. Imagination touches things like a wand.


The sound of Caterina singing: a snatch of an old song.
Seven o'clock in the morning. It makes everything still and
spacious. Then she calls to her chicks. The valley lies under
a shallow mist, with piercing, warm sunshine, after the tramontana
last night. For a moment there isn't the sound of a car or
cycle, no engines of any kind: the valley lies in its own original
quiet---a few birds sing briefly, there is the metallic sound of
a spade from Altapasquale, someone turning the earth over.
The exciting sound of cantering hoofs. The dentist from
P--- rides past on his white horse; he takes a ride every morning
before breakfast.
The hoofs sound busy, passionate, absorbed in
their own pace.
Before the war everything here was on horseback or was horse-
drawn. Every podere had a horse or two, and Sergio told me that
the road outside was always clattering with hoofs and wooden wheels.
Luciano's farm looks fine and idyllic on the other side of the
valley, in 'the early-morning sunshine, with the mist drifting by,
through its great holm oaks. The farm stands on an island, with
As I
a shere drop to the fields.
E Isng, there is no idyll there:
it isn't Austria or France; no gentleman has blessed the country-
side, given it a touch of folly and leisure.
We met the padrone of one of the houses up the hill; he
lives and works in Florence. He made a brilliant attack on the
present state of things in a loud, ringing voice, his eyes popping
out of his head. He said he'd seen a TV programme the previous
evening about the problem of how to feed the increasing populations
of the world: it seemed there were great possibilities---millions
of acres of land remain uncultivated on the earth---marshland,
tropical bush, desert, the sea-bed---and at vast expense they C ould


be claimed for human use. Then he struck his hand on the table
smartly---'We sit and watch this nonsense and outside---' he
turned towards the window, with Altopasquale below---'there are
thousands upon thousands of acres of our own land lying idle---
perhaps the richest land in the world, basking under the richest
climate---we have to go to tropical lands three thousand miles
away to find our food! What idiocy! There's more than enough
food for all of us outside in those fields! We sit watching
these programmes while we squander the inheritance of centuries---
the vines we inherited are going rotten, the olive trees are
unpruned! And we call ourselves intelligent, we say we've
advanced, we send our children to school to listen to this nonsense
while the facts under their noses are withheld from them!'
He added that only Mussolini had dared to tackle the problem,
thirty years before, and had foreseen what would happen. You
hear this echoed by the peasants as well, whether they're communist
or not. He knew 'how to treat the Italians', they are 'an un-
disciplined people.'
The collapse of fascism struck down an energetic, intelligent,
unpleasant t class of men. You can see them sitting ab out the squares
today---men with nearly distinguished faces, idle, malevolent,
embittered, in the gracious Italian way: semi-intellectuals, semi-
gentlemen; their world collapsed so suddenly. They would like to
do violence to life perhaps---but they can't break free from their
own timeless natures.
Reform is against the Italian genius. All attempts at it---
like fascism---end in evil.
Fascism was the Italian taste for rhetoric translated into
politics. All Italian life outside Rome is rhetorical: there


are no pleasures or enjoyments but those of rhetoric. This gives
foreigners the mistaken impression tha t Italy is sentimental,
because of her rhetorical pleasure in sentiment: she is the least
sentimental country of Christendom.
Foreigners are the signori who bless places by their presence.
They bless the hated countryside, the hated antique houses. Our
presence in this valley has produced a rash of enquiries for land
'to build a villa on'. The enquiries are rhetorical. So would
the villas be, if they were built. Their rooms would be showpieces.
Only Rome is unrhetorical. Rhetoric is provincial: the fear
of vulgarity. This is why Gianni makes set speeches: he is
flying above the basic vulgar chaos.
Rhetoric is so powerful that it may lead a man to eat what
he dislikes and engoy it more than what he likes. The peasants
who live near the dentist of P--- talk about his riding before
breakfast wit th a certain puzzlement; they say, 'Yes, he rides
for amusement! It diverts him!' They can't really understand
why he doesn't go by car. But if he put on a uniform, with shining
black boots, and had a retinue of attendants, they would understand:
it would be rhetorical, he would be making a fine figura.


Today I suddenly thought, 'Life is cascading down so fast
that we can feel it worse every day. Will it come to a head soon?
how will it burst?'
Each country will have its benevolent absolute ruler, perhaps,
to get the mess cleared up before too late.
Only single minds will
be able to deal with the problems. Only they will be free of the
collective publicity, by having to stand alone.
In England perhaps it will be through a prime minister rather


like the first there ever was, Walpole. Instead of a king to
cajole and placate, he will have the press and the Commons.
And instead of laisser-raire it will be faire ou mourir.
Today began bright and cold, with a thin mist veiling the
land. Then there were the usual clouds, with the sun appearing
now and then. Some of the clouds were black and fieroe-looking.
There was no growing heat as usual on an August day. The invig-
orating chilldremained. Sometimes one feels it is a summer
scirroco, because of the warm stillness; then it seems November.
Now thunder is rumbling in the distance, and a storm seems to be
drawing near.
There are roads to be built, the cities have to be cleared of
traffic, the air has to be purified, agriculture has to be put on
its feet, the insect- and animal-world has to be restored, doctors
must be healers again and not functionaries dispensing drugs.
Only this can forestall the great new plagues, the rorst of which
is cancer; its rate among children increases the further west you
A doctor needs as grave a vocation as a priest. The present-
day doctor needs to be stripped of his title and called 'male
nurse'; or else the real consultants should be professors, never
less. An approach to our enormous difficulties and pains can
never be taught in a university course.
These things wi ill promote nothing in themselves: they are
get
out of
made
whal we ate
only to free us fromja mess that brought us into-betung---and that
doesn't allow us to be any of the things it promi sed, including
free. They can't be reforms, that is, to make a better world:
but de-reforms, to open the door to intimacy again.
There are so few comedians today, they say: laughter and
freedom go together!


A child should be educated up to the age of eleven or so,
and should then be offered the chance of other Work for a few years---
farming, sailoring etc. A whole list of fascinating apprentice-
ships would await him. His health would benefit. Very few peopae
ih seltide
are fit to be educated, in the general sense. Working and thinking
are given to very few. In the years between eleven and eighteen
the child learns all the worst habits, of posture---leaning over
his desk in a stale atmosphere; and chronic masturbation. The
only education a man needs, for general thought and general develop-
ment, is reading and writing: and that can be done by the age of
eleven. After that his requirements are health and leisure.
The alternative to this is a vast army of semi-intellectuals all
over the world, who have been taught that their thoughts are
valuable, whereas this is not the case. This will pull all
learning and thought and certainly all art down, finally: education
will be the means of putting an end to our civilisation.
After the age of eleven a child is beginning to learn about
the world, his senses are eager, he is seeing something objective
outside him. And stuffed into a room every day this is thwarted
and starved. This is why teducated f people invariably seem more
remote from life than others, and why they have to find the key to
health slowly and painfully, because of those lost years, when
their passions were turned inwards.
But a child should be free to choose the stuffy room if he
wants it. It would be one of the apprenticeships.


la tis mend
The padrone of the house up the hill told me that Le
the peasants were much freer than thé workers; nfacts they
could take a rest when they felt like it, choose the particular
work they wanted to do each day, within the limits of the season;
they could take a day or so off if they felt ill, and make up for
it with extra work; they yould go to the fields a little earlier
or a little later than usual; there was no one to stand over
them---you simply couldn't supervise work in the fields as you could
factory-work. There could never be a set schedule in the country-
side. He said that the common people never really struggled for
only
Hat
freedom but,for the dreams people higher-up concocted for them.
The peasants were in an excellent position at the moment to drive
hard bargains: they could win whatever freedom they wanted on the
land, but they chose the ready-made life of the towns. In fact,
they were incapable of changing themselves.
Luciano brought the yeast over for our bread last night and
told us that the agreement for him to move into this house in
January was already fixed. All the produce of the land he's
renting will be his. Our padrona will get the tiny sum of fifty
thousand lire a year from him, ab out thirty pounds---for a podere
of three or four hectares. He also told us that his brother will
be leaving the land for good---he'll be a builder's mate, earning
three thousand lire a day instead of thy two thousand he would get
as a labourer on daily hire. He himself would do that, Luciano
said, but he was too old to change. (They don't seem to realise
what enormous knowledge they have, about the crops; they consider
it nothing---they think that I undoubtedly know as much as they
do, that it's common knowladge, how to till the rows for vines,
prune the olives, beat the bean-pods when they're dry with flays,


sew the maizek tend the cattle at night when they give birth,
feed the hundreds of geese and ducks and chickens, gransfer the
first wine to vats and squeeze the juice of dry, sweet grapes into
We then had a chat about food, in the darkness of the courtyard.
He said he himself W ould put three or four of the people who adulter-
ated food 'upagainst the wall' (a favourite image of Luciano's, but
he's the mildest man on earth)---then werd see if food-adulteration
continued! Most of the manufacturers laughed at the fines imposed,
he said. Their profits were such that they could afford a periodical
loss of a few hundred thousand. At one time, he said, he used to
buy his wine in town, but then he'd begun to wonder why he always
felt bad: he had cramps in his stomach, and these stopped soon after
he began to drink his own produce. He still wondered if that wine
was what had given him his kidney-trouble.
That same evening we saw the art-restorer and his wife, and
again the talk was about food. They told us they were obliged to
eat in restaurants most of the time, because church-restoration
took them all over Tuscany. They described some of the meals theyta
had with horror: they'd tried to C ook a cheese-dish one day and
the cheese had formed a sort of liquid rubber when heated, and had
been impossible to eat. Before the war, they said, grated cheese
had been a pleasant addition to minestrone, but now the stuff stuck
to your spoon like plastic and congealed horribly. What this was
doing to children, whose organs had to form, God alone knew!
They called this process of food-manufacture and adulteration
part of 'Americanisation'. Like many people brought up under
fascism or nazism, which created a wall of ignorance round the two
countries, they believe that America brought modernity to Europe
after the last war. They don't know that the process had already


started in England in the Thirties, as an inevitable climax of
industrialism.
The first Sunday of September: the 'hunting' season is on us.
All day there have been motor-cycles and cars outside the house.
At dawn the woods began to reverberate with thuds and thumps, from
various sizes of cartridge. And at about noon they began to retire,
with hares, pheasants and rabbits hanging from their belts. Sergio's
brother caught a hare soon after dawn: the first day of the season
is the best---the animals aren't expecting you. He described how
a dog follows the pheasant's scent: the pheasant believes she is
being followed by the eye, and th inks it enough to wriggle under
leaves and bracken, and lie there quietly. But the dog stands
stock-still, close to where she lies, waiting for the hunter's
signal to leap fo orward; the pheasant flies up in panic and you
shoot.
eleven
The season really began last night at eteten o'clock. Just
after we got to bed a motor-cycle stopped outside the courtyard
and we heard a hunter plod slowly past our bedroom W indow in his
rubber boots. And a few minutes later we heard a shot ring out
at the edge of the woods, followed by another.
There was bright
moonlight. This is forbidden---any shooting at night: you may
shoot afiter sunrise and before sunfall. The penalty is the loss
of your licence or even imprisonment. The road was being patrolled
by keepers at the time. We wondered about this wild, lonely
hunter, bent on.his quarry in the moonlight. Drunk, perhaps.
All evening there had been the a1 tmosphere of zero-hour: in the
village there were groups of rubber-bobted warriors, and youths
were polishing their guns. There was a lot of talk about the
carnage to take place the next day---hands being rubbed, conniving


smiles. All false; and mean, underneath. Another little bit
of rhetoric. Gianni, if we catch a hare in our headlights, shouts
at once, 'Drive fast! Fast! Kill itt' An animal means by
definition that which is to be killed. Except dogs, which are
necessary for the killing.
Don Amigo, our priest, brought along two ordinands from the
English College in Rome. We sat on the terrace drinking tea and
talking half in English and half in Italian. Don Amigo cautiously
left his tea---he wasn't used to it, he said; Protestantism, tea
and wholemeal bread are a strange and violent world for him.
We all laughed at the gingerly way he pushed the cup aside. At
noon he stood us up and said the angelus, reading from his prayer-
book. I noticed how much freer the English were. They really
seem the children of Protestantism, compared wi th him. They joke
about some of the saints, with mild impatience, and actually seem
to be thinking about their religion. Don Amigo seems never to
have thought in his life, only to have accepted and followed.
You can see that their consciences are alive.
There was Protestantism in St. Paul already, transmitted
from Christ: *Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith
Christ hath made us free and be not entangled again in the yoke
of bondage' (St. Paul to the Galatians). But it didn't make us
free. Something went wrong.
Before the fifteenth-century Humanists only a very few


people---these nearly all priests---bad ideas and talked about
them. We have so little sense of our hist ory that we lose sight
of the slow materialisation of Christian doctrine that has come
about since the end of the Roman empire. Everyone of us is a
talker now.
The Humanists looked back to ancient Greece and Rome because
these civalidations had concentrated everything on what men did:
they were two marvellous exercises in prowess, as if men had been
alone in the universe the en, not overhsadowed by God. The Humanists
Coam
were believers in 'poetry', which meant at that time what we would
call letters or scholarship. And Greece and Rome were the models
for this: every scholar produced his imitations, a custom that
went on far into the eighteent th century, all over Europe. But
it was always in the context of achieving a better Christianity.
It was never an interest in the ancient civilisation as an end in
itself.
Inevitably, this humanism led to reform. Christ seemed to
have offered exactly that freedom---to choose and make your own
life. Humanism and trade and flourishing towns and travel came
about together. It was a terrific Christian upheavel, mostly in
Italy, and not pagan at all. It was this that produced the slow
revolt in the Church culminating in the Reformation, after two
centuries of discussion.
But behind it all---hidden but never defeated by the example
of Greece and Rome---was the story of Adam's fall.


And it connected, fatally, with the new prowess men weredtrying
to learn. For Adam had fallen because of something he did.
And it was only one short step to saying that men had again to
do something, or undo what they'd done, to get back into God's
grace.
The climax of moral self-torture (the anguish of past crimes
and good resolutions for the future) was reached in the eighteenth
century, when it had infected the thinkers and even the leisured
classes. Dr. Johnson argued that the present was never a happy
state for any human being; asked if a man wasn't sometimes happy
in the present momen t he said, 'Never, but when he is drunk.'
They were talking about Pope's 'melancholy' line, 'Man never is,
but always tobe blest.'
Johnson tortured himself with resolutions,
and his failure to achieve them.
'Hell is paved with good intent-
ionst was his phrase.
I thought of Rome again. Time doesn't haunt Rome. This
is why she is called eternal, not because of her span of years.
It's a feeling. There isn't the itch of men's time. This is
the Rome that survives every invasion, from that of the mercenray
troops under Charles V to that of six hundred thousand cars.
Rome is a feeling that has always evaded reform. It has never
put any hope in men's time: that is, in the possibility that by
Sitdl) doing something, by behaviour, you change the world.
Is this how she survived? She didn't invade, menace,
plunder, out of moral justification: she did it because she
wanted the land or the money or the strategic position. She
plundered little; she quietly took the fruits. She has always,
since the conversion, been intimate. She has always been a
consumer, never a producer. A producer's exploits would have


been moreddangerous and less effective.
I remember a phrase I read once, that there is nobody
crueller and less relenting than the man who believes he's
morally justified.
They always do think it morally justified---the nazis in
their camps, the mass-bombers, the planners of Hiroshima...
But no power can be. It always comes from a hot desire for
domination, from interest: that is, it can't be brought up to the
level of religion, and only Christianity has attempted it. Power
is an agreement between men, and it impresses only men. The time-
less isn't involved. Power is never spiritual.
Thomas More's ambiguity---causi ing a puzzlement that has followed
him down the centuries---was that he tried to administer power
morally, as a judge. There was something stained in his whole
posi ition. He tried to administer Christ, so to speak, not just the
law: he didn't leave it to the timeless, except at the end of his
life, when he no longer argued or tried to persuade.
This moral use of power---administering life as if you were
God---is what we cally Reform. It bears its own cancer. No
reform produces happiness.
This is why the great men of Reform---More, Erasmus, Luther---
had to withdraw from what they had provoked. It is why Henry Vlll
looked hopefully to More as a Reformer and ended by beheading him.
Henry vlll was the first to use moral power on a grand scale. The
result was a bitter and murderous carnage. He destroyed everything
beautiful in England, helped by his chancellor Cromwell. Another
Cromwell took it a stage further a century later and desecrated


what little had been left in the churches.
Yet each violent step brought the doctrine 'be not entangled
in the yoke of bondage' nearer to fulfilment. But it involved
a sort of mass-suicide: a man who uses power morally (that is,
coolly---to teach a lesson, to change other people) does this---
he commitys a sort of suicide. His intimacy suffers every time.
Our cities are like vast factories geared to ideas we no longer
understand: we yearn for a little intimacy again; there are so
many monuments!
After two bright, sparkling days---the first two of September---
the weather collapsed aga in and there was heavy rain, with black
clouds and alternate stuffy heat and freshness. During those
bright days I could feel the other weather coming, in a peculiar
nervous expectation, like an electrical throbbing in my body; when
the first massive clouds came the air seemed to go stock-still,
the pressure was enormous, with sudden shafts of burning and blind-
and
ing sunlight. There was a brief stormoithen the light rain you
get in the mounta ins, during the autumn of early spring, making
a light, mournful dripping from the leaves, and a mist that drifts
through the branches.
Yet the heat hasn't gone, for all the rain. We decided to
go to the sea this morning but turned back before Volterra.
There were low, misty clouds across the whole barren range of
salt-hills east of the town. We found a tiny lake far below
the road, with a vast hill sticking up at its side like an ant-
heap. We sheltered from the rain in a peasant-house and the owner
pointed out all the abandoned houses round about: there was a
palazzo surrounded by cypresses on the other side of the valley---
all abaddoned, together with its tenant-houses. He said that
of about three hundred peasants who used to live in the area,


fewer than thirty remained. At one time the podere up the road
had forty or fifty head of cattle, but now there was hardly more
thanthree: yet the demand for meat was going up all the time etc.
etd. He himself worked his own land---conto diretto: but there
was little to be made out of it; provided with tractors, mech-
anical copper-sulphate sprays and pumps he would make a fine liting,
and work less.
Suddenly, in the middle of the night, a fierce wind started
up---again the doors and windows slammed, and there was a booming
noise down the chimney. It was quite dark---three or four o'clock,
perhaps. After twenty minutes or so it stopped as suddenly as it
started, and the night was still and warm again, with heavy clouds.
We are wondering if there was a kind of tornado on the coast again.
Somebody has said it! 'This weather is due to a twenty-
year cycle.' Last year it was an eleven-year cycle, the year
before that a fifteen-year cycle: torrential rains in the summer,
floods, tornadoes, abnormal cold, something strange nearly every
year since the war... People will do anything not to pierce the
publicity and find out what's going on. Of course, they might
/ite find out that nothing is going on, but tow do they know? Have
they had a guarantee? Have we a guarantee that our bodies aren't
being influenced invisibly, that not only the immediate weather but
the earth is being wrecked, perhaps for generations, and our child-
ren maimed in a way we don't yet understand? Who can give us a
definite no to these things? They tell us now that the atomic
experiments were harmful to the earth, the air, our bodies, because
their interests no longer required the experiments. Yet for years
they denied it. The scientists---the highly-paid accomplices--
aie
HerE s ilent about it. We can keep our fingers crossed. Millions


of people all over the world must---hope for the best! And we
choose our own lives? We no more choose our own lives than the
darkest slaves of Roman times!
But we're choosing something: we're choosing for people in
the future.
Again, it's all morally justified! The men who authorise
the experiments and the men who arrange them are all very moral
people! There are two arguments: first, you see, if we weren't
doing these things there might be a war, it creatfes---it creates---
a balance of power, you see! and, secondly, all these researches
are simultaneously going into peaceful and civic useso a e
So if you are poisoning all future life on this earth,
and your own child's body, well, there's a reason for it...
We got a load of gunshot in the Window today but luckily
the shutters were closed. I rushed to the window and shouted down
various curses---'Vagabondi! che fanno? vuoi ammazzarci?" etc.
etc. Then I realised they couldn't hear a thing I was saying
because they were sitting on motor-cycles and their engines were
running. There were three of them. I dashed down to the road
and pinned on to one, a pale, surly-looking chap. 'Did you fire
just then?' I asked him.
'Fire? Fire?' He looked as if he
didn't know what a gun was. The other two looked more homely
and I turned to them: 'Did you fire?t Yes, they had fired,
and---madonna la troial---the bird had got away; they were look-
ing for it; they knew it was wounded, but it had limped away.
witkm
And they kicked through the bushes, even toa foot of our bedroom
Wi indow. I realised he---the youngest of them, with his firepiece
lo be Told,
still smoking---needed actually, in So many words: 'Do you
realise,' I asked him, 'that you just now fired into our bedroom
window?t 'What?' He gaped, his eyes still blazing from the


chase. Since I hadn't talked about birds he couldn't understand
me at once. Then he came to. 'Impossible!' he cried. 'I fired---
I fired there!'---and he pointed straight into our bedroom window.
'Exactly,' I said.
'You fired at a bird but the bird wasn't there,
and you overlooked the fact that shot doesn't stop because it finds
nothing, it travels on until it does. And in this case it found
our window. It made a hole this big,' I added, lying unto my back
teeth, and making a hole the size of a potato with my fingers.
Impossible!" the older homely man cried. 'It must have been some-
thing else. A si imultaneous explosion!' 'The law ofprobability
is against you there,' T I said, settling down and losing interest.
The grubbing among the bushes had started again.) ad + a
LLit Giso you've taken this
house, have you?' the older homely man went on. 'I've seen you
in town.'
'Yes, we've taken it for the summer.' 'And are you
camfortable?' 'Oh, yes,' I said wi th a smile, 'Until a load of
shot comes through the window, then it gets a bit hot.' 'But
look---' he said, taking a cartrideg out of his belt, 'how could
all those tiny little ball-bearings hurt anybody?'
'Well, they
come at quite a speed.' 'I know, but they could never make a hole
in a window!' 'No,' the young man went on, 'I can't find it.
How the devil it got away I can't think! I know I wounded it!
wyuld
Madonna cane!' You C ould see from his eyes that het E/fire at
including. his owh feet.
anythingil But he calmed down. They turned their cycles round
and then with a cheerful good-evening seme drove off.
The hunting makes the woods seem gloomy and barbaric, especially
in this weather.
There is a particular clowning trio Who come at
dawn and call out to each other dramatically through the trees as
if they were drowning, while their dogs yap and squeal. When they
these
bag something one of the clowns makes a sort of high-pitched croon-


ing noise as if Harleuin had hit him over the head with a rubber
truncheon. You expect mechanical tears to pour out of his eyes.
"Woo-hoo-000-00-hoo-hool' he goes.
Gianni came back on Sunday looking exhausted and pale after
a week on the road. I asked him to return in the evening---"Come
and tell us some little stories---about what you saw, especially
in Sicily, the people you met.' He looked puzzled by this, but
he came dutifully. And at once he plunged into a set recital
that lasted an hour. Did he get enough exercise? Wasn't it
awful leaning over a wheel So many hours together? No, no! He
got enoughy exercise, unloading and then reloading the truck every
few hundred kilometres. And then there were the st ops. Three
lales
or four minutes after-thet he said that one of the troubles was,
you didn't get enoughy exercise; you were leaning over the wheel
all the time... 'I want to eat like you do---healthily! All
that filth they serve in these restaurants, especially the meat---
more disgusting the further south you go: You wonder if it's
not a dog or cat sometimes! The body gets nothing na tural now-
adays. One of our drivers can't work any more---he's gone down
with stomach trouble, his nerves are wrecked!' You coulgsee
the difference between a truck-driver and a peasant, he went on---
just by looking at their faces. He then made a speech about
youth. 'Youth today isn't satisfied with a piece of bread and
a bar of chocolate on it as a treat, like it was at one tim:0
We aren't so easily satisfied, not like our mothers and fathers!'
I asked him, supposing the government made a good deal for
the land and increased daily-hire earnings to, say, three thousand
lire, would he come back to the land? Yes, yes! He'd return
gladly if he could make a decent living---be as good as the factory-


worker. The land would then represent a future for him, not
lo fall
something he-felf back on when his luck was down.
I described the wonderful farms in Germany.
- with
their huge elm trees, the horses and tall wooden houses, the sense
you got there, not only in the south, in Bavaria, but close to
Hamburg as well, of a great thriving land-tradition; there were
families, I said, of ten or eleven children, and the young were
still working on the land, because it was a solid and even rich
life. 'Ah, yest' he said. 'In Russia, too! The peasants get
a good deal there, too!' Russia means the happy land of peasant-
owners, in Italy: Sergio's father has Stalin's picture on the wall
of his bedroom; it balances the madonnina over the bed---the male
dream that the Church has failed to provide...
The work seems to have coarsened Gianni. I wonder what he'll
be like in ten years' time. I see him looking back on these times
with the Italian wistfulness---'Ah, do you remember when we went
to Rome? The blonde in front of that telescope! Che tempi,eh?
Ragazzi!
Some minutes after he'd left us we walked up the hill with
the dog, for a breath of air before bed. The dog barked suddenly
at a turn in the path and I saw a figure standing in the field
just above our house, only a few feet from where we were walking.
I noticed that the figure was wearing bright fawn trousers.
And the dog walked on, apparently. not alarmed at all. Then
I saw the figure walking thirty or so yards behind us, now that
we'd passed on. We turned back at the brow of the hill as usual
began)
and beganto walk down again: and in the moonlight I saw him
leap off the path to avoid us, into the darkness of the woods,
clearly waiting for us to pass him. The dog sniffed in his
direction as we passed but didn't bark. Then when we were gone


the figure jumped back on to the path and hurried up the hill.
I was sure it was Gianni. That would account for the dog not
barking. And itwas his same walk; and he'd been wearing fawn
trousers.
Perhaps he'd been squatting in the field, and pudore made
him avoid us. But there is always this mystery, in Italy: I
mean a mystery between people. Everyone is a stranger and alone
in himself: even with his mother, his wife, this is true. But
he isn't separate by introversion. It simply is the truth about
life. There, as in so much else, he is sound and natural.
The weather is duddenly cold, and the rain pours down steadily,
with low, grey skies and drifting mists. We need winter clothes,
though this is only the first week in September. Tuscany looks
gloomy and barren as I've never seen her before. But in an hour's
time it could be hot: you can't tell from the state of the sky any
more. A still, clear night can cloud over within a few minutes
and a storm suddenly rise.
There are supposed to have been floods in Trieste, and sn OW
in the Alto-Adige.
Italy gives way completely to the weather: interiors are bare,
waiting for the sun to fill them. Sunlight is part of the Italian
character, necessary like water. In the rain, everything waits--
the trees, the houses and people. It is dark and still all day,
with the alow rain. But people are mildly excited, too, by the
abnormality. At the market yesterday evening there was an atmosphere
tly.
of hilarity. The rain brings intimacy, and no work. The hired
workers like Sergio stay at home, and aren't paid. That brings
a holiday feeling. He told me yesterday that last winter, because
of the endless rain and cold, everybody ran up bills at the sh ops:


they 'planted nails', as the Italian seys---piantavenfo chiodi!
Some, he added with his honest, rather wistful smile, were good
enough to honour their bills when they were earning again, others---
took their custom to other shops...
Alberto came down yesterday wrapped in a brown overcoat, with
water dripping from his nose, and asked if we could take his mother
into town. We said yes, we'd wait for her. But the rain began
pouring down in a fantastic avalanche, and she didn't come. He
told us that Gianni was in Sardinia, with another load of furniture.
He probably meant Sicily. It was better this way, he said---with
Gianni earning enough to pay for his cigarettes and a suit of clothes
now and then. Who else C ould buy these things for him? He,
Alberto, worked the land, but this could never provide money to
'put aside'.
(This is what money is for the peasant---Something
to be put aside, not a basic, much less terrible, necessity; this
is why he can blue, with more ease than others).
A concert in Florence---mediaeval and Renascence music, on
the original instruments: flutes, cymbals, viola da gamba, lutes,
castonets, hand-drums. Quiet, subtle musio---fingers lightly
and delicately tapped. It was like returning to real music--
its first quality, at the edge of S ilence. Music should open
the outer silence to us, which we never hear in the day. It
should take us. beyond men's time.
The music we're used to, WHTe-16 largely Herman music,
doesn't
LO do that---quite. It opens up a construction
for us:
e a man's stupendous construction,set in
hess
the middle of the vast silenee outside; an orddrly and basically
certain world which the Germans create wherever they sopeuhich
they seencte need and must at all costs make, EET out of, chaos.


You find it in their thinkers: great systems, constructions---
Locke
Kant's was perfectly rounded off, as unlike KIME or any other
English philosopher as le could be; it is why the German universities
have despised English philosohpers, for their apparent untidinees,
and have argued that only one of them was worth reading, and that
because Kant exploded him (Hume).
In music Brahms made a struggle away from this, and achieved
his freedom better than anybody else after Beethoven.
Therefore
when he is played like Beethoven (that is, as the dramatic unfold-
ing of a theme) he is meaningless, and we cannot see how his instr-
umental work connects with his symphonic. Haydn, Mozart, Schubert---
the Austrians-- -always left something open: in all of them the
marvellous outer silence is suddenly heard, wit thout it making us
feel, as we do in most of the renderings of Beethoven (perhaps in
Beethoven himself) that it has been prepared for with tremendous
lonely gravity, like a legend told at night, leading to something
far beyond us. Furtwangler's great touch with Beethoven was
perhaps due to his unfolding him like an awful legend, in breathless
dramatic steps. But Schubert defies the same treatmen t (which
Furtwangler was careful not to give him): : man's time has to be
forgotten in Schubert, development and progress have to be put
aside. When Schubert's Great Symphony is played for development
it is a hopless, rushed messp not only that, but vulgar and
repetitive.
This is why Schubert was despised in his day (by
the German taste), and still is secretly. The same is true of
Mozart: but the Germans have hoisted him up as a monument and
spiritualised him, as they must everything they respect. He is
much closer to the Italians
that---to the early music that
was written for great yet intimate (that is to say, aristocratic)
occasions. But the great occasion in Germany can never be intima te:


it is always formal, and basically rhetorical, a show of power.
Perhaps the most important thing to know about Germany is that
Humanism with its bright and free and intimate discussion, in which
men laid their minds bare to each other, had no place there.
The great formative origin of society in Italy, France and England
was lacking.
In the German tradition Mozart is stripped of int imacy, and
becomes as cool and ordered as mountain-tops. Even Beethoven---
supposed to be the protagonist of this tradition (the bombshell
that ended music)---is damaged by it, and turned into a rigid
system. In fact, you hear the same struggle in his work as you
do in Brahms s's---to break free of system: the imprisoning sys tem
for him was Haydn, while he himself was the imprisoning system for
Brahms ; a system wasn't there in either case. In Beethoven,
you hear the signs of this struggle in sudden changes and alarms,
a harsh note, silence. The end of the Ninth symphony is nearly
chaos : because a flight from system.
Beethoven's struggle was harder than Schubert's because his
natural form was less than Schubert's. Musical form---the quartet,
sonatat, symphony---was always a harrassment for Schubert: a means
leading to his perfectly natural and easy form, that seemed to
Secend tria
capture silence itself (quintet in C Major, the third-and-fourth
in E flak major
rement
he Trout), and to defy written form but never to
break it as the end of the Ninth does. For the German taste
Schubert was always lacking 'techincally', for this reason.
Real form is always apparently lacking in 'technique'.
In none of the Austrians do you have a struggle for form.
They are all close to the Italians, and derived from them conscious-
ly. Beeween the operatic style of Mozart and that of Cimerosa
there are obvious similarities. We overlook this because of


the massive German tradition that hidesthe scene. Haydn's
real nature---soft and cheerful and daring---seems squashed under
a supposedly Exquisite and Lofty Mozart, a Gothic Bach, and a Great
(heroic) Beethoven. The result is the falsifiection of the
Austrian tradition entirely, and the subordination of Schubert
and Mozart to a system that neither of them could possibly have
worried about.
In fact, the German tradition fades into air if you touch
it: Beethoven, takem as the authentic German master, kept his
hard-won sanity (form) by living and learning and suffering in
Vienna. Bach, an alternative basis to the German taste, was
first and foremost a Christian, and a clear exponent of Italian
style. There were then Schumann and Brahms, but Schumann went
mad and Brahms won through in the same way as Beethoven: he too
knew Vienna, but above all his first tender model in music was
Schubert (some of his early works could be Schubert's, at first
hearing).
And the natural climax of the German taste is what we have
in music today---abstraction. Its herald was what might be called
the baroque abstraction of Wagner: then you have the mathematical
or atonal music (Schoenberg based his studies on Wagner).
Those quité mediaeval phrases---almost silence: almost a
kiss, a glance... We have SO little intimacy---how can we have
a music?
It looks as if we Won't be returning to Castel Vecchio after


all, to see those ruins. First, our priest told us that there
were vipers. That was during the warm weather. And now the
hunting season has started---danger of getting your head shot off.
Also we heard that there aren't Etruscan tombs there, only the ruins
of a mediaeval castle which one can see just as well from the
surrounding hills. Next year perhaps---When the sun is blzing
aga in---if it ever blazes in Italy again---we shall go there and
see for ourselves: a confirmation of something, a dream.
Both Sergio and Gianni have the slightest of smiles when
their faces are in repose: it is fixed in their mouths. Here
is the Etruscan smile---as Sergio's bright optimism, a sort of
lithely contained joy, and Gianni's gaiety and quickness of
imagination, are Etruscan, too. You could find nothing like
ei ther of them among the Romans, whose Etruscan root went into
empire.
We call our pig Giacomo. He lives most of the day in
darkness, just able to turn round. Gigi lets him out to roam


a call our pig_Giacomo. He-livee-mest-of-the-day-in
depkneseyjust mable to turn round
Gig o lets-him-out-to-1oam
in the field below the road for perhaps an hour. At the end of
this eventful life, in four or five months' time, he will have
his throat cut and be bled to death.
Some snatches of quite strong sunlight today: but there is
none of the usual calm of September. The air is weak and damp.
Mist drifts across the hills north of Siena. I walked down into
the vineyard this morning and the grapes are still far behind.
They should be a deep, dark colour now, and the white ones should
be yellow and plump, but they are all still pale; if there is
really strong sunlight for the rest of September some Wine might
come out of it, of about ten degrees alcohol, but otherwise it
will be hopeless. Sergio has found us some wine of thirteen and
a half degrees which we can store for two or three years. On
the Whole the peasants don't like mai tured Wine. They say it's
too 'seeet', too heavy. They like the young wine which is st ill
vivacious and sparkling.
Gianni appeared briefly again, with a brand-new wristwatch.
He has been to Calabria. He already talks about the 'old' days
when we joked together, as if they were deep in the past. He
looked matter-of-ract; made no speeches. To keep himself awake
for night-driving he'd drunk seventeen coffees the previous day,
he said. But as much of the coffee is barley, orzo, its stim-
ulating effect is small. Their grain at home was already
threshed, he told us, and we'd missed their harvest supper.
'But it wouldn't have been any good without me!t he added gayly.
The weather seems to be settling into winter, although it
is only the second week in September; we're already in Winter
clothes. A certain grim nullity begins to settle into pe ople,


as if what charm they have, which is really very little, is
going into hibernation. Only Sergio keeps his bright smile.
His whole face is a smile, always, not just his mouth. He is one
of those few creatures who were made for their work, and for wh .om
work was made.
Today Giacomo was So happy to be let out of his dungeon that
he ran full tilt along the road outside and Gigi had to chase after
him. He then did the same across the field. He has a witty
turn of mind. The other day he ran into the cattle-house to
inspect it, and when Gigi chased him out he climbed up the steps
to our entrance, sniffing everything gladly; he got a kick in
the side of the face for that, which made him squeal. Gigi says
he won't-let him out again. He makes too much 'fuss'; so he
must spend the rest of his life in darkness, with just room to
move round in. He can hardly support himself on his back legs
as it is, through over-feeding and over-confinement.
Went to Certaldo for an exhibition of altar-pictures and
crucifixes from all over Tuscany. I was surprised by Filippo
Lippi's blonde Madonna and child, so remote-looking, quite
German. A world of difference from the rapt dark face of the
Byzantine and mediaeval panels. She has slightly whispy hait
and an open, clear gaze. Like the clear light of Greece pouring
on to Christianity: the Renscence.
But the look only lasted a moment. Then,
efler Hal
the Counter-Reformation:
/bec omes derk,
This
suffocating and mediocre.
Thed was in the
exhibiton, too: heroic themes, with ridiculous heavy bodies,
posturing and going theough the motions of divinity; very
Spanish in flavour. Spain was the SC ourge that went through


Italy: her Inquisition, with a mediaeval vengeance (for Humanism
ne ver got to Spain), put the brilliant Italian imagination under
a terror the effects of which aren't ended yet.
Like Filippo Lippi's glimpse of the light, Erasmus's expect-
ation of a new age only lasted a moment: for Luther broke on the
World.
The first Erasmus heard from Luther was a reminder (Luther was
then an unknown friar) that he paid too little attention to
original sin; and should read St. Augustine. People usually say
that Luther's propositions against indulgences, posted up in 1517,
were the first act of the Ref ormation, but in fact they br ought it
down in ruins.
Humanism was the real Reformation, and it had existed for two
centuries or more. Reform of the Church had been its endless
theme, and its hope. It brought the printing press into being,
so that scholars could read several copies of a letter, instead
of circulating it slowly from hand to hand: these gradually
became what we call books.
And Luther's influence spread chiefly through this press.
The Germans only had to embrace Erasmus, and admire him as the
first reformer of Europe, to bring not only him but all humanism
down in ruins. The condemnation of Luther at Louvain university
in 1519 meant that Erasmus, who was teaching there, had to go;
he, too, was by inference a reformer'. He sooner or later had
to declare for or against Luther, and he recoiled from Luther's
violence. It forced him eventually to declare against.
Answering Erasmus's treatise on free will, Luther wrote
in a pamphlet that God had always hated men, even before He
created them. He was thus much closer to strict Church doctrine


than Erasmus, who (like Christ) had little to say about original
sin. And Erasmus's reformation was deeper and more drastic and
more revolutionary than Luther's by its arguing that men were free
and good.
Luther wasn't a lonely martyr. He always had the support
of power---that of the princes who expected big gains from the
confiscation of Church property, and that of the people who hoped
for a respite from the unthinkable brutality of their owners.
When he was called before the Deit of Worms in 1521 he was cheeped
to the doors by great crowds, and he came out as free as he went
in. The emperor Charles V was unwilling to provoke religious
trouble in the German provinces by oppesing him. The pope amd
his council at Rome were listless and passive, and seemed not to
know what to do; after all, reforma had been talked of before,
for two centuries; no one expected a division of the Church to
come out of it. And Luther felt strong enough when he got the
papal bull condemning his works to burn it in the market place
at Wittenberg.
Luther's ardour was thoroughly German---it grew violent in
its first stages by the blank refusal of interest all round it,
and violent in its later stages by the brute power it had provoked.
He had none of the Italian Renascence in him, no humanism,
though the Humanis sts were the first to acclaim him. He belonged
to the middle ages, though to the 'heresies' of the middle ages.
He was indignant towards the weak and ineffectual papcy, and
docile towards the princes when the time came for them to crush
the peasants mercilessly after their revolt: though the revolt
was a direct result of Lutheran doc I trine. It was a thoroughly
German stc ory, as we have come to know it since---a 'revolt' that


began with the grievances of the people and ended with the
consolidation of a power more terrible than any before: with the
leader condoning the bloodshed of his own followers, whose bravery
he had provoked.
Humanism and Italy were brought down in a sudden and ghastly
end. There was panic in the Church. The Humanists were blamed.
The study of Greece and Rome was blamed. Intelligence was blamed.
And by putting himself under the protection of the princes Luther
consolidated serfdom in Germany at a time when it was dead every-
where else in Europe. When serfdom came to a C omplete end in
Germany, Englishmen and Frenchmen had already been free six hundred
years.
Above all, he produced the Germany we know today, where the
status quo consists of a more or less unchallenged power on the
one hand and a docile people on the other, mitigated by sudden
terrifying revolutions. It remains the country where a man with
power can do what the devil he likes---if he keeps out of sight of
that child of Humanism, the press.
The Reformation was carried out in England and Germany by
authority, and in both cases on behalf of a small group of powerful
men. If the butt of your attack is power and not falsehood, you
have to replace it with different power, not truth. Thus, the
Reformation s1 tarted by attacking Church-magnates and ended by
establishing lay ones.
The people in both countries has as little to do With it
as the people ever do with revolutions, especially the ones in
their name. But in this case it involved their most intimate
affiliations. Few knew the questions involved. Almost no one
had ever thought of leaving the Church, that t is, disrupting life


at the base. Even Henry Vlll never meant to leave the Church:
it happened step by step, almost by accident.
Erasmus had warned Luther that his violence would disrupt the
globe.
Does the curious Bicherheit you sometimes find in the
caps)
German---his downright and undoubting mode of speech, which is
quite unadapted for discussion---Con---come from that first Reformer
who argued that he was an instrument of God's will? And
Erasmus's answer to this was something like, 'I'm a man. How
can I know about God's will?'
As another terrible dream---mystically inspired---nazism--
turned us into destroyers (the destroyers of all forms of life
on the planet), so the Reformation turned the Church into a
destroyer.
In a way, Rome became Luther. It shook with self-disgust,
under his moral lances. The bright and simple impulses of the
Renascence were suddenly dark. The baroque that came later on
was like men celebrating marvellous memories, which were doomed
because they were only memories: you got the florid and sentiment-
Erasmus saw men leaving their Reformed mass with faces full
of moral anger and violence. Strange to see---coming out of a
churchi He noticed that there were no fewer drunkards, rich
men or fornicators among the Reformed. Then what had been
reformed?
Again, there is no one crueller than the man who acts out
of virtue. Remember the classical beginning of the virtuous
letter you receive at least once in life: 'It hurts me to write


Luther forced the Church to rest its power squarely on
guilt. Guilt isn't simply remorse, which had always exis ted
in the Church, and is a natural human emotion. Guilt is the
claiming of a moral destiny. 'I am guilty' implies the same
claim as 'I am free from all stain'. Guilt in its proper and
original sense meant simply 'having committed a crimet but it has
come, through the Reformed doctrine of original sin, to mean 'the
destiny to committ crimes', a darkness that lies over the soul
permanently, bowing it in a kind of paralysis.
Guilt and freedom were of course incompatible: this is how
Luther was the cause of the persecution of the Humanists and bonae
literae without intending it at all. Like many other Germans
since, after some frightful private or social calamity, he woke
up and asked, *What have I done?' That question has been silently
asked by so many German lips, with endearing simplicity, from
childhood on, as if this people were sealed off in some strange
6 I
way from mankind: *Why diaj do it? What have I done?'; as if
no power lay in them, but at best a destiny beyond their control...
And destiny began to dominate their thoughts increasi ingly.
Music became their destiny; when they had a few philosophers,
these became their destiny to Deep Thought. And of C ourse
there were the frequent political destinies, and even, finally,
a racial destiny.
Really, Germany came into being through Luther: before, she
had simply been 'the German lands'; through him she discovered
an identity separate from both the empire and the Church. It was
the beginning of their national destiny.
The Germans were the authors of that fatal view of civilisation
as a destiny slowly unfolding, a 'process' and therefore by
inf ere ence a 'progress'. America since the last war has been


dominated by this to an extraordinary extent, just as the
previous moral society in Vict torian England was; the idea of
a moral destiny rewarded by world-power was accepted by millions
of Americans so deeply that they couldn't visualise others not
sharing it; a sense of 'youth' and a quiet ethical superiority
to other peoples went with this. Nazi Germany has been 'youthful'
too, and its sense of ethical superiority had been uncurbed by
human sympathies.
It is rare to find a German who can stand before the humble
works of the middle ages or the early Renascence and exchange his
intimacy for that of the work: he is invariably in the presence
of Art, or a Movement of art, or a School, or Beauty, or a destiny
of some kind or another which makes the painter, in this single
effort, slightly pathetic and irrelevant. To tell the truth,
there are few Germans who can see anything in the literature of
France or England except what can be falsified into a monument,
has been
like Shakespeare (who wag-then claimed as German). There is a
rough and personal and intimate quality in our work, the fruit
of the long discussions of humanism, which offends the usual
canons of German taste, even now. It is why German editions of
books, even first editions, are some of the finest in the World:
they have none of the rough touch of those first letters of the
Humanists, and they are in direct contrast to French books with
their paper covers and uncut leaves, meant to be browsed over
and marked and put in the pocket. Everything in the German canon
must be turned into power, that is, a destiny 'higher' than the
human creature.
German society was always a chaos, from the middle ages on.
Whereas the English and French were born into a certain form---


into a society that had been moulded slowly by an aristocracy
and united under a monarchy---the German was either a victim of
or a possessor of power, with little to guide him except hard
necessity and written law (though the written laws were in a choas
of contradiction, too).
Therefore the German's struggles were always towards echigdving
form; his successes were invariably on the lonely heroic level
(Goethe, Beethoven), like his legends and dreams. And his blunders
of judgement usually came from beliving that the rest of the world
was formlesso too...
History became wrapped in destiny, through German clamour.
They were the authors of an Italy that was no longer a brilliant
people but Archaeology or a Movement of Art or a Museun. They
were the authors of the ridiculous view of the Italian Renascence
as tachieivng harmony at last', the climax of a struggle tha t
had been going on since the beginning of Christendom, though
there is no evidence of this struggle. A century and a half ago
they---including Goethe---came to Italy and didn't trouble to
look at the Giottos and Massaccios and Piero della Francescas;
now these artists have been catalogued into the area of accepted
German taste, but with the same exclusiveness as before. What t-
ever showed a sort of monumental power yielded itself readily to
the German taste: the late Greek, the late Renascence. And the
poor Etruscans, the 'primitivest of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, were a little despised; they were 'naif', they hadn't
the full sophisticat ed stamp of power required. The Etruscan
smile was momentary, fleeting, the image of an intimacy that lasts
as long as a flower...
There is always this sense of a moving belt of time in the
German taste, a destiny that governs every creature and every


event, so that our individual efforts are no more than tiny
marks along the way, to be collected into one ideal. In no case
is the creature himself a seat and authority of life. Basically,
in his intimacy, he is gauche and ridiculous and pathetic like
the peasant as he used to be considered in Germany, who if he was
fool enough to show his intimacy showed his backside. The man
who lays his heart bare to the German is invariably despised.
He must go to him armed with power. This gives him the right to
a voice. The human creature is basically visious in the German
psychology.
Religion in great parts of Germany bacame just a code of
respectayility as a result of Luther. It meant obedience to
the princes. Christ became a word for tameness and mediocrity,
and insipidly ethical living. Having been stripped of his
religi ious impusle, the German tried again, in the barbarous chaos
that was left him, to establish systems out of his head, as nat-
urally as the Puritans, suffering from a similar sterilisation
of powers but in a more ancient and formed society, created
factories and mills to give a st tamp of power and destiny to an
earth that had been struck bari ren. England and France were
pradtical, Gei rmany visionary.
Flicked through the sayings of Christ in the four gospels
and found no reference to the Fall, to priginal sin. Emphasis
is all the time on forgiveness, 'ye are gods'.
We went to Lucca for the festa of the Santo Volto when


crucifixes and banners and even tall altar-pieces are brought
from churches all over the town's province---from Pisa and Massa
Casara
Marritima and Viareggio---to be drawn in procession. We arrived
when the candles were already alight---hundreds upon hundreds of
framing
tiny tapers fromaing the windows and the porches and the arches and
even the roof-tops, in a twinkling mass that made the town look
like the most exquisite wedding-cake ever made. The traffic was
barred, and waiting crowds with that special intimate Luccese
humour surged through the narrow streets. We parked the car
on topmof the massive wall that has preserved the town's intimacy
for centuries, and will renew it when traffic is barred once and
for all. The worderful overladen shops and busy cafes glowed on
either side; the town-theatre, a quiet, sedate, baroque building,
looked like a miniature palace under its candlelight, standing
alone behind a square that seemed made for cockaded soldiers to
parade in. S. Michele had great flaming tapers behind its tiers
of pillars and arches, so that it seemed to float and roll in
flames with a strange and wild movement. We passed the little
church of S. Frediano, So humped and modest, lying under one
arc-lamp, neglected by the festa, aad watching humbly and a little


gloweringly. The cafés were full. People were crowded at
the windows and balconies. The baker-shops were selling ring-
shaped sweet loaves with currants in them. On the square before
the cathedral there were stalls for doughhuts and toys and sweets.
The procession was forming up in different parts of the town.
The night was clear and warm, and luckily we were in our summer
clothes again. People were sweeping into the town from all the
gates, hurrying. Then the ordinary lights wentout. We stood
step
in front of one of the doughnut stalls on a raised, with the hot
the
smoke from lrs fat in our faces, and the owner unscrewed the electric
bulb over our heads. The procession began. There was the sound
of a band. The hum of voices grew louder. The crowds surged.
There were children in arms, old men, staring young women, boys
close together, priests. And the first massive cross came slowly
along, above people's heads, borne like a treasure, swaying slight-
ly, high in the air, clasped in the arms of a single man, making
him bend his knees with the effort, While two others stood close Pry
to relieve him every few yards. And this man made a strange slow
dance with the cross in his arms, so that it turned in the air,
seeming to bow and to leap slightly. Here you have the joy of
religion. The Christ was black, jet-black, and shining, and
they had draped a golden robe round his middle, with a tassle
dangling down, so that he seemed to sway and dance in the air,
with a strange ecstatic grief, clothed delicately and thoughtfully
like a marvellous child. Then came banners and smaller crosses,
and men in black cloaks with pointed hoods, and thick candles
held high above, on sticks, followed by the first band. And again
there was a massive crucifix, this time with SI prays of gold leaf
pouring out from its arms in great tinkling globes as it swayed
along, like a shower of light in the darkness, swathing the patient


and broken Christ in colour. I've never seen anything where
the shere joy and victory of the crucifixion was showed so much,
in such a fervent celebration. There you have the mediaeval---
that frency of worlsip that has nothing heady or false about it,
but is S imply wild joy, also delicate and compassionate and
intimate, as the procession sweeps along and one raucous band
follows the other, clashing and echoing in the night, and there
are monks, priests, servers, men dressed as mediaeval soldiers
with long hair that makes their faces look real and dark and
virile as ours can never be under our ridiculous half-shaved
scalps; and suddenly, as one of the last great crosses pass,
swaying above its be earer like a tower, there is a burst of light
and smoke and shattering noise from one.of the roofs as the
fireworkas go up, making a silver blaze over the town like the
eye of a great animal watching and flashing. And as each new
cross passes people clap and cheer. The crowd is thick and
hot. Bells ring out. There is the wildness of faith, wi th
nothing pagan, nothing destructive or egotistic, but delicate and
loud and joyful, with masses of sound and colour and light,
the kind of worship that to its shame the Church put out, in
safety-first.
Now that the rain has let up the hunters are out again at
dawn, prowling round the house and calling to their dogs. There
is little game left, after the first day's carnage: hardly a
shot rings out. We recognised one of the noistest of the dawn-
marauders: the village-carpenter, a thin, pale, hungry fellow
from
with a brusque mai nner; I got my desk Er him, for very little,
but his sly glances made me feel I was paying a lot. At the
top of the hill we saw a little gathering of hunters in their


usual gear, standing about like military C ommanders. They
remind me of photographs of fascist officers from the last war, 2
standing at the edge of woods before an attack. The wet
weather produces a certain surliness in people: the other day
we were standing in Altapasquale talking to one of the families,
about eight of us in the road, and a munter passed on a motor-
cycle, stopped by us and murmured with an unpleasantly abashed
smile, 'The road is public, you know.' We smiled at him and
said, 'There's room enough for you,' and he drove unsteadily on.
The other day, in the gloomy weather, I drove over one of
our pigeons, coming into the courtyard. The tyre pinioned one
of her wings down. as she was trying to fly off, and drew her under
it; presumably the mud had stopped her. Her mate flew quickly
up, with an unusual rushing movement which I noticed inside the
car without realising what I'd done. We got out and went upstairs,
and only there, after a few minutes, when I happened to look out
of the window casually, did I see the pigeon sunk into the mud,
the
almost flat. The male was in tis nest and I could see his rear
feathers moving as he sat nervously over the young. I went down
and scooped the creature up in a newspaper, for Gigi to see.
There wasn't a scratch on her body---I realised by her darker
markings that she was the female. I climbed up to the nest and
found the two tiny, featherless squabs, sitting huddled together.
I wasn't sure that the male would continue to look after them.
I would get him another female, but only after these young were
4f mated again loe Seon.
reared; he would desert them
All the following morning he didn't appear. Gigi said
that almost certainly he was out finding food. And later I
found him sitting placidly in the nest with the squabs under
him C e He didn't stir when I looked in.


It made me feel gloomy and restless for two days. Some-
times he approaches the female of the other C ouple and the male
walks firmly across his path, puffing his breast.
Sergio took me to the local wine-factory. In the entrance
there were hundreds of fiaschi of red and white Wine, lined up
like painted soldiers. Further inside there were girls standing
at a moving belt, looking tired and bored, with pale faces.
It was towards the end of the day. A printed schedule on the
wall gave closing-time as six o'clock, but it was nearly seven:
the employer can exact longer hours---'Let's just finish these
bottles so that we can get them offt---because he can get more
labour where these came from.
The girls were pasting red and
golden labels on to the fiaschi as they jerked past. Among them
was one young man, the 'chemist', as I found out later. And it
occurs to me now that he looked a bit conscience-stricken, as well
he might.
The fiaschi were emerging gtom a circulating platform, where
they were filled mechanically from taps: and here an old man was
sitting, thin and tight-faced, wi th sharp but strangely naked and
lifeless eyes; like the girls, he was very pale. He leaned on
a stick, as he took cleaned bottles off the belt and fixed them
under the taps. I took him for a peasant, but Sergio said,
'The owner.'
And the owner began showing us round, while the girls looked
on in a listless way, like condemned prisoners. There were massive
hosepipes coming from cement vats, and these supplied the taps.
'So clean!' the owner cried proudly, and Sergio echoed him:
'Clean, clean!' The chemist's little office was pointed out:
here, Sergio whis pered to me, is where the chemical element is


determined. I looked in and saw small bottles marked 'Pure
Alcohol', 'Red Carbolic Acid', 'Sulphuric Acid'. In the corridors
between the tall cement vats there were sacks of pulverised citric
acid, used to correct any tendency in the wine (the inferior or
stale wine that is used as a basis) to go bad. I noticed that the
hosepipe feeding the circular platform with Wine didn't in fact
ome from the cement vats at all but passed through the wall to a
half-hidden tank outside, on the roof; I saw that access to this
could only be reached through the ownerts private quarters above.
I asked, was this half-hidden tank to 'coolt the wine before it
went into the bottles, but the owner bugshed the question aside
vaguely---no, no, it was only another tank; a sort of subsidiary
tank---they were going to remove it soon (but it was new).
When Sergio cried to the owner, out of earshot from the
workers, 'Now show us how you make wine from water!', the old man
smiled with a quick, gleeful, roguish expression and nodded,
'Sifa, si fal'---yes, yes, it's done, wine is made from water!
But today he couldn't show us how. On a Sunday. We must come on
a Sunday. And he gave us a confidential glance. He seems to
drink the stuff himself: he took down some of his own vernaccia
while we were there, gulping it greedily; I took a cautious sip,
man
and it was delicious. The old/lipmed, and his joints seemed to
give him trouble. He told us that he produced over a thousand
litres a day, and two truckdlads a week went south, to Rome and
Caserta. And he sends big consignments abroad, as far as America.
He showed us two gleaming machines for filtering the wine and
said proudly, 'They cost six millions each.'
The work of con-
structing the factory on 'modern' lines, out of barns, cost him
sixty million lire. The firm was now worth twice that sum.
'And you started as a peasant!' Sergio said with his beaming


smile, 'Just think of that!' 'Yes', the old rogue said,
limping up the stairs like a character in Dickens, 'I'm worth
a lot of money!'
As we were walking up the narrow mediaeval street at the
side of the factory afterwards I asked Sergio, *Why do those
girls stand for it---isn't there a trade union---why do they allow
a man to poison people like themselves, all over the world?
And aren't there inspectors?t Sergio smiled and took my arm in
his erect way, 'There are inspectors, caro mio! There are laws---
strict laws and strict inspectors! But the inspectors are payed,
well, not so much. A little addition to their income every
month is welcome, it helps their children, brightens their homes!
And our old friend there knows how to keep people quiet, he knows
the human weakness for money! So what use are the strictest laws
in the warld?'
And as for the girls, he said, if they liked to
talk about poisons and leave their job, there were others to take
their places at once; not that they would leave, probably, a
little rise in salary. would see to their consciences as well...
The daily habits of the weather have changed but they are
still uncanny. The air is balmy and warm at present, the best
temperature for the grapes. But the clouds gather in the af ter-
noon and a rainstorm breaks in the evening, suddenly. Then,
after the heavy masses of rain, there is a serene, starry sky,
with hardly a breeze, and the grilli echo across the fields again.
The clouds don't seemEquite right when they come. I've never
seen this light in Italy before. I've seen it in England,
Germany: but here rain has always been accompanied by a heavily-
misted sky that shines blindingly because of the strong sun behind
it; Italian rain is soft and drifting. I don't remember these


separate, dark, heaving clouds, day after day, producing a
sunlight---when it breaks through---that belongs to the north,
thin and sparkling and enormously spacious; the Italian sun,
from north to south, has a deeper quality---a massive glow close
to the earth. Even in Rome I noticed that the sun was watery;
not at all the relentless Roman sun of August, that drenches
the streets.
What is happening to us? Is it possible that our bodies
are bing influenced, too? Things are rarely influenced separately
in nature; our bodies are a functioning part of nature. When
the papers say that we 27r0 being exposed increasingly to radiation,
what does it mean? Sometimes the storms here are So overwhelming---
the avalanches of water are so shattering---that you think the
end of the world is coming each time. And then the air itself
feels unnatural---it grips and haunts the nerves. I feel it
sep oralely
seaparetiy from myself---from my own mood; it seems totally
physical.
The oceans regulate the temperatures of the world: they
absorb or radiate heat according to the needs of each area,
equalising one area with the other. If the oceans didn't do
this there would be sudden terrific winds, tornadoes everywhere,
as the cold rushed into the heat; there would be sudden changes
of weather, chaotic and unpredictable...
Are the OC eans being interfered with? (We are like children
with onr questionst)
Are we contaminated? Will there be more, say, malformed
babies? Are terrible plagues in wait for us, working invisi bly
at present---will thousands suddenly be affected, their skin fall-
ing off? We hear of an explosion at a 'most secret atom-plant'--
the column of smoke that rose from it was seen for miles around:


did it injure, kill, contaminate no one? what happened to the
contaminated? All secret! The future of our lives---wrapped
in secrecy! We elect these men to top positions---and at once
they're in the grip of security police, or seem to be. The
higher you go, the more enslaved you find them. When you reach
the president of the United States you find a man asgagged and
dound and restricted as ever a man was outside a concentration
camp: only he himself would be able to tell the full truth of
what I'm wiiting. For under his titular control is the biggest
stock of atomic material in the west. Or am I wrong? How do
I know? Are my little feelings enough to show me the facts?
But my little feelings are all I have to go on...
Yet the secrecy can't be maintained. By making an agree-
ment about atomic experiments the two S ides showed that it was
necessary: they needn't have done, they could have shown it as
simply politically expedient, which was the case; but they pre-
ferred to make moral capital out of it. And this is what blasted
a hole in their secrecy. For why should the end of experiments
have been a moral necessity? even, apparently, an urgent necess-
continuing
ity? how is it they are going-on. now, under the ground, when no
expediency on earth could justify them? We hear about atomic
material being dumped by the English and Americans in the Atlantic---
the fish being contaminated---the fish entering us as food... Can
the stories be multiplied? The men who work in these plants-- -
from the top to the bottom=--they're silent men. What Faustian
contract have they signed? When will the break come---or will
Einstein's prediction come true, that the price for not having
destroyed all atomic weapons at the beginning would be the dest-
ruction of all life? Will it be allowed to drift to that?
Has it already drifted to that? Or will something drastic


happen to save us---to save a few? Will there be cases of
contamination---men like lepers---panic in and around the camps--
attempted suicides? Will government-denials then engage the
anger of the people? Or is it too late? How could the at tomic
material be destroyed if we wanted to do it? Is burying it enough?
One way or another we shall wake up! And perhaps we shall find
that all these years we've been living in the grip of two terrible
war-systems which have engulfed the whole world by the simple
device of keeping tension with each other, under the pretence of
keeping peace when in fact the most deadly and complete war ever
conducted on living things has been going on. A war so long that
it may be twenty years before we know the outcome! :
At the very first light the hunters begin climbing into the
woods with their dogs. In the immense stillness of dawn their
voices sound dry and unenchanted. When I hear them I think,
'Haven't they anything charming to keep them at home?' Sometimes
the men here gaze before them like their own oxen.
I'm beginning to like Paolo the shpeherd. He has fought
hard for his life. And he no longer seems to take us for puppets.
He beamed at us today and cried out, It's been cold, hasn't it?
Nearly winter last week!' Then he gazed at us wistfully with his
shining red face and sharp nose, his long, penetrating Etruscan
eyes. Now he's made money, he feels he can afford to soften his
heart, like signori, like foreigners.
An afternoon in Siena. I think I could look endlessly only
at the Sienese school of the fourteenth century---Lorenzetti,
Paolo dp Giovanni, Duccio, Bartolo di Fredi, Martini. Their
intimacy is complete---unbroken.


The moment the classical enters, in the next century, you
get the first touches of falsity, the conditions of upheaval.
There are poses, dramatic srfokes, spectacle. The crea ture
begins to writhe against the accusation of original S in, to insist
on his godliness. Botticelli was the climax of this deliberate
assertion ofthe godly human body. It went too far---like a throw-
back to paganism. But perhaps it had to.
But In those early pictures there is a rapt stillness.
The people in them aren(t moving otwerds, or Foving away from:
they are, in themselves.
Christ's rhythm---his personal rhythm---is what we've for-
gotten and what, through the fatal story of the Fall, we've twisted
into moral tension. But he wasn't a teacher: much less a reforming
man. What he advised was for himself. Hecgave up his own life,
not others.
This rhythm of his is always there, in the gospels. It is
the rhythm of the present. He's always in the present. He points
only to the present. He moves in his own timeless present.
His predictions of the future are predictions about himself, based
on his own designs---the crucifixion and the aftermath. This
rhythm can't be pointed out or proved: it lies in the gospel like
a special S ilence, a presence. It is the only proof of his exist-
ence we have.
Power in us lies in what we are at present. Anything that
draws us out of the present---hope for future fulfilment or regret
for the past (the same thing)---draws power out of us. The
present is beyond time: when I think of the past wi thout any wish
to alter one of its details, it is in the present; that is, 'the
past' is not then time, but experience-- --timeless.
Our nervous and unnatural concept of the present as a fraction


that moves along a belt of time, with the past increasing behind
it and the future decreasing in front, is due to the concept of
original sin that has been forced on us: the past becomes the
area of sin, born with us, and the future is potential grace, a
hope for relief.
So there is a quest in us all the time. The quest has
broken us further and further into time, until now we are obssessed
with it, with clocks that tick away the minutes and seconds;
whereas, before, at the time of these paintings, the divisions of
time were large, they were the seasons, and from dawn to dusk,
there was no pressing moment, gone before it was caught.
Our livers, kidneys, hearts, glands, cells do their work in
the stillness of present time: only when we chase time do we dss-
order them; our breathing becomes tense, our circulation changes,
one by one our organs are flung into alarm and disharmony. We
are free only when we cease fixing our minds on things, and things
on our minds: then wonder can begin. This is Eastern teaching:
but perhaps Christ pointed East, to stillness. Perhaps one day
we shall draw a strange new power from Buddha.
We have been given no rec ommendations for living in a bare
universe.
The Jews were in a family, and partly we inherited
their life, through Christ and Sto Paul. But the fact remains
that Abraham, Moses, Aaron, had no recommendations for the man
who ceased to be a Jew---who fell into the void. We are all,
now, in the void. We were given promise of that great family,
but it wasn't fulfilled---we are a conglomeration of races,


languages. Our harmony has tobe chosen, won.
But a bare and cold universe is a good start: the best cert-
ainty is no foothold at all (again the East). We only have to let
ourselves fall into the present. But we no longer know how. We
have to learn in our bodies, nerves, not in our attitudes (these
follow om, in any case). We are broken people.
The moral revolution broke us. The rhythm round Luther was
one of power, that is, tension: not intimacy. It wasn't enough
for him to be, to believe. The moral revolution always destroys,
overtly like the French revolution or nazism, or in the processes
of time like the English industrial revolution or America's War
of Independence.
In this sense, America is the climax of the false reformation---
in the bedief that life can be made all over again, on a new footing.
The War of Independence made further wars necessary: wherever an
intimate local life was found it was uprooted and massacred---the
Indians, the Mexicans, the southern aristocrats and finally the negroes.
The moral revolution tries to supersede original sin. The
sense of being superior to others (the hub of moral revolution) is
the sense of being dirty in oneself. In flying from intimacy we
are flying from the present. We are always questing, trying.
Our 'daily exerciees', 'sport', all build up tension because they
come out of tension---that is, trying, forcing.
We force ourselves everywhere---it might be in the lavatory, or
in our thoughts. Thet Germans are the mas ters of tension, thereore
the authors of all the tense theories of history, thought. Someone
says of the hero in Death in Venice that he has always lived 'like
this', clenching his hand into a fist, never 'like this', letting it
fall relaxed.
The hero tries it (living relaxed) amd the result
is S ickness, madness and death.
German ideas engulfed two continents---America and the Russian
lands: the idea of moral progress and the idea of


Hegalian
historical materialism are the same, doc trine in the
endo
This doctrine makes all the past a sort of shortcoming, and the
future the zone of promised glory and fulfilment: T a a a the
Apowers of the present are always wasted.
The present isn't here and now, that is, a particle of time:
it is our being.
Future' and 'past' are S imply arguments about
our being: therefore - 6 y moral.
I try to give up seeing life as A development (from place
to place, age to age), and to know it as motionless. But I
na turally think of our coming here from Rome as a movement towards
something, that is, as a development in my life: and now I find
I've begun to think of our move back to Rome next month in the
same way. But the reality is a landscape where Rome is one
place and this village another, they remain there in stillness,
like distant lighted cities in a plain, seen from a hill.
If I no longer move forward, I am more fully.
The present is a glowing stillness; it never disappears; ge
are in it all the time. Like a room, it is still and safe all
round us. We only have to think like this to feel remarkably
safe. And this isn't the stillness of things: it is the stillness
of that from which all things come. The present, in the real
sense, leads us beyond men's time.
At once we shed the haunting questions, 'What will the future
bring?', 'What has the past stolen from me?' The past and future
are our minds working. As the philosophers say, we can't perceive
space and time.
If I want to keep an Italian friend, I'm always careful to
let him down now and then. It makes him feel in equal company.
He hates the sense of a blueprint of obligations hanging over a


friednship. Like the Jew---perhaps like all ancient religious
peoples---he wantsan escape-hatch from time.
Gradually, in the last ten years, I've looked into every
part of my life---tried to disrobe myself of education. My
early childhood supported me in this: being brought up by poor
wus
people I laeedbreren allowed my natural harmony. But later the
world made me cover my face with fixed expressions to hide its
real ones, to walk in a rigid, ashamed way, to stand, sit, breathe
as if under a censorious eye.
There.are books now on how to be natural---how to breathe,
stand, even on how to go to the lavatory. Don't try, they say---
don't force: you damage the organs.
If you breathe properly---
not quickly or tensely---your body gets the oxygen it wants, and
the diaphragm massages the bowels as it is designed to, etc. etc.
We took Caterina to a 'fair'. It was above Castel Vecchio,
looking straight across a wooded valley with a rim of clean, rolling
fields. We could see Where we had walked in the first heat of
the summer, trying to find the ruins; now the ruins were invisible,
hugged in one of the deep valleys. We st trolled up to where the
fair should have been, at the top of a hill, like a high plateau.
There was the usual chaasso of an Italian gathering, in the distanc e--
voices raised, bells, cries, hooting horns, whistles, laughter.
Luciano had told us about this fair: at one time, even ten years
ago, it had been famous in the whole countryside, the big annual
event to which people walked ten and twenty miles; hundreds of
horses were for sale, filling an immense field; there were calves,
pigs, merry-go-rounds, roasting booths, plenty to drink; there
were music and dancing, and the peasants wore their costumes.
Men had got drunk and sang at the top of their voices.


And when we got to the top of the hill we found four or
five solitary booths selling sweets, toys, oddments like bootlaces
and pooket-kinves. There was an air of self-conscious desolation
over everything. We looked for cattle, horses, sheep: nothing.
Caterina shrugged and laughed---'How things have changed!' There
was a table and bench where a few men sat drinking white wine in
a perplexed and vacant way. There was rubbish on the ground,
people were ill-dressed; there was one shy-looking W omen in peasant
costume, standing alone, not knowing what to do while her husband
sat at the table. Youths looked round them, gawping and heavy---
they'd come for fun. We looked into the woods---nothing. Why
had people come, then? To buy a bag of sweets they could get
in the shops? Perhaps they'd all expected something more, like
us. The white cloak of the woman in costume gleamed proudly.
A shepherd had scrubbed himself and his two children so clean that
the three of them looked polished, and they were walking back home,
the children clutching flimsy plastic pistols. But nobody minded.
We laughed. Nothing is destroyed So fast and with so little regret
as in Italy. They're used to it. 'Better to stay at home ironing!'
Caterina said.
Don Amigo gave me an Italian New Testament and I was struck
by the rhythm and simplicity of the language. It was the same as
the King James version, the same rhythm and tone; you would think
one word had been exchanged for its perfect equivalent. e It was
clearer to me than ever before that we belong to the same civilis-
ation, like a close family:
Ora i Giudei lo cercavano alla festa e dicevano: Lui dovtè?
E tra la gente era un gran mororare di lui. Gli uni dicevano:
'E buono' altri: 'No; anzi travia il popolo'.


Nessuno pero ne parlava in palese per paura de' Giudei.
Ma già nel mezzo della festa Gesu sali nel tempio a insegnare.
E i Giudei ne stupivano, dicendo: Come mai costui sa di
lettere senza aver mai studiato?
Gesù prese a dir loro: La mia dottrina non e mia, ma di
chi mi ha mandato.
Then the Jews sought him a t the feast and said: Where is he?
And there was much murmuring among the people concerning him. For
some said: 'He is a good man 1 others said: 'Nay; but he deceiveth
the people'.
Howbeit no man spake openly of him for fear of the Jews.
Now about the midst of the feast Jesus went up into the temple,
and taught.
And the Jews marvelled, saying: How knoweth this man letters,
having never learned?
Jesus answered them and said: My doctrine is not mine, but
his that sent me.
Yet, since that time, our languages hav e become 'foreign' to
each other. When I read the two languaged side by side it makes
me feel that we weren't foreigners to each other in those times as
we are now. Europe was an actuality as it has never been since.
Italian has changed: really it has been abolished as language--
what Dante started wasn't fulfilled; it defies being learned
because it has an infinite number of rhythms suitable for different
situations and areas and attitudes---rather like a distracted
person who can settle to nothing, through having been forbidden
to concentrate on anything; the language shows the mark of the
Counter-Reformation as the people dops. There are words no
dictionary will tell you about---even if adequate dictionaries
existed: Italian has been locked in a sort of desert for SO long,


separated from the rest of its family in Europe, that it has
become a formless pool of words and dialects through which the
writer has to flounder to find a rhythm of his OWn. The con-
structions have no decided and universal rhythm as French and
English ones do.
The other day Luciano's family asked us to write a letter of
thanks for them---to someone in Switzerland Who had sent them
photographs. They naturally assumed that I was less foreign to
the language than they were. Thelanguage wasn't their possession.
By being educated, we knew more of its secrets, had more of a right
to it. And they looked over my shoulders like foreigners as I
wrote. A foreign or strange use of language isn't as foreign
and strange to them as it would be, in a similar case, to French
or English people. The Italians who correct your language punct-
alwoy
iliously
have an attitude of some kind---a mild national-
ism; they would like you to believe that a fixed and authentic
national language existed, but it doesn't.
An idiotic note at the beginning of the little New Testament
Don Amigo has given me: The faithful, who for at least a quarter
of an hour read the books of the Holy Scripture with veneration and
as sacred writing may gai in with contrite heart a partial indulgence
Time agaiin! TRe sewards % time!
of three years.' But-for- u #
ounte
mer T
This morning, Sunday---a convoy of cars, small trucks,
motor-scooters come and park themselves round us; ; before first
light. Like an invasion---voices raised, dogs barking, rifles
being cocked.
They walk under our bedroom window talking as if


it was full noon. This isn't boorishness. To 'disturb' in
Italy---disturbare---doesn't mean to violate somone's peace so much
as to 'put someone out'. Violating someone's peace is impossible
because no one is thought to have any: inner peace doesn't exist,
so it can't be held sacred.
Therefore cars, guns, televisions,
radios quickly become nuisances in Italian hands. The whole inner
theme of conscience in our sense is missing. Compassion, fellow-
feeling (perhaps stronger than ours), timidity, fear of the law,
prudence, takef its place. The Church broke the interior mono-
logue, as you find it broken in, say, political prisoners. The
Italian no longer had any right to choose for himself---even between
right and wrong: it must be referred to the priest. This is the
sense of life I get from Don Amigo, now that I know him. Given
the power, he would close my mind, and all my books, without a
moment's thought. He is rigid and stern, and even perhaps relent-
less in a Lutheran way, under his mildness.
Italy had peace once: I mean, in people---something more than
the sound nerves that they have at present, an inheritance from that
peace. You can hear it in their music of the fourteenth and fif-
teenth centuries---an extraodrinary silence like another rhythm we
have never been allowed to hear, in our broken and shattered lives.
Only Schubert perhaps, in the north, really captures that stillness.
Their voices in the early morning are dry, barren, dusty,
unenchanted by a moment's enlightenment, that is, real choice.
The enlightenment missed Italy.
The worst flood in Italy since the war: a broken dyke.
A vast wave, said to be a hundred metres high, swept down the
Piave from lake Vaiont through villages, sweeping them away,
uprooting trees; the whole area is silent and devastated, without


a sign of life.
Thousands of people buried and drowned.
The papers say that in the seventy years after 1889 there
were four great dam-bursts in the world. EutIn the last four
years alone there have been seven.
I saw Sergio this morning on his way into the village, erect
and stern-lboking on his motor-scooter. He was wearing a jacket
kim
and the effect of this was to makeylook like an English country
gentlemen, if there are any left---lined, ruddy, with fine eyes.
I was astonished to see the resemblance---for a fleeting moment.
kim
The optmmism in his Bace makes E quite different from the others.
Etruscan
y lact as yousee ikin tke fomb-ligures.
His mouth bears the ancient optimism/ P
HST L There is
something uncrushed in him. A great dreamer---he can't wait to
get to town every day, just to stand in the piazza and dream.
'He's mad for the town!' Caterina says. He's moving there to
complete the dream. Soon they'll be installed: the water and
ligh t are there.
Gianni is off again, this time to.Rome. We were away in
Lucca when he called last. We talk about him together, wondering
if he will get 'blunted'.
With the return of the warm weather there are thunderstorms
again and sudden flashes of lightning. At Lucca, after a clear
evening, a wind started up in the middle of the night---our familiar
little tornado---and died as suddenly as it had started.
The swifts were forming up on the wires this morning, for their
migration. They were side by side along the two aparallel wires
as far as we could see, stretching far down into the valley,
like hundreds of tiny sobdiers. Then they flew off south in a
great mass, as if by a silent signal.
I went down into the podere and tasted the grapes. I tried


Gianni's suggestion---biting them straight off the vine without
touching them with my hands. They taste so fresh that they burn
the throat. Every vine tastes different, and every part of each
vine tastes different. Comparing the tastes, I found the highest
were the best; an old man in northern Tuscany once told me that
the best wine in his experience came from grapes grown in the form
of a roof, along wires. His wine, he said, would keep for five or
ten years without spoiling.
One of our vines, with white grapes, stands alone and has
grown as tall as a fruit tree, supporting itself on a pear-tree at
its side. The grapes are for eating, swollen and juicy.
Many of the grapes aren't ripe even now : some of the vines
are blighted, and their grapes hang in shrivelled clusters, like
dried raisins. This is partly the excessive rain and partly cere-f
less copper-sulpha te spraying.
The weather suddenly became normal for early autumn, with radiant
and warm sunshine and a CO ol breeze. Evrybody rubbed their hands:
it would push the wine up to ten or eleven degrees, perhaps. The
podere below lay in its hot, still basin, glorying in it. The
flies came back, as in July. I killed our second SC orpion.
Gianni returned, looking thin and in some way liberated;
also very serious. He drank a glass of wine with us and described
the long journeys to Caserta and north to Bergamo, where it was
cold. 'Tiring?' I asked. 'No, not tiring at all! But---it's
too much.' He would come to Rome with us, perhaps---look for a
job. Far from being blunted, he seems frailer.
The golden weather ceased suddenly, the sky darkened and than
unloaded such an enormous quantity of water that our well was full


in a few minutes and a cascading river had formed down our rocky
path, making the hill look like Austria. It poured down relentlessly
and everyone said, 'Now---now the wine's finished!'
But then the glowing autumn weather came back again, and
remained even longer. And at this moment, after five or six
splendid days that were like an autumn belonging to a different
year, and therefore a sort of uncanny dream, it has begun to rain
again. An extraordinery darkness comes over the valley, like
night in the middle of the afternoon. The gullies outside quickly
form rivers. The wind howls. The road is a pool of mud.
The rain comes gently at first, then more and more powerfully.
And now the whole roof is thundering with its force, so violent
that the house with its massive walls, which have stood the weather
of five centruies, seems about to collapse at last.