The Barrie Group of Publishers (Barrie Books Ltd) Directors: Hon. AG Samuel (Chairman) L A Ullstein (Managing) J Bunting TEagle EGodfrey JPattisson BUllstein RWadleigh
Barrie & Rockliff
2 Clement's Inn
The Cresset Press Strand
London WC2
Herbert Jenkins Telephone: 01-242 9171
Cables: Barricliff London
Hammond Hammond
M. Rowdon, Esq.,
28th November, 1967.
49 Waldron Road,
London S.W.18.
Dear Maurice,
Thank you very much for your letter. WAITING FOR MELLI sounds very
interesting. I don't know of course how far you have got with it and simply
on a few lines of description I might have got the whole thing wrong. I
think I should, though, raise one faint warning noise. Whether we like it or
not, the book trade is pretty conservative and is occasionally a bit reluctant
to abandon its long held classifications. Novels are novels, autobiographies
are autobiographies and travel books are travel books. A combination of these
is apt to throw it into a state of jitters and dismay, from which the easiest
way out is not to buy it. Of course any rule can be broken triumphantly if
the book itself is outstanding enough, and I most certainly don't want to
discourage you from breaking new ground and doing something original. I am
just making warning noises in case we have to talk in much the same way when
the manuscript arrives. If in fact the book is a personal record, might it
not be simpler to make it just that and drop the fictional approach altogether?
You may of course have perfectly valid reasons but what you have to say may well
be of sufficient interest to stand on its own feet without being supported by
a fictional prop.
The third volume of the Italian trilogy also sounds interesting,
particularly in view of the reviews of the first two volumes. But the Gollancz
angle raises a question in my mind. Are you allowed to offer it to us? The
other point is a little delicate but I feel I know you well enough to be frank:
has it in fact already been offered to Gollancz?
I am very glad about your two forthcoming books from Collins and Weidenfeld
and I hope they are very successful. I do hope this letter does not sound
over-cautious and discouraging - that is the last impression I want to make
and I am keenly looking forward to the next manuscript from you. Any time you
feel like a drink, do give me a ring.
Yours,
Richard
Richard Wadleigh
RW/ak
Cc: LAU
CCML


THE LAST ITALY
Maurice Rowdon


A di
oto 1 l
Atuéc
Irag
hittle halhe
panez
The Road to Volt terra
Yet
The road outside hasn t/been asphal ted and-ts a
blinding dusty étrip # the morning sunlight, ft goes
to Volterra. 1 I've seen a salamander twice, darting,
aeross the pebbles; anea Little Owl stuing on a mile-
stone ir-brond-dayltens staring at us craning his neok
/ roundg also-grass-snake, and a weasle. Thereare Many
live
cuckoos in the woods above ué, apa sometimes they sing on
the lower note only, three straight notes 1ike a train-
and R pefru tins
sucs cats
hooter/ hnd-Hearly always thereis a nightingale) af
al hgue Ch
voic
night, close to our window, uttenloned There-are
aye-bitas
roan
Hhorr
rerean
Tonu Foxsajian the woods but we never hear ORE bark. Sometimes i Uwk.
A pheasant OFL woodgrouse flaps away close to thehouse, with
an echoing cry of alarm. There are warblers and wheatears
and stonechataf many house-martins, but I've only seen
LveTgA,
one swallow sofar. The house-martinslewooped over the
wher we us ued i 1h
house for a few days after a
- 4 # ved tosee whet a sddden
tuichl
movement-wes-about, but they seento-mave lost interest A se
totto
fow. I was surprised to see a jay yeetertay with its
wine-coloured breast, flapping down heavily from one


litle
rock, a
peak,
branch to another.
Tue
fad
our house is so ramshackle it looks as if it Xs growp
ing into the hill, The tiles are (mellowdd, ther glow in
the last of the sun. A truck passes and. sends up a spray
fane - te U iudnc, u L a su h ua, G L14
of white powder into the windomp. You enter a tiny court-
doe,
yard with a foul dark well and rotten barn-doors hanging
off their hinges, sha old carts with their shafts up.
"tere-arakeusty bisouit tins/tied to the rafters with
a blaa
wire, for the pigeons to sit and coo 10 There-are
le dusy a the Ce Ilar,
Barrels and broken demijohns and a wine-prossk The old
stones underfoot ere uneven, with cow-piss ouzing between
them. The gate has gone. Grass grows out of the holes
left by the hinges. A corrugated iron roof by the well
ruins any chance of prettiness. Plants push up between
the dusty bricks of the walls. Bricks are missi ing---
used to hold down haystacks in the wind. Stucoo has peel-
ed away from the house, layers of it. There is a stench
of pig. TWO SOws are sniffing at their low doors, in
their dark cabins hardly bigger than themselves. They
never see daylight, except when the muok is cleared and
the ir swill thrown in. They squeal to be let out, and
gets terrific blows on the nose from a hay-rake.
Upstairs the windows are dark, cobwebbed, and they
make you think there are old people peering through them
from ages ago, when everything was neat and humming here.
The cows shift in the stable with a thump of the hoof,
then a soft blowing through the nostrils. Up the steps,
which are broken, there are the peasant rooms, but no


peasants. The walls are black with smoke. Some of
the beams hang, kept up by the main shaft. There are
holes in the roof, and fungoid strips down the wall
where the rain has been pouring. In a dark room where
the old lavatory sits-eea s imple hole in the floor,
still stinking---there are hams hanging from the rafters,
and bags of white beans, tomatoes hangtne in clusters to
dry, onions, demijohns of last year's wine with jam-jars
over their mouths to keep the mice out, little barrels
of vin santo, their tops cemented, and bags of maize for
the pigeons, chiokens. You can hardly see out of the
tiny window. The filthy glass makes the little court-
yard below glow vaguely, in the last sun. It is silent.
This is our home. Upstairs tha owners---who never
come except to take their annual share of the wine and
oil and grain---have built a palazzino, a 'little palace?
meaning a couple of rooms with crushed-marble floors and
a balcony of about six square yards leading from one of
them, with real ceilings where the rats and mice play at
night. The balcony looks out across the farm belonging
to the house, a dapping field of about ten acres, orowded
with vines and olive trees and plum trees and pear trees
and apple trees and almond trees, all sloping down to a
wooded stream, usually dry in the summer. You could
look down at this crowded field for hours, as the sun
begins to fall. It speaks to you about the past.
A peasant called Bartolino---to us Gino---comes and
works it every day. Soon after dawn we hear the COWS


thumping out of the barn underneath us, with him q ietly
swearing at them. Their heavy chains ring together.
They blow heavily in the couryard.
We fixed up a straw mat over the baleony, against
the bliding sun. Right underneath is the Volterra road,
hardly ever used. People seem to have something against
chessi-
it. Mainly it ruins the springs with its potholes, and
covers the ear with a film of dust. But partly is has
a reputation for not being safe. Centuries ago wars
were fought along it, with tho Volterrans.
Above us the hill slopes abruptly, to dense woods
thorty or forty kilometres deep, and rocky pa ths where
there are millions of fossils thrown up by volcanic
erutpions before history started. A whole sea=bed was
suddenly disgorged into the air, 1t looks like. The patk
above our house is blinding in the midday sun. It is
white with dust and slippery rooks. You have to be
careful of the vipers if there hasn't been rain for some
time. A dog helps you there. She steps suddenly and
sits down. She never sniffs after a snake. Her nose
is the one fatal place, where they cen bite.
Looking from our balcony we can see a real 'palace',
its walls a glowing terracotta, with farmhouses clustered
round it, attached to it like servants who slowly got a
grip on the master and wouldn't let go until he was suff-
ocated. The 'padace is in fact on its kne es. Its
long hall on the first floor, like a tiny ruined ballroom,


is unsafe to walk in for the loose tiles overhead and the
shakey floor underfoot. The windows are planked up.
We went over it one day. There are rat droppings every-
where, black masses of them. A stink of damp hangs in
the air. The 'mastert doesn't come here any more. He
used to give dances here. The peasants watehed from
below. There were horses then. A grand guest might
drive up in a car. There were vine-pergolas round the
house, with bemhes underneath, and bursting apricot and
peach trees, and pomegranates, and a stone fountain which
is now grown over with weeds. There were roses, which
peep wild through the grass now.
All round this tiny one-house village the vineyards
were neat, the land straight-ploughed. The olive trees
stood with their pruned branches spread up like an open
palm, with a spray of leaves and blossoms between the
fingors. In the last waz the Germans occupied this
'palace'. One of them was killed by a mortar bomb and
they buried him by the footpeth under a stone. His
wife came after the war to see the spot, when he had
already been removed to a cemetery. The Morrocans
used the barn as a hospital. Their wounded lay in the
hay groaning. The peasants tore down the leafy pergola
over their door because troops found it nice to eat under.
I went with Gino to an ugly little house just down
the road from us. He said the woman there might help us
get the house straight. She opened the door at the top


of the steps in the blinding midday sunlight. It was
May. She had the glowing oopper face of a sypsy, and
emiled carelessly. Her name was Armida. She was to
help us, Gino said. Next morning she came and got the
kitchen straight. Her husband, Dino, talked to me in
the evening. He calls out in a hearty, husky voice.
His face is always in a smile, fixed, bright, Etruscen.
His head is always lifted, to scent new adventures.
He attached h: inself to us at once. They have a grown-
up son who works in a merble-yard at Poggibonsi. Their
little house was once a briok-kiln, until the last war,
hence its ugliness. Mice seurry about while we sit at
table with them, drinking wine. The
are
windows
cracked.
Dino says he doesn't care because the house is only theirs
for a year. They pay no rent. They will move into 'town',
to a new flat, when it is ready. They have been sat ving
for years to pay for it.Armida 1s doubtful about the move.
But Dino, with his quiok, scenting air, his endless optimism,
knows it will be just the thing.
Armida grew up in the woods. She went everywhere
on horseback, as a child---no saddle. Up in the hills
behind the woods, on a vast green plateau, a horse-fair
was held every year---danc ing, drinking, horse-buying.
It is dying out now, she says. But we say we shall take
her there, to see.
Dino will be a worker when they move to their flat,
not a peasant any more. That is, he will be hired by the
day. Instead of working until sundown he will knock off


at five sharp, and instead of staring before dawn he will
get to work at eight o'clock.
The old orop-sharing system, called mezzadria, is
dying, end will soon be ruled out by a government bill.
It worked for big families farming hilly, multi-crop
farms. It doesn't work for the big mechanised holdings
of the future, and for small families Which divide up
early, with the children going into factories.
Dino was born at the 'palace'. He was one of the
peasants who chopped down the vine-pergola in the last
war. He and his brother did it. They had nothing
against the Germans but didn't want them C oming every
day, to attract enemy fire. Dino ocmes to our courtyard
in the morning, on his way to the fields, calling up my
Italianised name. In the evening we sit with him by
what would be the gate if it weren't missing, or we stroll
down the road to his house, where his son Sivano is sitting
exhausted, with marble-dust in his ears.
There are children. at the 'palace'. We hear their
voices in the dying light. Gabriella has just started
work in 'town', sewing. Her sister Graziella is still
at school. They are both dark, pretty, giggling.
A car swishes past on the powdery road, and we all
stare at it. Sometimes Dino and Gino call to us from
across the fields, to our balcony. There is always
some business to be done---we need same wine, or oil,
or beans, or a terracotta oil-pot to put earth and
geraniums in. Or they need a lift to town'. or


a letter has arrived. or a telegram. or we are being
called to a Averlia, a twake', which means we sit and talk
in the semi-darkness in one of the farmhouses, until mid-
night or so.
Up the hill there two or three more houses, including
that of Paolo the shepherd, at the very top, standing in
its own cool plateau at the edge of #e woods.
From its farm below the road our house looks like
a miniature castle, with massive sloping walls. It might
have been a defensive position once, in the middle ages.
Every sound fells clear in the valley---the midday bell
from 'town', the pad-pad of sheep following Paolo down
the rocky path, the hun of a car approaching. Then the
silence draws round again.
In the darkness last night, on the rocky path, we
met Gianni. He lives in a house hidden at the edge of
the woods, just below Paolo the shepherd. Even in the
dark we could see that he was blond in the Italian way,
with rather curly hair and freckles. His eyes were
large, he had a frank, gay face. He made a sort of
speech (the first of many): we must come and see his
mother; the air here wes invigorating, superior to
city-air; his family would make us welcome; we would
find them friendly folk; in this part of Tuscany people
were open; once you made a friend he was your friend for


life. He shouted all this across the darkness rhetor-
ically, standing on one of the bare, slippery, voleanic
stones that mark our hill. His voice rang out in the
still eir, with the sky clear and bright overhead.
nodded in a bewildered way and the moment his speech was
finished he stalked off up the hill with a dramatic
'Felice nottet', the country-way of saying good night--
a happy night to you!
The speech gave no idea of his gaiety, a of his
soft flexible intimacy, d his frolics and puns and
devil-may-care laugh. We put him at twenty-two or
twenty-three.
We saw his home today. It is a
humped house
long,
with an outdoor brick staircase like ours. The dwelling
rooms are above. It must be mediaevel. They hate it-me
'dirty and inconvenient'. A worker from 'town? who
happened to be there said with a seowl, 'I wouldn't live
up here 1f you paid mel I'd blow the whole hot up
tomorrow.' They can*tbunders tand how we can admire 1t,
and they laugh.
He has two brothers, Luigi who works in town at a
compressed-wood factory, and Angelo who looks after the
farm with his mother. They have oxen, and three or four
large fiedhs with grain, vines, olive trees and some
fruit. The woods slope up directly from their fields.
The wheat is just beginning to get high. Angelo is tall
and gangling next to Gianni. He smiles, shows bad
teeth. 'A good ladg' his mother says-ee 'He works hardg*


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---"andonna
cane-ea (e favourite ourse)---"where's the sickle?'
They work endlessly, even while we are there. She is
shrivelled and dried-up with work, She lost her husband
in the war and has brought up her three sons alone. She
taught one of them to work enough for two, another to work
enough for himself and Gianni to play the fool. In a
familyyou need everything.
She gets a tiny state pension, about ten pounds a
month, for having lost her husband, The peasants all
round say that this is why her sons are spoiled,
why
Gianni won't work. I say he has imagination, and they
smile. They say he's clever, yes, but he '11 come to
nothing. They say that the fat pension robbed the
family of its incentive. The father was a fine man.
He was leading oxen through the woods, for the Germans.
They were pulling an ammunition eart and one of the
wheels went over a landmine. The oxen dashed away.
The Germans jumped free but the cart blew up and he
blew up with it. He was not yet thirty. A Woman left
on her own is an element of suspieion, fear for the
peasants. She is the serpent untempered by a watchful
husband. Serpents are hated. They are beaten to death
mercilessly in the fields, even the harmless ones.
'Uccht the peasants say fastidiously, a serpent is a
horrible thing?


She W orks and works. All she 1s, all she thinks is
work. Perhaps the unyielding eyes of the peasant men keep
her at it.
When you pass Gianni's house at meal-time there is
the sound of fierce gaiety. The boys bang the table,
shout at the top of their voices, sing. She sereams at
them, toothless. They lift her up in their arms.
Their two oman are kept roped up in their stalls
under the staircase. Gianni calls them 'veal' end,
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 er 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 8o that they won't move too far. They have
just room to turn their heads and look at the door, but
they can hardly raise their. heads, unless they lie down.
We walk outside to the vines. Gianni wants cleaner
work. He strolls along between us, rether poutingly,
flicking at the grass with his switch. He has bright
eyes that flicker with amusement. He responds to every-
thing with anazing quickness. He has dreams: the land
is a drudgery that never stops, he says. It take away
your dignity. He hates to get his hands dirty.


Gino's wine is good---thick and dark. We eat lunch
in our tiny kitchen, with the cane sun-curtain right down
over the window. Strips of blidning light gleam across
the room, enough for us to see by. The afternoon throbs
outside.
We put our car in the courtyard below, which is in-
convenient for Gino, who has to get his oxen in and out
nearly every day. He doesn't say anything, knowing we
are paying a rent to his padrona; and we don't at first
see the inc onvenience. The car keeps getting burst
tyres. I keep going down and changing the wheel. of
course he is bursting the tyre each tiem, with a nail.
When he and the other peasants see me working at the
wheel it seems to draw them closer to me. They are
astonished that I can do anything practical. I am no
longer in the padrona's feckless and helpless class for
them. The car-tyres cease getting punctured. And then
I begin to leave the car outside the 'gates'.
Nobody can imagine why we want to live among theme
There must be a trick. The padrone, the middle class
of the 'town', rather despise us for living among people
they have always though t filthy and shameful.
They guess
that we aan have no self-respect.
As yet townspeople are not looking for houses in the
country. It will happen in a rush, as life in the cities
is less and less bearable.
The peasants are straight, trusting. We CO across
the valley to the Agnarelli family sometimes. They live


in a house among tall holm-oaks, looking like Austria.
There are two brothers who don't get on, with four or five
children between them. The women bake bread, put the
sign of the oross on it to make it come out well. They
do about twenty loaves at a time and the smoke pours up
the side of the house, blacking the wall. They C ompla in
about their padrone, how he won't put money into the farm.
But the poor old swine is weighed down by taxes, they say.
They are all communist. It is the only form of self-
defence they have.
As we move into June the weather colla pses in an
uncanny way. Instead of the usual implacable sun rising
1ike a great copper gong in the morning and beginning to
weigh heavier and heavier on the earth with remoreless
fire in the day, black clouds drift over an d a biting
wind, with the kind of rain I have never seen in Italy
before. The old rain was soft, drenching, from a low,
dazzling-white sky overhead. It would rain for an hour,
a day, a week, but then the low white mist above would
grow brighter and brighter until the su was clear, and
then everything wculd dry, swiftly, and the great copper
gong would begin its visits again.
We had to put a bowl of hot cinders in our bed (hooked
on to a wooden hoop), it got so cold. We build wood fires
in the kitchen. The midday sun no longer piere es the
slats of the cane sunshade. The eky is gloomy, angry.
The balcony is chill now, with its sodden straw mat over-
head. The road under the house no longer sends up a


fine powder, but the cars hiss past, splashing. Gino
swears more when the oxen come out in the morning. The
old serenity 1s gone. The young wheat bends over under
the wind, breaks in the hail. The fields look as though
fantastic huge birds have been beating over them, flatten-
ing the stalks.
It goes on and ono There is a brief hope of the
dark clouds parting, the sun paerces for a moment---hot,
too hot---but other clouds take over. The old houses
that have drowesed under the sun for centuries now begin
to let the water through, even the inhabited. ones, not
only our old wreck. At first the peasants like it.
The rain cools the air, and it makes work in the fields
easier. On the other hand you have to slop through the
muddy ruts. And then too much rain will endanger the
wine. It could ruin the wheat. At first it looks like
freakish weather. But it goes on and on. The peasnats
talk about the atom bomb as being the cause. But they
dontt really believe it. They begin to say that there
are no longer 'seas ons these days. It is a process that
has been happening for years, they say. There have been
odd cold snaps in May. The Italian sun no longer gilds
every experience. The Italian light o ollapses. But
the old light was a matter of air as well. It wes a
unity of warm, level air and brightness, that did the
body good, that made the legs spring along. The warnth
and the light went together.


It has been raining for days with low misty cl ouds
hanging round the house. There are stupendous crackling
thunderstorms at night, lasting for hours, sometimes the
whole night through, rumbling among the dense clouds.
There are sudden blinding flashes, crashes that shake
the house. I'm here alone for a few days. Dino tells
me he would be frightened to sleep here alone, even in
serene weather. He admires me for it. The oxen under-
neath the bedroom stamp and shift their chains, breathe
out with a great puff. When they feel peace they slump
down with a thump that echoes through the house. The
pigeons flutter the ir wings suddenly, shift in their loft.
The stable underneath makes a sort of central heating.
Without the animals the house would be an icebox.
Last night I went to see a film with Gianni. Toto
the comic was playing. It thrilled me being in the long
bare hall, 1ike a palace dreamed up by people far away,
with youths down in the front stalls whistling, shotuing,
chewing chocolate, smoking, putting their arms out on
the back of the seats, crossing their legs over the seats
in front.
Before the film we went to Poggibonsi, which two
years ago (people say) had ten thousand inhabitants and
now has forty thousand, though is an exaggeration. The
roads are being torn up, there are smokey 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 look different


there, lively and optimistic. Noise, light, company,
these are what they yearn for. Gianni said he went to
Poggibonsi for the whores. But the fact is he had no
m oney, for whores or anything else. He free-wheels down
the rocky path on his Lambretta to save petrol.
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 is before a dazzling
autumn day. The valley looked still, hushed. There
were deep shadows under the olive trees, the saplings in
the dip were black and mysterious. The lights of the
etown? 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, inolud-
ing myself, into a signle motionless unit.
In the morning I watched a hen pecking away outside
the wastepipe from our kitchen and thought to myself,
'You'd better look out-e-the shops sell poisons nowadays--e
detergents, bleaches.' And later she was dead. There
was a great clucking from the other hens which brought
me downstairs, and she was just moving her claws for the
last time, lying on her side. The others were 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. The pigeons too were curious and
awed at this death. They gazed towards the corpse from


the barn roof and didn't flap about as usual.
Then Gino the peasant came and threw the corpse
awer. 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 main square in town' today said
that the unusual weather was due to experiments in space.
He said it had started with the use of spaceoraft. The
scientists knew it changed the weather but kept quiet about
it. There are articles in the paper about how the space-
oraft by erossing a radioactive zone called Van Ellen's
belt round the earth, two axt or three hundred miles up,
may be disturbing a sort of weather-factory. The barber
sadd that in sixty years he had never known weather like
this.
Gianni, on his way to cut forage for 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 clouds.
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.
Paolo the shepherd appeared with a calf seven or
eight months old. He had arranged with Gino to keep it
overnight in our stable, as it must go for salughtering
in the morning. 'People want ten der 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 wobbly legs, her eyes wide and round.
Today pe ople ate meat as never before, Paolo said. So
you had to kill the animals before their time. This
calf would fetoh twiee the price if left to grow for
another six months. Not so long ago meat had been a
special dish---for Sundays and holidays. That had always
been the case in his family. It was how hetd grown up.
Now everybody, includi ng his own femily, ate meat at
least once a day and sometimes twice. The huge cities
had to be supported. Somore and more beasts were
slaughtered. Itbeouldn't go on, he said, unless they
found a way of manufac eturing meat in factories. They
had found ways of producing wine without grapes s0-ee-t
of course the animal feed was pepped up nowadays. 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 a bad effect on the animal raceitself.
What was the result when you inseminated cows and reared
their young by foreed feeding, when you even kept them
in batteries like chickens? 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 an d they were slaugh tered When they were
strong, heavy, full-grown beasts. The meaty was tastey
and substantial, and if the pasture was right 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 a
beast off to slaughter when you could get twice or three
times the money for it later!' And he flicked the ereature
with hisswitch.
What would happen to the animal race? It would degen-
erate. Disease would start. The dootors, 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 dow the drain if we
didn't take exercise and never saw the light of day, so
will the animals.
Paolo is sharp and wide-eyed, and shows no interest
in anything but money. He would sell me and my wife
for a thousand lire if he could. When he takes money
he makea a kind of gasp. Gianni says he has become quite
a rich man in the last few years, caleulating every cent,
putting cow's milk into his sheep-cheeses and selling his
diseased sheep as healthy meat.
He gave us bad cheese the other day. Also he charges
us ten lire more per litre of milk than the shops in 'town'
do. He gives us the slops. Gianni says quietly,
'Fhilistine.'
Paolo only talked on the theme of healthy meat because
I started him on it. He doesn't give a damn about the
animals in fact.


After a few days of sun it goes on raining, with
thunderstorms and wind. Nearly three weeks of it now.
It has turned the rocky path above the house into a
yellow rushing stream. The water whirls ro und at the
bend outside our courtyard and cascades down to the road.
Its endless muffled thunder makes the place feel like
Austria. Patches of damp form on our ceilings. We
put buckets everywhere to catch the drops.
New potholes appear in the road. Peasants clump
past with their great green umbrellas held up, or a coat
flung over their heads. Sometimes the rain becomes, ioy,
smarting, hissing sleet. At night a dozen thunderstorms
take place. Lighaning flickers in every part of the sky.
It is so constant that the countryside is lit up for
minutes on end. The thunder is continuous, a rumble
that stirs into a clap now and then.
People keep mentioning last winder---the unusual
deep snow, the recurment frosts, over a period of two
months. Biting win ds as late as April.
Paolo the shepherd won't leave milk any more
because we e omplained to Dino about the cheese he had
given us. It wasn't bad really, only too young.
Three etti of its weight was liquid.
I met him in town'. It was the feast of Corpus
Domini. I asked him, Whet about the milk today?'
He was dressed in his best, with a neat trilby hat and a
feather.
'Ah,' he said, I forgot it---today being a holiday.


They were just strewing flower-petals down the
middle of the cobbled street for the procession, which
passed 1ike the end of the world. It happens because
it happens. A surpliced boy goes in front ringing a
bell. There are girls in their first communion white,
with veils. The two files on either side grow more
adult as they pass. The faces are mournful, fixed
with tedi ium. People tramp, more than walk. It looks
like the last procession there will ever be. The sun
shines a little, in a big watery sky, brightening the
children's faces for a moment. The bishop's canopy
passes. There is our landlady, her face drawn down,
in yellowish pallor, her shoulders hunched, her feet
plodding. And further back there is her daughter,
her hair loose all over her shoulders in a way that
looks distracted, a little mad. The women are
separate from the men. At the back the cathedral's
choir master, a heavy youth with a thick jowl and
eyes that always stare in the same way, as if they
can't see, leads a group of boys in a ragged song,
like somnambulists. As soon as the procession is past
the town-sweepers appear with their witchés brooms
to sweep the petals into vivid little piles, and
behind them comes the garbage van at a snail's pace.
In a moment the street is as clean of flowers---
carefully picked for a week before by townswomen
at the edge of our woods---as it was before.
The peasant across the valley who is 8 ometimes


called 11 mafioso because of his s1 tocky, piratic look
told us that at one time, before the war, this process-
ion was a grand, colourful affair, with the main square
packed with people. There were mountains of flowers
in the church. But the pope of that time decreed that
communists were to be exec communicated, he said, some
per forzat of coursel--eall the men began tostay away.
Now you see the churches half empty, and the Corpus
Domini procession is a thing for children, who go carry-
ing their lilies, dressed in their communion white,
without knowing quite what itis all about.
*People aren't communist because they don't believe
in God,* he said, 'but because they want better lives.'
His a eyes shone when he talked about the processions
as they used to be.
Gianni again claimed that he goes to Poggibonsi
twice a week and spend S thousand lire 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. He said what a fine thing
woman had---'though not pretty perhaps'. He made
a little ironical speech extolling nature for having
given this woman this thing, this 'key to pleasure'
(*chiavere', to lock', meaning to fornicate). A
smile trembled on his lips all the time.
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 is he


egrees to your being engaged to her he invites you
home, and this i8 the first of many long tedious
visits throughout life. He doesn it want that, he
says.
His mother shouts, When are you going to marry?'
When is he g oing to get a job? He leaves the cleaning
of the stables to Angelo. He is 'rash' and "forward'.
But he has imagination, fantasia. He used to pain
madonninas as a child. And they respect this. He
has flair, pers onality. Angelo, who clears out the
cowshit, knows he hasn't.
Gianni has a special path to tread, they say, and
they don't know what it is. Nor does he.
He came with us all the way to Siena. He suddenly
decided to, on the outskirts of town'. He seems not to
want his brother Luigi to come. His family doesn't
know about things', he sayd. He notices everything out-
side the window as it flashes by---piecemeal, in the
Italian way; without a sustained inner theme. And
when he isn't noticing things he is asleep like a
child, With his hand round our dog's neck.
On the outskirts of Poggibonsi he gets excited at
the hideous new factories going up in the fields.
'Bello!' he shouts. *Bello da verot How lovely they
aret
Gianni said when we first met him, 'I'm looking
for a job. There's no money here. I can't find work.'
It was a dark picture. But his padrone is generous


with them, he says. He owns a number of factories in
Torino. All the produce of the ir land---wheat, maize,
vine, oil, fruit and vegetables---goes to theme The
padrone simply takes forty-seven percent of the money
derived from selling cattle (about four head a year).
So they have a house Which though they despise it is
sturdy and dry, for which they pay no rent. They get
all the wine and oil they need for the year, plus an
income from the cattle. The owner pays the taxes.
But for this the family has to work like dogs, but
only because it is a dog's life for them, spiritually.
Worked out on better they are better off than most
industrial working families, though they get no sick
benefit or pension. But then many industrial workers
are swindled out of it, they say. The lack of any
social scheme for the peasants is the reason for the
rural strikes that go on all the t ime. They are so
usual that only a few peasants acknowledge them.
The work has to be done. Otherwise they starve.
When we got back fon Siena it was dark. We
found Angelo wotking on the rocky path with Paolo
the shepherd. The endless flow of water had blocked
the gullies with mud and stone.
Gianni asked to get out of the car fifty yards
back. He wanted to visit Pescille, where there are
the two young girls. And he knew his brother was
working further up the hill. He wanted to avoid
reproach. Angelo said quietly to us in the dark-


ness, pushing at his long spade, 'Did my brother come
back with you?'
Everyone seems to grudge Gianni these journeys to
Siena. I believe he makes much of them. It is a kind
of new social position for him. Dino joked about it
as Gianni got out of the car. He was standing in the
darkness, spare and sunburned, and said to us with a
smile, 'If you're going to take him to Siena, take me
as welli I love Sienag (He has never been).
Siena shines for them, distantly. And it has
begun to for us too.
Yet everyone has a car or motor-cyele locally.
Paolo the shepherd has a Peugot, secondhand. Luigi,
Gianni's brother, has a Lambretta, So has Silvano,
Dino's son. He is plump, shy and jovial, taking
after his mother. Yet they never go to Siena, much
less Florence, much less Lucca, Pisa. Dino told us
that peasants have only been going to the 'town? since
the war, though it is less than four kilometres away.
Before then people laughed at them if they saw them in
the streets. They were ridiculed away. They wore
different clothes, 80 they always stood out.
Armida is still frightened of 'town', a village
of two or three thousand inhabitants. She won't go even
for market.
'I must stay with my chickens,' she says. And
her husband laughs at her, making her turn her head
away with a bashful, stiff movement.


Gino shouted as we were starting out for Siena with
Gianni in the back, 'You're not taking him? Let him
walk! Then he laughed in his boyish, throaty way,
through cigarette smoke, half-spluttering. He has a
thick, soft neck and quick eyes that sometimes look
delicate, belying the gruffness of his voice. He has
reared tow sons and two daughters. He satisfted the
town-dream early, moved there over five years ago.
His family is civil, optimistic, the product of all
his silent aspirations as he worked in the fields,
cursing the axen and puffing at his cigarettes behind
the handplough. He isnlt reallya peasant. He worked
as a fattore for a time, selling and buying cattle.
But it wasn't steady enough. So now he Works on a
day to day basis for our landlady, who lives in one of
the tall houses on the village-square. When she comes
to measure the wine she stands by with a little notebook,
writing the weights down as the men balance the stake
on their shoulders and hang the demijohns between them.
There is rain more or less night and day, with
bursts of very hot sunshine. It is dangerous for the
vines. Unless they are constantly sprayed with copper
sulphate they shrivel with disease. A spot of rain
lies cupped in the leaf and the sun than *boils', and
the sickness starts from there. The copper sulphate
stops the rain settling.
Paolo the shepherd brings the milk RUKE again:
down ten lire per litre.


Everybody seems delighted and flattered when
Gianni's around. The peasants smile and chuckle---
unwil.lingly. Silvano, Dino'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 Scandinavian. I remember the
same look in a young Roman girl---and the same wild
cloming nature, with blue eyes that seem to open into
space when they laugh. Blond Italians---dashing,
reckless people. Gianni's father came from the Veneto,
and so (people say) he may have a touch of Austrian
blood.
I went cherry-picking with him along narrow dusty
lanes high up in the woods, where the sun goes down
late. It was just setting when we left, disappearing
behind a vast plain, like a table over the world.
We passed the lane where his father was killed. They
have put an iron cross there, over a marble slab.
'V.... Vittorio, dies here tragically in July, 1941.*
We went on to where his family lived twenty years
ago: a grey, tumbledown house with all the bricks show-
ing through broken stucco, its courtyard overgrown
with tall grass, the steps up to the door entangled in
weeds, cracking with them. A man's jacket was hanging
out of an open window. IO looked as if it had been
there years, bl eached with previous suns. We cl imbed


a tree and picked a basket-full of cherries, not quite
ripe because of the late summer. Vines were tangled
with the tree. There were clusters of grapes in
embryo. They will soon be wild. The olive trees are
still kept up, though unless the black dead wood inside
the curling bark is cut away and tarred over they will
not last many years. Noises came from the woods which
1 involuntarily thought were traffio noises but they
were birds. Eve rything stands quiet and withheld.
The woods are anxious to encraoch on these dead farms.
On the way back Gianni was stricken with fear that
we'd been seen. Perhaps he should tell someone--it
wasn't his land after all. But when we'd got to the road
he settled in his seat and laughed.
In the middle of the rei n and thunderstorms a
priest said on TV, 'Summer will come---and stay-e-on
June 17th.'
That was three days ago: since the morn-
ing 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 local guesses about the priest: he has divine
insight; he knows somebody who works at a spacecraft
launehing pad.
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 Luigits
motor-eycle, to deposit two bags of flour in one of
our outhouses. They must be picked up later by Paolo
the sheperd and taken up the hill. He tugged at
Luigi's sleeve and said, nodding towards me, with his
flickering---and this time rat ther hurt---smile, 'Thich
of us is the more fortunate, eh? Is he all right or
not?' And Luigi disclaimed the question, turning
awey. The work is an affront to Gianni: a personal
insult.
But this morning he came bright and early, as I was
washing the dishes. His face was clear and untroubled
again. He'd slept well.
There are clouds again. I looked out of the window
just now and my firsth thought was, 'I shouldn't have
written anything about the weather. This is how pagan-
ism justifies itself. It is in the air here.
And now the sune has gone completely.
Next day the sun was out and resplendent. I lay
on the little balcony naked, gazingat the woods that
rise above the house.
The butcher said the other say, 'You should to to
Certaldo---it's very interesting, the house of Boccacoio,
and some wonderful ruins!' Absentmindedly, not really
intending it, I said, 'E bello?---is it nice?'
'Bellog he said in a baffled tone, staring into
my eyes with his mouth open. 'No, no, not at allmee
only the modern can be bello for meto Solo 1l modernot


Gino has long arguments with the oxen when he
arrives in the morning. 'Good God---Dio buonot--
what the devil have you been doing here?', as he pushed
the door open and enters the dark stall.
'Your chains
all twisted: And look---look? The mess down theret
Upt Upt What a fine night you've hads Porca la
Madonnat Dio cane!' (pig-Virgin, God-dog!).
When they're led from the stall to be put un der
the yoke they look 1ike queens coming out into the
light, tall and pure and white, blinking and wond er-
ing. They take no notice of his talk.
After he'd taken the yoke off them at lunchtime
the taller one stepped up into the stable without
waiting, trailing her halter-ropes behind her. Gino
watched her in silence and then said quietly, 'All
right---now you're going in-e-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 Gino
then bent down and untied her.
Paolo the shepherd is going to move soon. He
has made 'millions', Gianni told me. He did it by
'sacrifice'. A sheperd'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 mezza-
dria (erop-sharing), like most of the peasants here.


He made his money slowly, trickle by trickle, on his
sheep's cheese, his ricotta (butter-milk curd), and his
cattle, his sheep and pigs for salughtering. He pays
little rent-e-perhaps sixty thousand lire a year. He
has a regular deal with one of the loeal hotels to
supply them with his cheese. Now he '11 move to the
village and become a butcher.
There are three families on the hill above usmee
Paolo the shepherd, Gianni's and a couple working on
mezzadria. In a few months time only Gianni's family
willbe there. The other two are moving away.
Paolo's wife, a pretty young Sicilian woman, has
just given birth to a child, and looks exhausted. The
cheeses have to be pressed every day, the sheep and cows
milked, while she is nursing her child. 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 s eems quite un-Italian. But then a determined
moneymaker never seems to belong anywhere.
Sunset: we walk up the hill and look across to the
Elsa valley. The few light alouds are bright yellow, like
all the midsummer country afternoons- one ever knew as a
child. Towards the sea, over the wooded hill, the sky
is deep-blue on one side and the colour of the sea it-
self on the other, an astonishing limpid green. The
hills over the Pesa valley are dim and peaceful in the
distance. The houses down below, including our own,


shine red. There is a nightingale close to Dino's
house directly under us, and a few cicadas, and the
raucous sound of frogs, still enjoying the last of the
rad npools.
We were surprised to hear later from Dino that he
is leaving soon with his family. Then we shall have
no near neighbours. His house, the closest to us,
will stand empty as the landlord can't find a successor.
Dino's flat will be five miles from his work, on
the outskirts of 'town'. It has two bedrooms, a kitchen
and bathroom. He works on a vast podere further down
the valley. They have nachines and the pnoperty is
paying its way. He is on daily hire and therefore has
more ready money in his pocket than the other peasants.
He is a worker, as opposed toa contadino, peasant.
We are after an earthenware coppa or jar and found
it standing in the cotrtyard of a tiny Romanesque church
in the hills. These were once used for storing oil and
now look nice in a garden. The priest, a small, resent-
ful looking man, crisply said that be'd bought this one
from a nearby peasant and didn't want to sell. 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 as large as this one.
We went down and inspected the thing in the man's


henhouse---black with filth but still serviceable. He
would give it a clean-up, he said. He was a slim, dark,
erect young man with hesitant eyes. We asked him to name
a price. No, no, he said at once, laughing shyly, he
didn't have an ideag He would enquire, and we would
enquire, and then we'a meet again after We'd both enquired.
We did enquire but no one had any idea how much an
old coppa should cost, now that its function was over.
These jars were once made in number at Imprunetta near
Florenee. Priginally they would have cost a few thousand
lire. They were only earthenwere after all, without
much design. We went back to the priest but he was out
Working. So we plodded on down to Antonio. An Etrescan
light breaks on his face as he smiles---yes, he's cleaned
the pot, we must come and see itt There it stands,
remote, mellow-looking, in the forecourt. How much
will we offer? I say five thousand. No, no, una
sciocchezza--a trifles Much too little: How mich then?
Well, he has heard from the priest up at the church that,
well, these things are---well, quite in demand nowadays.
We stand there patiently, waiting for the dirge we've heard
so often. I ask again, How much?? And he says softly,
as 1f he expected to be hit for it, 'Una trentina di mila
lire.' About thirty thousend, or twenty quid. The
priest, he says, gave that much for his. (Extraotdinary,
this-e-a priest in his condition gets forty thousend lire
a month at most and has to keep a family on it-e-his
parents, sometimes a sister, actually related to him or


otherwise). He couldn't, by the terms of his own can-
science, let it go for less than thirty thousand---
certainly not less than twenty-five---or twenty at the
very minimum. Such things were precious, he said,
and he was sure of being able to sell at his price
later one 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 s oon
and didn't want to take it with him.
Sowe turn away. 'Niente da fare!' After a
few-brief goodbyes, during which he offers us something
to drink and we refuse, we leave. We decide to offer
him fifteen thousand, and go to the priest a third time.
Again he's out, working his farm. But gust as we are
about to go he drives in. He doesn't pause When he sees
but goes straight to his door, dressed in an old shirt
and trousers, with his sleeves rolled upe Nor does he
even turn when we walk over to him. He's used to visit-
ors-e-in fact, they plague him, as his church is of
historic interest.
I ash him about the coppo. What price ought we to
pay the peasant? He stands there with his sleeves rolled
up, his arms frail and pale underneath the day's su nburn,
andthen talks: first, he is busy, very busy---and there-
fore doesn't know as much about these things as he should.
Yes, I say, you're very much in giro---you go around a
lot.
'No, not? he is quick to reply. 'I'm not g oing


round-eeI work? And he gives me a sort of fenatical
look through his glasses.
*I've offered the peasant five thousand lire,' I
say.
At once he says in his dry, hard way, without a
trace of charity, 'No, no, five thousand 1s a sciocchezzat
No, no, they*re worth very much more than that?*
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
exclaimed over his jar (a lie); the factories weren 't
produc cing them any more ( a lie); they had great
historical interest (a lie).
*The price of a thing, he says, his glasses
flashing wildly, *depends on who wishes to buy it and
who wishes to selli It depends above all on the need
and passion of the person buying! The more he wants
a thing the more he has to pay for it!
*Well how much did you pay for yours then?
He stares at me for a moment and then to our
astonishment makes a quick round gesture with his
(meaning
hand amlxsngs theft) and says, I ac quired it.'
Dino and Armida came to us in the evening and sat
in our kitchen. We told him about the priest with his
trentina di mila lire and he said, 'Jars---Isve got
two of them-e-at least two---beauties!' And he


laughed. *Why dan't you come to me first? Every-
thing is on your doorstep and you go miles away to
argue with priestst' Tomorrow morning we would walk
together to Pescille and have a look at theme
Next day was saturday. The valley outside echoed
with children, and pigs squealing for their swill.
We syrolled along the path to Pescille 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 collected the horsedung from the road outside
for his garden-a-in the days when there were still a few
horses in London.
"Ah,' he said, then your father must have been
peggio (worse) than you?'
'How do you mean?' I asked hime
'I mean, he must have d'one mora workee-he was
poorer!*
*Yes,' I said, feeling confused. I wanted to say,
'But I work tool* But I stopped. "Work here means the
fields.
His pots were much better than the priest's or the
peasant's. They lay on the ir sides in the mud by the
house where he was born. We rolled them into the stable
yard and cleaned them up a bit. The oil had seeped
thr ough the: ir bases, but since they would never be used
for oil again, that didn't matter. Armida said to me
doubtfully, 'They're belli, aren't they? And Dino
echoed her: *Yes, they're nice! But until that moment
they had thought them rather shameful junk.


That evening Dino asked us What kind of church we
belonged to. Were we Christians? He wanted to know
about the English and the Germans, how they differed in
religion. Yes, I said, they were all Christians. I
tried to describe protestantism.
'How do protestants differ from us?' he asked.
I said, Mainly in the matter of confession.
They don't confess.'
'Ah,' he said quickly, his eyes gleaming in his
ruddy, lean face, 'they don't believe the priest has a
special position---I'
'Exactly,' I said. 'He's only another man for him.
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 has to find his own way.'
Dino said, Then they're more religious than we
are! They examine everything they dot That's why
fareigners seem so responsible compared with us--so
polite and thoughtful? We think, Oh, I can swear and
behave badly today because tomorrow I'm going to confess.
I know men who think like that,' he said.
'Religion is
the reason why they're bad? Can you imagine that??
We are sending two. of his jars to friends. They
sent their man over in a small truck to pick them up.
We roped them round securely. When Dino asked the man
what trees were going to be planted in them he said,
'None. They'll just be put on the terrace. Empty.
As ornaments.' Dino 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 empty ornament
is a step into a new world. There was silence.
Before he drove back the man had lunch with us.
He has liquidlyblack eyes, penetrating, and a mild
way of speech, reflective and patient. He said there
was a feeling of rebellion all over Italy, but vague'
rebellion: no one was sure what he wanted to rebel
against, or indeed if there existed anyone 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 by the
landlords.
We have to go through that phase,' he said.
'I myself felt rebellion against the landlords once,
but I've passed through that now.'
He is paler than the peasants here, though he used
to be apeasant himself. And they look up to himee-I
was aware of that, when Dino and he were talking to-
gether. The peasants see something different in him,
an advance to which they aspire. He has the air of
thinking life out all the time. There isan air of
quiet charity about him. If an Italian has a real
transf ormation of experience, which is rare, it is
always religious, I think. He took out a crisp note
and paid Dino for the jars. Whenever Dino talks about
him hém now his eyes glisten with admiration, he shakes
his head wonderingly.


Italy is the most unfathomable country in Christend dom
for me. Her motives, decisions, moods are an enormous
pool of mystery, even to the people themselves. There
are a thousand explanations---Greek, Etrusean, Roman,
Moorish, Phoenician, Christian, Gothic, feudal, inquisit-
orial, Spanish, Auatrian---far more than any one creature
can know.
Everyone here has some thing devout (and superstitious)
about him---Gianni, Dino, even Paolo the shepherd, even
Gino who lives in 'town' 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 mysterious presene e they are aware of all the
time, guiding their lives.
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 chest.
The madonnina he painted when he was fourteen is on the
wall of his kitchen, with a flashlight bulb under,
always alight. An authentic Sienese sweetness pours
out of the Child's eyes and the Madonna has something
special that makes you look up at her again and again.
It is abit stylised---from centuries of style, that
has almost crept into the blood, determined the movements
of any hand that tries to paint. His drawings of
Christ are exact, stem. He hasn't painted or drawn
fc eight years or more. 'Not enough tim,' he says
with a laugh.


He looks sad and oddly distracted sometimes.
He hasn't been near this house for three days now. I
saw him yesterday at Pescille. He came into the stable
yard with a quaintly delicate-looking shopping bag in.
his hand. He was off to *town', he said. 'Not to
work!' Dino shouted with his clear, charitable,
objective laugh. *Strikes aren't necessary for you--e
youtre on strike every day!' Gianni smiled and turned
away, then we saw nothing more of hime
His mother is devout in a natural wey, 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 is half the site of any of her sons, yet they obey
her like slaves.
Swearing and behaving badly are like assaulting his
own mother, in Gianni's eyes. This is What stops him.
Every evening when he comes home from work Dino's
son Silvano goes to the madonnina at the side of the road
and says a quick prayer and crosses himself.
Dino seems to insidt on this as an eet of decency
and uprightness.
Signor B. and his family came today for a few
minutes. He owns a large vineyard near Florence and
a wine-factory. He told us he was selling his share
of the business, as it was hopeless to try to live by


the land these days. All the houses on his land were
empty, there were no longer any peasants. He was
obliged to follow the current madness? and move to
Florence himself. He will find a job there. 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 dark,
pokey rooms full of the stench of gas-fumes, but they're
happier.
He said that among the peasants those who had moved
to the city first had made most money. Now there was less
demand for indurtial labour. The hunger for city-1ife
didn't come from miseria, he said: 'People want to be
machines now.'
Only in one or two optimists like Dinowe-he is just
sixty years oldee-does the land not ereate horror. The
others feel cheated and insulted. Today I tried to
imagine what this horror was. I thought of a time when
I worked on the land briefly, to earn a serap of money.
I was digging turf. I watched the mounds of turf rise
all round me every day. The work had a fearful blank-
ness about it, even when the sun shone, even at dawn,
which I otherwise loved. I hated the land as if it
personally insulted me---as I see Gianni doing now.
I was working with no onee There was no community, no
farmhouse to go back to, and the land vasn't mine.
And so it is in Italy. The dream has gone, perhaps
longer ago than we think, perhaps centuries agoe
There is nothing precious to cling to---nothing gay, no


intimacy. Nothing that flatters the human ereature.
And the mind is developing another rhythm, another time,
that bel ong s to the city.
The peasants live like dogs. This is true of Gianni,
of Dino---they expect no more, but they dream of more.
Only the town can give them the flattery and attention
they need.
They want a dignity that'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, There are typical
mediaeval lanes, intact, with the houses sheer and flat-
walled on either side, containing the minimum number of
windows, and those small. Tunnels disappear far under
the houses, joining one lane to another. There are
hidden squares still not asphalted where people sit
outside their doors talking, the women knitting.
The streets are clean. A massive villa---occupied
now by dozens of femilies---sits astride the road,
dominating two valleys. There is a sense of order and
contentment. Down below is the industrial part, with
tall chimneys and pastel-coloured blocks of flats.
The order and contentment up here is due to the fact
that everyone works down there.
will people want to move down to the industrial
parts, away from the reminders of the past? It has
happened in castel Fiorentino. They have left the
aplendid old houses on the hill, with their secret


arches and barred windows, and gone to embrace the
noise and smoke below. What was a wonderful old town
ten years ago, with clean cobbled streets, is a slum.
And it may happen in Certaldo, with the mediaeval quarter
perched inaccessibly on his hill, and the industrial part
below.
And then, after twnety or thirty years, or perhaps
much sooner, middle-class people will move into the
ancient parts, as part of a fashionable swing c oming
partly from abroad. They will prefer the lack of
traffic. The cobbled streets will look smart again.
And people will move back into the country, into the old
abandoned houses; and furnish the countryside with a new
dream. But perhaps that is only a dream, itself.
We went to see Dino's brand-new flat. It stands a
little away from the road and overlooks 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. Armida has still not seen it and refuses
to - go until they're actually movi ing in. Her exeuse is
always, with a dark, timid look, 'I have too many chickst'
*Always chickst Dino says with a laugh.
He was anzious to know What we thought of it. There
is a bathroom with green glazed tiles and a flushing lavatory
even a little spray attached to the bath, and next there's
a kitchen. He plans to put a bei neh in the corridor with
oushions, to sit and talk in the ev ening, when the kitchen
is too hot. The building was done by an old friend of


his, he said. No architects came into it. He was re-
lieved that 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 CO neess ipn,
this. We stood gazing out of the windows. 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 place is a
king!' And he says, 'Yes, yes?', his eyes fixed on me
with fierce enthusiasm.
The baths won't be used much, except by the young.
The men will use them more than the women, who seem to have
an ancient fear of water. Once a week the small water=
heaters will be switched on over the bath and the W oman
will go in to scrub her husband 's back. Wster, like
fresh air, is thought ta source of rheumatism. The bath-
ro om is a prestige thing. It has to shine, wait for
Sun day visitors. You may go into this prestige thing
more deeply if you like by actually taking a bathe
But some people simply leave them al one, shining.
The lavatory seats get broken quickly, and slips
of newspaper stand on the stool in front of the white
throne. You can go into the prestige thing even more
deeply by actually having toilet paper. But it has to
be used sparingly, and preferably kept for the Sunday
visits. Dnce I had a rented room in Rome and the land-
lady was astonished at the toilet paper I used. *what
do you do with it?' she asked me. We use one or two


pieces a time.
I think Dino will use the bath and put toilet
paper. The seat won't get broken. He seems to have
gone into the dream in careful detail. The slam of
a fallen lavatory seat is a familiar one in all Italy.
They clatter down in flats, hotels. Many of the flats
will dispense with them altogether. You sit straight
on to the cold china rim.
None of the flats at Dino's has a water tank.
When the flow of water from *town' ceases, which it often
does in the summer, your taps are dry.
A fridge will soon be g oing into Dino's kitchen.
He is putting money down for a TV set too. He beams.
A new life? Armida will soon forget her chicks, he
says. The fridge will be enveloped in a great polythene
bag during the winter when it isn't in use. The TV set
will get a little cover, with tassles. It will be put
to bed at night like a budgerigar.
We left Dino in "town' and drove back alone. He came
to us later that evening and said, *Town's a beautiful
thing!'
He told us he'd been in the café on the square
wa tohing TV. You find out what's going on in the
worldl' And he added, 'Here---of coursel---you can breathe
good air, there are things we all need here, but itts
outsi de whe world, we're out off!'
He didn't want to be right inside the 'town'---just
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.
In a gravelled courtyard behind his new house, just
before we left in the afternoon, he pulled a great bush
aside and said, 'Here---look!' It was a wayside shrine,
and we were amazed to see that it was the same madonnina
that stands at the side of the road here, Our Lady of
Pancole.
'A good sign, don't you think?' he said.
He'd only found it after he'd masnest bought the land
and planned the house, with three other families also
from Panoole, where his parents lived, a small village
towards the sea.
He has been on S trike for three days: the mezzadri
struck several days back, unsuccessfully, and now its
the land workers. They're asking for a seven-hour day,
which means a forty-two-hour week as Saturday is a full
working day, plus a rise a of three hundred lire a day.
They say they think they'll get the rise but not the re-
duction of hours. Dino believes that the strikes will
go on until the g overnment produces a decent plan for the
land, and there may be violence.
Gianni returned yesterday, looking quiet and numbed.
He said he'd been working on the vines. He mys t have
been copper-sulphate spraying. You carry the tank on
your back and Work a lever up and down, holding the long
spray towards the highest leaves. Your head gets spray-


ed an acquamarine blue if the wind is going the wrong way.
He hardly smiled.
The work tears him from his real life, which is still
in darkness, forming. A day's idleness is enough to
bring him to life again. For the peasants all round this
just means a taste for 1dleness.
Dino said last night that he thought the great shame
of the Italiancountryside was still the mezzadria system,
though he and Gianni's family and paolo and Gino are
free of it. Tuseany, he said, a rich, fertile province,
is being abandoned like the desert because of this system,
which no longer works either for the padrone or the peas-
ant. The owners have done nothing for their own houses.
They let them fall into ruin. They won't put in light
or water. There are no bathrooms, even showers, even
proper lavatories. People won't work land that doesn 't
give them a proper living, he said. He himself had a
good employer, so he worked hard and willingly. But
the hig house on the other side of the valley, where we
go to fetch our drinking water, and the group of houses
called Pescille, are still mezzadrie.
'The people work like dogs, yet their lives are at a
standstill!'
One of the padroni, nicknamed Zampe---'pawt or 'hoof dmee
because of his limp, never keeps accounts, and always
pockets the yield from a sale. His part should be forty-
seven percent but it Works out at nearer seventy or
eighty. The remaining percentage has to feed two famil-
ies (about seven people) who do all the work. On the


other hand, some say this is 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 loss, that is, find
money elsewhere to finance it. In fact, the 'good'
padroni, like Dino's, do derive their capital from other
sources and live in town. The small local landlords
have no money to invest.
'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, the
house-repairs, machin ry---real landlords??
'Ah, you mean the fattori!' he says.
Every landlord has a fattore, a man who administers
several piéces of land and takes a percentage for his
services. He is what we would call an agent or steward.
Farmers in the proper sense don't exist in great number
yet. The fattore or agent is absentee as well. He
invariably lives in town too.
Padrone, landlord, means signore, gentleman, in
Italian: that is, somebody who doesn't work.
Just as the peasants abandon the darmhouse, so the
landowners abandon their lovely villas. High and low
despise the land.
We begin th see the difference between the mezzadria
and the others---like that between light and dark.
Whenever we go to the well on the other side of the
valley for our drinking water we stop and talk at the
big house, where there are the two mezzadria families.


We spend evenings with them, drink their vin santo.
But we don't know them by Christian name. They always
seem bowed in work. They are shy, speechless, remote,
though slowly they ga in confidence in us. They don't
present themselves to us personally and individually yet.
They neither enquire our names nor ask too many questions.
Only the smallest child, a boy, do we know by name.
And you can see the difference in the cattle too.
The bull at their house is 'bad', has to be castrated
soon. The oxen are tied too close to the trough and
look---are---uverworked. But at Pescille the calves
look annocent and undisturbed, as the people there do.
A sense of panic and drudgery seems to accompany Aeiza-
dria---tranamits itself to the be asts.
A dream no longer surrounds this house for us,
now we'ye lived here some time. It's real for us,
untouched by dreams of any kind. I remember how we
came early one morning, before we moved in, and stood
in the enclosed courtyard looking down the road towards
'town'. The 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. We could
imagine sitting in the courtyard, bringing tables and
cha irs down. The light would glitter on the windows
upstairs of an afternoon. But in faet we only go down
to draw filthy rainwater from the well. It 1s a Workplace--
for oxen, hens, bags of grain, empty demijohns, carts
and ploughshares, Gino's motor-cyele and our car. As
for our rooms, they are flatly real too---the places


where we work, eat, sleep. Gino goes to and fro outside
all day. The dog barks at the oxen and frightens them.
The country looks the same as before---vast and serene.
But there too is no dream. It only enters you---the
country: it isn't a matter of sight or pleasure, or in-
deed anything felt at all. The silence of the 8 untry
at night is the silence of your own sleep. It isn't the
scene of hopes, desires, memories. There is no country
idyll. Nothing like Bavaria, the Tyrol, Carinthia.
No dreams and follies have been weaved, life hasn't been
drunk deep and recklessly. This is the most important
thing to know about the Italian countryside. The farm=
houses haven 't shaken, expanded with fun. Tamed creatures
have crouched in them. The Tuscan landlord was hard.
Some even of the peasants say he had to be. For some
time it warked. People even used to sing at their work,
in the golden sun that came up almost every day and never
hid far begind the clouds, in the warmth that gushed from
the earth.
The valley lies there like a garden. But the only
toses are wild ones. There is no hum of talk that you
might hear on a Provencal farm, with people sitting round
a table. Only animal needs are served here, and perhaps
not all these.
We've lost interest in camfort---the little rituals of
home. We hardly go into the sitting room', 11 salotto
as our landlady calls it. We're either working or at
table, eating. The kitchen is where we live, leaning


over thetable, a bottle of wine in front of us, in the
dimness, the shade drawn against the sunlight again.
Heat has arrived at last. But still there are clouds,
lurking. There 1s a strange mist. It doesn't feel
settled.
Dino promises to take us to where he works, several
kilometres up the road, ot the other side of the valley.
'You'll say it's bellot' he says. But for him it's just
there. Yet we feel the same now-e-no positive delight,
even in the shattering early-morning light that pours
down on to the vineyards and cornfields opposite. There
is only the touch of it on your skin, the glow that lies
right inside you. You aren't separate, which you must
be for delights. The countryside produces you. It suns
brighten you, a datk sky darkens you. You are 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 today, this time of the peasants again,
the mezzadri. They are all collecting in the town' as
usual, and there are endless files of motor-soooters
outside the south gate.


Early morning: the sunlight pours down, fresh and
glittering. I empty some ashes on the dump outside the
courtyard. our dog lies half in the shade, where the
fledgling-pigeons are. There is the sound of bees.
They have a nest in the broken wall. The Whole valley
lies dreaming. In any country north of the Alps this
would be an idyll.
Gino will take the fledgling-pigeons down soon,
before they can fly, and wring their neoks and eat them
roasted.
Today three men came, dressed in town-suits, with
collars and ties. They stepped out of a car and after
some murmuring advanced towards the oourtyard. A
telegram had arrived at the same time and my wife was
downstairs signing for it. Our dog, attached to a long
rope that extends just to the edge of the courtyerd,
started barking like mad. The three men drew nearer
and stood by what would be the gate if the house wasn 't
falling to pieces. One was young and plump. Another
was slim and dark, and older. And the other, standing
between them, was rather shrivelled and tired-looking---
apparently the leader.
He spoke first, with the muzzle of our dog close
to his trousers: *What is this dog doing here?*
We stared and gaped at the impertinenee. Armida
came on to the balcony with me. We watched my sife
gather up the dog's lead and draw the dog inside. The
three men advanced further, their faces expressionless.


Some rapid thoughts went through my head: were they
police? had they come to arrest somebody? had we done
something wrang? They advanced like Italians sure of
their power. The leader then stopped in the middle of
the courtyard and, looking up at me-e-he had decided to
treat my wife as a shadow, and therefore her removal of
the dog as a duty---said he underst ood that a peasant cane
to the house every day, and What was his name? Armida
answered hin with her childish half-smile: Gino was the
name, she said.
Where was this Gino now?
He'd gone home, she said.
Had he left a key?
She didn't know.
He then advanced a few more paces and said, taking
a piece of paper out of his pooket, 'Voi povete legere?'---
can you (plural) read?
Armida shook her had and said an intimidated 'No.
He turned to me: "ELe1p'a--and you?
I said with a touch of irony, *Yes, I think I can
read,* and the other two made agreeable noises through the: ir
hoses, like henchmen, though henchmen hovering between him
and me.
He extended the piece of paper:
*Perhaps you can
read this thent'
I went downstairs and took the paper from hime It
was signed (I thought) by the owner of the houseand said,
*These gentlemen ahave my permission to enter the house.'


I tried to hand the paper back to him, not quite under-
standing, but he held up his hand: 'No, you can keep 1t.'
There was a silence. He stood there. I stood there.
The thoughts were still in my head: had something gone
wrong? were these police? had the owner, hitherto a
friend, gone mad and decided to throw us out?
I returned indoors with the note. After all, they
seemed to know what they were doing, so I could leave
them to it. And we went on with our lunch upstairs.
But they continued 8 tanding there. Armida remained
on the balcony. The leader calle a up: 'Has the letter
been read? She came into us and repeated it, had the
letter been read? I shrugged and said, *why, yes, he
saw me do itt
*Well they want to see you again,' she said.
This time--ewith my mouth full of the best risotto
my wife had made for months---I dashed down with the note
in my hand.
*This is addressed to no onet I said. *Secondly
I think you've been very disc ourteous, you've no right
to ask educated people if they can rad, or question the
existence of my own dog tn 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 permiss-
ion, and you haven't asked my permission, the landlady's
permission isn't enought ete etc.
At this, said in more or less one rush, there was
much shuffling and scowling, and the leader replied that


he hadn't known I 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 youngest of them---at
a safe distance---called out that the signore (that is,
the leader) had only asked if we spoke Italian because
he knew we were foreigners, and secondly that our dog was
dangerous---gra seritto in faccia, the desire to bite
them was written in her facet
A most mysterious incident. Armida said she thought
the shirvelled man was 1l maestro, a schoolmaster in town'.
And meanwhile we had recognised the slim, silent man as
one of the local bank managers. We realised they must
have come to view the house for a possible. Or perhaps
the schoolmaster was an assessore for mortgages---we
knew thw owner wanted one.
All at once we seemed to have had a glimpse into the
lower Tuscan seams, where fascism lay. We realised what
a superficial part of fascism the politics of it had been.
To this day, in Italy, a fascist can be recognised at
once. It is a life-thing, a total way of bahaviour.
There are several types, but they're all clearly rec ognis-
able. It may be a walk, a way of lifting the chin,
a peculiar defensive and hurt arrogance, or a brillience
and dash with a dangerous edge. Some of the cleverest


people were drawn to fascism. Or sometimes it is a sort
of faded competence and authority, a clipped bitterness of
manner. They are of the schoolteacher's generation---the
over-fifties.
Yet I know that, being Italian, this man is forgiving
and gentle, much like a child, at S ome point. The terrible
thing is what he could provoke others to do, by childish
action. 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 are dead.
I noticed their fascist technique, so common among
the middle class here: the sudden arrival, the arrogant
slam of car-doors, the chins pushed forward, the threat-
ening voices. Yet it's. - a game too. And it's passing
away too---with the mezzadria, with the heat that God
could be relied on to switch on every day as if He felt
a duty to this land.
We met our landlady the day after and she told us we d
done well to send the three signori away. Her daugh ter
had written the note, she said, and then had come to her
most shocked afterwards saying we'd refused them entry.
'I'm so glad,' she said, "but don't tell my daughter
It seems the man was the local schoolmaster: ran


unpleasant individual', she said. In any case, he had
offered her toomlittle for the houset
She speaks with tired eyes that flash dramatically
now and then, opening her mouth wide to enunciate her
syllables. You can see the same face, sallow and drowsy,
her mouth drawn down permanent sorrowing introspection,
in the early frescoes, those of the s0-called Sienese
primitives. When she wraps a scarf round her head to
go to church she nakes it look like a cowl. The "town'
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 more
than it hated its real enemies.
After dark we went up to the hill to the other mazza-
dria family, above Dino's house. Their place is hidden
behind eypress trees and used to be a monastery, with a
wide natural forecourt of grass and boulders, on the edge
of the woods. The house and barn are low-slung, built
on rock, centuries old. There are three in the family,
a couple and their daughter, who will marry soone
They were still working in the darkness, getting
the forage in. This is the hard part of the season,
When first the grass has to be out and then thr 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 ozen, we
talked about conditions. They are leaving at the end
of the summer like everybody else, the man said.


'Soon the Whole 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 would S oon be leaving. He himself could
no longer work eight hectares (nearly twenty-five acres)
of hilly land with his wife and daughter alone, and look
after the beasts as well. His landlord 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 mezza-
dria. The woman leaned in the doorway, a rake in her
hand, saying she wondered at the food people would soon
be expec ted to eat. The animals no longer live properly,
and this meant the meat was bad. Who knew if it wasn't
harmful too? She didn't believe in allevamenti for
chickens (broiler houses). Anybody with a palate could
tell a broiler bird at once. All their birds, she saide--
theyta had nearly a thousand at one time---were healthy
and free to peck where they wanted to.
Their voices were tired in the dusk, dry like the
grassy air in the barn. We went upstairs With them and
sat at table while they ate their late dinner. Their
daughter, a tall, handsome, hypoch ondriac type of girl,
told us that at a baker's in town* an inspector had
found a sack of plaster once. It was used to make up
the weight. Many of the bakers used starch, she said,
to whiten the loaves. Was that why people had so many
complaints nowadays---the liver and stomach and kidneys?
The penalty for putting ox's blood in wine to give it


colour was six months' imprisonment, but what about
the chemicals that these wine-factories put in? If you
drank trade-wine you could feel it circulating round your
stomahe like a burning poison. This was the acid they
put in. It really did burn yourinsides. Real wine
never made itself felt in the stomach 1ike that. If it
warmed you, it warmed the whole of you.
The dirge goes on until we, are all yawning.
Gianni is lost again in a 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 tonight, when
Luigi will fetch him on his motor-scooter. The wheat
harvest---the most hated time of year-e-is just start-
ing. The wheatfields are golden. Many of the fields
in the valley have already been reaped. Everybody is up
at four now, and in bed not much before eleven, after
a quick silent dinner.
The heat goes on, baking and cracking the earth
after the stupendous rainfalls. There is great danger
of the grapes rotting on their stems in this steamy
furnace. Gino has already lost a third of his yield
through the hail. Some of the bunches are getting a
mildew on them. Dino says this is partly because
the vines haven't been sprayed enough. And then they
weren 't hoed and manured properly in the spring. *They're
hungry.' And also, he ayas with a wink, Gino prfers


his town-flat to the land. In faot Gino has a heart-
complaint and puffs and blows at the slightest exertion.
He comes to the house at odd times. Sometimes it
is nightfall before he feeds the oxen and olears out their
dirty straw. The hidden pigs squeal for food. He is
the last to cut the grain. His wife and grown-up S ons
come to help. They sweat at the seythes, look mortified.
At night they C ome stumbling into the yard, speechless,
raw-red from the sun, and sit down to a meal like ziut
tired wolves, gulping their wine thirstyly, smacking
their lips. They really hate it. We don(t go near
them at this tine.
Dino's family has come too---brothers and nephews.
Next year, or perhaps the year after, most of the work
will be done by machine. e But for the moment it is still
the soythe. We happened to call on them at nightfall
and-there was panic inside the little house in case we
would come in and hold up the meal. They were like
broken animals. You felt you could have thrown them
food, like in the zoo. They hate to show themselves
in this state. We went off quickly. They hate the
world at such times. Soon the machines will take over,
not to save them work but because there wontt be enough
hands in the fields to work them.
A lot of the grain has ruined. The ears may rot
in the sheaf, if it reins. The wet heat may be enough
to do it. The hail had already ruined a lot.
Today is St Jbhn's Day, and we gave Gianni a present


of three tiny books of reproductions, Dufy, Cezanne,
Breughel. He pioked up the Dufy first and said quietly,
'How simple the drawing is.'
We went up to his house and had salani and wine
with his mother. She leaned over the table, bony and
black, with her blazing eyes. She had no appetite these
days, she said. She had to force the food down. There
was too much work---she always felt better in the winter
because there was less Work. She has no teeth. We
promised to show her how to make a vegetable broth Whioh
would give her substance without having to be chewed.
But she won't do it. She won't go to the dentist.
She eats on her gums, which are now nearly as hard as
teeth. Gianni was a serpente, she said. He was never
so happy as when he wasn't working! He wanted to find
a profession but what? The poor oreaturet Poverinot
He had to work in the fields to bring in a little cash
but he was too bright and clever for that worki
Gianni keeps asking me if I know of any better
work. Well, we'll go to Rome soon and see if therets
anything. I said he might try at one of the airports;
good money, the illusion of constant flight without act-
ually moving, the presence of foreigners---perfect
ferment for the Italian soul.
We strolled down to Dino's to tell him we were
going away for a few days. The at tmosphere round his
house was still dark and heavy. He came to the foot of
the stairs with his brother, as if to warn us not to


come in. Their meal was just beginning. Armida didnT
call down to us as usual, and the rest of the family sat
huddled at the top of the steps in silence. Sex and flirt-
ing are associated with the harvest everywhere. There
are long traditions of harvest merriment, it is the crown
of the farming year. But not here. or perhaps simply-ee
not now.
We heard Silvano call down to his father with a
growl to come up and eat his food. As we were walking
away we heard Armida scream at him, her mouth full,
'Maiala (female pig), why can't you come when youtre
called?'
They all sit down to eat. Not to feast t ogether,
just to eat. In a few moments it will be all over,
they'll be on their feet again to: prepare for the last
act of the unwanted day---throwing themselves on a bare
bed.
Dino's brother had a word for it. He said, "This
is an ugly moment for us-eed un brutto momento.' They
had to sell the grain at low prices he said. The millers
abused the situation because of the sudden great supply,
now that there were vast wheat-farms in the north,
mechanised. The family no longer wants the farming.
The farm no longer wants the family.


*The End of the World'
We were only away four or five days but everything
looked strange to us when we got back. The house had
its old musty, disused smell. We flung open the shutters,
took chairs out on the balcony again, started the fridge
which makes the lights blink and fade every few moments.
Gino said it had been quite hot---in somma, he added.
He always says this, with his peculiar bull-like duck
of the head: by in soma he means 'more or less'. We
found ourselves staring across the Elsa valley again.
The silence enters the body slowly. It comes down the
hill on the breeze, through the woords, a cool breath
rustling the trees.
Most of the grain is in nowe Dino's is in sheaves---
what they call barche, stacks piled rather like Arab mud-
huts, the ears pointing inwards, to protect them from the
rain. Our own grain isn't finished yet. Gino has
decided to do the rest by machine. His fattore agreed
to hire one. So he seythes paths for the tractor to
turn along. And then he must seythe close to the vines
and olive trees, where the tractor can't reach. Not an


ear must be missed.
We feel rested after the sea. The resorts were
crowded and sticky, with cars clustering the narrow
roads.
Late in the evening, after dark, I heard Angelo
coming up the road with his two oxen. The wheels
scraped and rumbled over the stones. He cried, 'Vat
Viat Val Caminat Cam-i-nag vat Forzat Forzat'
Sometimes it is in a low voice, enc ouragingly, and then
with sharpness as the wheels take a steep incline.
These words echo across the valley all day, wherever
a pair of oxen are pulling. Angelo says 'Va, ya, va'
in a strangely deep and absent way, as if the past was
talking. I followed him up the hill, hearing his soft
ories and the serape of the wheels all the way. Half
way up I met Gianni and Luigi on the motar-scooter.
I told Gianni I'd caught a chill at the sea he shouted
burlesquely, waving his erms, "You.should have stayed
here with ust You're better off here! We havaaria
pura-e-and peace-eewe 're free from diseases here-e-
don't leave us againt'
He'd become thinner in the last few days, his
face was bronzed. All their grain is in now. He
said. the work had oost him two kilos of weight. And
now they were off to enjoy themselves. The air was
soft all round. The 'town* lights shone in the distance,
like a crown held up. I walked on up and came to their
house just as Angelo was turning into the S tableyard


with his oxen. It was past ten and his mother was
still working, bringing in forage. 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, pushing his head up with terrific
force. Angelo indulges this and gives the beast an
affectionate smack on the rump--- "He's fatter than the
other one because he gets more complimenti---ore affection--
he always manages to get free!' If an animal didn't get
proper affection, he said, it didn't put on weight and
its meat was less choice.
After the oxen were haltered to their troughs he had
to help bring in the forage. The electric bulb failed
in the hot, dark stable, and they used a candle. Then
there was the cutting of the grass at a ciroular soythe
worked by turning a handle---first the soft clover and
maize-leaves for the young, and then the coarser, dryer
grass for the grown oxen. Angelo turned the wheel while
his mother fed the grass into the chute in great armfulls,
plunging forward with her whole tany body, that only seems
skin and bone. Angelo was elated, a bit drunk, and
swung the wheel carelessly, telling his mother that the
grass was no good, too dryt He'd been working at another
podere all day, and the C ompany seems to have gone to his
head. He almost never goes to town'. His face is
long and striking, in the stark Etruscan manner, not
goodlooking like Gianni's. When he's dressed up on
Sundays in a super suit he looks like an actor, with


his dark oily hair and straight back and eyes that
flash. Only his rotten teeth, and the fact that he
gabbles all the time out of sheer awkwardness at being
dressed up, show that he's Angelo 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 is 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 courtyard for fear of alarming
him and also perhaps getting some gunshot in myear.
Then I gave up and came down. The reult would be a
litter of mongrels---but--oh welli I went to bed.
After an hour or so she appeared, with a mean, yellow-
looking half-breed in tow, Paolo's 'hunting dog',
trailing a long chain that sounded like all the pris aers
in Fidelio.
I felt hot from wine, overtired. The nightingale
who always perches close to our bedroom window made his
familiar call: one long, soaring whistle and a few
warbles, then silence; just the beginning of a song--me
never more.
The moment I heard his brief call I felt better and
fell asleep.


At half-past five this morning, soon after we woke
up, there was a sudden storme A fierce wind swept through
the house. We rushed about closing doors and shutters,
getting things in off the terrace. our dog was terrified
and kept close to us. Water cascaded down off the roof
in a great chute. Our rainwater well filled up in no
time. There were blinding flashes of lightning. Then,
as we lay in bed waiting for it to stop, we heard the first
dawn bird sing, and the clouds began to draw away.
Dino had gone towork at four, though it was Sunday
(strikes have delayed the harvest and make overtime necess-
ary), and we watched him tramping back at seven soaked
through, his food b asket un tbuched. Gianni came down
later and said he'd been saturated from head to foot in
a few moments. The storm was like the finimondo, the end
of the world. He'a been building barohe of wheat-sheaves
and couldn't leave them before the 'roofs' were one At
four that morning, when he'a started work, the sky had
been olear and there'd been bright stars. Dawn brought
the storm. Hecsaid he'd arrived home at one in the morn
ing from 'town'. Then he hadn 't been able to sleep for
the great heat and the mosquitoes. He lay smoking, then
he leaned out of the window. Now and then he gave his
brother Luigi a good kiok, he said, for sleeping so
soundly.
It isn't real July weather. The usual heat hasn't
come, though there are bursts of wet sirocco heat that
seem to come from the sea. The coast this year is much


hotter than inland. Yet the Val d'Elsa is usually one
of the dryest and most torrid zones north of Rome.
They say that half 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 Gino has had to sell her at a loss of forty thousand
lire. But she is still there in her S tall, looking
delicate and apprehensive. The padrona complains about
it in her singing, wan, mediaeval way.
She has been putting a fine story about that this
house is a 'villa', even a "palazzot---meaning that we
pay a pittance. I scotch her stories by saying we are
'camping' here---it's just like being in a tent. When
I explained to a shopkeeper yesterday that far from having
a bathroom in the 'villa* we had no water and little
electric light, and no lavatory to speak of, he seemed
relieved. He'a been worried that the general C onspiracey
to charge the foreigner fancy prices might have been
undermined. "If he said, 'yourd like a really nice
place another year, four rooms with a bathroom, kitchen
and all conveni lences, in town too, I have it. Beaut-
ifully furnished. No camping there.' I asked him how
much and he made the classical Italian reply which never
differs so much as by a word, in whatever province you
happen to be: 'Ah, quealo non posso dire---that t I can't
say. But certainly we would come to some arrangement..."
My *camping' story seems to have got to the land-
lady. When I passed her. daughter in the square today


I asked after her mother.
'Very well,* she said. 'She ts gone on holiday.'
*Camping?' And she flbunced off.
Real July weather has settled inwe-or rather is here
for the moment. The rocky path up the hill is bl inding
white. The cicadas are deafening, echoing across the
valley. But there is alweys a cool breeze coming down
from the woods, and therefore from the sea. This breeze
is cold in the evening: unusually so, even after a stifling
day. There seems to be another weather interfering with
the real Italian one.
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. People say there are more
vipers about now because pigs no longer roan through the
woods, tended by young girls with sticks, as you used to
see them. Pigs ate the vipers. They are immune to their
poison.
The heat nakes the uphill walk slower: our dog plods
along with head drooping, tongue hanging out. There are
great yells from a peasant at the foot of the valley,
egging his oxen about as he shakes in his iron seat.
'Dio buono, caminat Madonna troiag'
Yesterday we saw Ginots fattore. He is to be a go-
between for the landlady and us. There are misunderstand-
ings about when to pay the rent and to whom, about the
pozzo nero (the "black well' or swewer which is always
overflowing under our bedroom window), and lastly---the


biggest bone of contention, on which I refuse to
yield---the bill for "disinfecting' the house, that is
whitewashing the walls previous to our entry, which she
would like me to pay. As Armida 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. Anyway, I paid him two
months* rent. 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.'
There are rarely two or three days without a storm
now. Sudden chills come into the air, like the cold
currents you feel in the sea sometine S. The sun isn't
safe as it usually is from May onwards. It seems tsick.'
'Il cielo è malatto', people says---the sky is sick.
In a moment the sky can cloud over.
We walked in the thick woods. A path winds between
cornfields and lava-rocks and saplings, and comes out
at the top of a hill, from which you can see a dansely
wooded mass of hills one after the other stretching in-
land. Gianni's brother says we must come up and have a
merenda with them at the edge of the woods. Merenda
means snack or pionic. It is such a lovely Word.
But the thing itself wouldn't be done with relish.
We would snatoh 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, *Wetve just had a merendat*
So everything passes, without relish. 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 in them: no fliratations, delight, folly.
And as soon as you've said that you have to withdraw it.
There is nothing like their dolcezza, the sweetness you
see in the Sienese masters. It isn't at the centre of
their lives but it is somewhere, hoerving, all the time.
It gushes out towards children.
On our walk we saw a great wall sticking up from
one of the wooded valleys, broken and jagged, surrounded
by thick undergrowth. Beyond it 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 the jagged wall part of
them? I read a in a guidebook that a Florentine prineess
was once imprisoned in a castle near here by her own
family. She fell in love with the wrong man. She
died there, partly from sadness. The woods hug it
remoreslessly, waiting to bring it all down, absorbing
even the sunlight into their darkness.
We took the obvious road towards it. Mist and
clouds floated in the valley. It climbed up and up,


dominating the st trange, stirring hills below Volterra,
which look as though a massive freazing wave had passed
over them and ruffled theme After the dark woods there
were sudden bright fields, laid out like a map as far as
we could see. We asked for Castel Vecchio and were told
werd passed it. There had been a path to the left we
hadn't noticed. We wett back and found it, sloping down
between trees, parting from the road surreptitiously, at
an angle, as if it didn't want to be found. We noticed.
a shepherd, his face much like Paolo's, and gueesed he
must be the brother. The path began to hug the side of
the hill, rather in the style of an Etruscan approach,
secret and protected. There before us, after a turn,
shining on the erest of a hill, lay not an old castle
but two farnhouses, with rolling hills beyond them as
far as Castel Fiorentino. We asked two peasants lean-
ing on their sticks in the courtyard, 'Is this Castel
Vecchio?*
Yes it was. Were we after the ruins? Yes we
were. Ah well, they were further on, along a path at
the side of the houses. It went through woods, over
rocks and streams. It took about an hour, they said.
'But what are these towers? I asked theme
Ah, that they couldn't say! But certainly they
were interesting for thoae who 'unders tood' 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 in holes, under stones, and he
wasn't in a hurry to be bitten by a viper: Once, he
said, a lawyer--a'a small, fat mantae-had spent a month
there looking at the ruins day by day, a book in his
hand. And when they had asked him what there was of
interest in the 'towers? he only said quietly, with a
smile, 'You wouldn't un derstand---non capite, voil'
Wemust come another day, they said, because it was
already too late in the afternoon to start penetrating
the woods. It wouldn't do for a cristiano to get lost
theret They made faces and laughed.
Was Paolo's brother there? we asked. Yes, he lived
there, and he'd just taken his sheep up the road. We
expla ined that we lived near Paolo and got our milk from
him. Then we must be the foreigners who'd taken the
house at the foot of the hill where Paolo lived? Yes,
they'd heardt Apparently the news had got across the
vast, pathless, wooded valley, to their isolated post.
They talked about the war. Moroccan troops had been
there---fearful fellows, they said, who cut off ears and
never spared Germens when they caught them---they eut
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 fro m under
him.
They spoke as if the war had been the last thing to


really happen there. They seemed to feel that those
troops were still young, and solidering somewhere else.
They talked about the Moroccans and their French officers
as if their faces were still before theme Youth, they
said, is unmindful' in war. Boys lose their sense of
family. Homes, crops, other peoplets belongings are
meaningless to them.
It was getting chilly. As we went away they sat
with their eyes still on us, calm and inquisitive.
Perhaps we seemed to them only another aspect of the war-
experience that had fallen into the silence so few years
ago, when the sky was golden.
A letter cane from the landlady---an answer to my
conference with her fattore. will I please not take our
business to 'third partiest to settle? But I shall.
Her words run close together in one round, breathless
serawl, 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 instinet, this.
When we go to see her she talks about the pope, end
her son who lives far avay, and how intolerably untidy
her dauhgter is, and about the religious experience she
has had. She once saw her son---the image passed across
her mind as she was standing before a madonnin@---and
later that day she heard he'a had an accident. She
talks rhetorically, opening her mouth wide, with flashes


of humour and dry irony. By the time she finishes we
are tired antl toonhungry to think about bills. We've
been wrangling mildly for two months now. Some deep
Italian wrangles go on for five, fifteen years. Sonetimes
they go from one generation to another, abolishing time.
Paolo braught us milk yesterday that went sour at
once. This followed an affable conversation with hime
The peasants approach each other in a hard way, for this
reason. They almost never have twakes? wi th each.other.
We are the catalyst that brings them together in the
evening. otherwise they stay in families. The young
bring themtogether sometimes. Gianni flirts with the
two girls at Pescille. There may be a dance improvised
in the rough courtyard, to the radio. We say we shall
have a dance one day but it comes to nothing.
Gianni brought down a live chicken and a basket-
full of marrows for us. Gino says, trying to make a
laugh out of it, that we're spbiling him, by always
taking him in the car. Silvano said yesterday---not
realising what he*a said until he'd said it-e-that
Gianni occupies the *dog's place' in our car.
The girl up the hill, who lives with her paren ts
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 jro your mother?
Gianni's lips show signs of ungoverned ohildhood
passion. It was the first thing I noticed about hime
They are the shape of lips closed hungrily round a


nipple. He was still going to his mother for milk at the
age of seven or eight, he says with a smile. Extra flesh
has formed on his mouth. He says he will have a little
operation sometime.
'I took too much milk,* he shouts, tand then I sucked
my thumb 1
We took our bread over to the Agnarelli family this
morning for baking. They have an oven outs: ide and our
two loaves will go in with the rest. They all gape at
the wholemeal flour. Why isn't it white? Yet they grow
and out and thresh the whole grain themselves. They
take it to the mill where it is stripped of the germ
and returned to them in bags of flour (white) or else a
promissory note for a year's supply of white bread.
Fewer and fewer peasants are baking their own bread now.
The flour they use looks rather like French podwer.
They say wistfully, *Who knows it it's our grain we get
back?' They give the wheat to chickens. In the winter
the oxen get wholeneal flour mixed with water. They suck
it up hungrily. All the old stone mills have closed
down. One bakery with wood-ovens remains in the 'town'.
The craze for bleached white bread only hit Italy
after the last war. The priest at Racciano who looks like
Luther told us that the *American's---a generic name for
the other side in the war---brought it in. 'Since then,'
he said, we won't touch the dark stuff. This is light-
er, easier to digest.' He seys the dark stuff means
poverty for then.


The peasants look unhealthy on the whole. They are
burned by the sun, but it doesn't go deep. They fill
themselves with stodgy masses of spaghetti and indigestible
white bread. If they buy their bread in town* it is in-
variably undercooked, to save fuel.
The weather is strange again. Every afternoon at
roughly the same time the clouds draw up from the eastern
horizon and a storm approaches Blowly, rumbling. The
lightning darts down on the fields, with deafening claps
of thunder. The rain is sudden, brief, torrential.
Then there is a olear evening. It happens every day-ee
a fine, hot mroning, the storm, and then the serene evening
sky.
There was a slight earth-tremor along the coast a few
days.ago.
Gianni told us that a streak of lightning had come
within a few steps of his mother when she was bringing in
grass. He was standing by the house and it struek between
them. The noise was immense. He asked her if she was
frightened and she said, 'No, I didn't even see it!
Last night there was an opera in the 'town? square.
During each interval there was violent hammering and
sceneshifti ing, as if builders had taken the town hall
over. Lacking a ourtain they hit on the savage idea of
shining arc-lamps in to our faces, to blind us to the
soeneshifting. There was a Woman conductor wreathed in
a tight black gown down to her feet. It made her look
snakey and bizarre. Her conducting oroduced a kind of


school performance. She appeared on the stage wi th the
principal singers at the end of each act, like the: ir
schoolmistress. Her movements were round and graceful,
and sometimes her hips moved in a dancing way, like in a
foxtrot. It was Verdi, but minus the drama: a shell.
We nodded and dozed. In the ballroom seene the chorus
knocked together like fammers 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 were
being throttled.
The conspirators were dressed in shiny
green night-dresses and sleeping caps, like old women 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 is
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 Armida calldrig
her chickens. In passionate moments she was like
Armida being tickled. When the tenor was dying at the
end the chorus looked on like farmers in a slaughter
house. The thing dragged on until one in the morning.
Gianni was with us, dressed up to the nines. Two seats
away sat the fattore who had found us our house---he


roared "Braval* after one of the soprano's arias as if
shera struck a olever bargain at the cattle market (admir-
ing her without thinking her honest). The smell with
which everyone was impregnated---sweet grass, voleanie
soil and cow-shit-endrifted across the open auditorium
towards the gasping singers and mingled with the cheap
cigamette smoke. All the people with windows looking on
to the square had their lights turned off, by special
request of the town hall, so as not to interfere with the
performance, but being Italian they kept on finding things
to visit these rooms for, and every few moments a light
want up self-effacingly and then out again. Flags were
draped out. of the windows above the stage for the last
seene. At curtain call the stage was a choaos. The
principal characters got mixed up with the stagehands,
while the applause thundered through the night. The
bass, who got the biggest hand of the evening, had a
thernos flask with him and was busily opening it.
They got the musie right, more or less. Being
Verdi performed by oxen, there was something nat tural about
it: but of course oxen have no sense of drama.
It made me think, 'No sense of aristooracy, no art.'
Aristocraoy means the ability to show yourself naked
(that is, in any state) to the world: tobe a living and
walking denial of original sin. It was knocked out of
Italian life by the Counter Reformation three hundred
years ago. Yet it started in Italy, imported from
Greece. It emerged, the Greek influence, in Christ-


ianity. And then Christianity stamped it out on its
own doorstep. The Church took over from the princes and
the dukes. The art went down. The Italian imagination
wallowed briefly in baroque, then petered out, tamed.
Another strike of the mezzadri. There were dozens
of motor-cycles outside the south gate. They are asking
for some form of peasant ownership: the state should take
over the responsibilities of the landlord. Gianni and I
passed a field where the wheat lay uneut. The thick,
golden ears were drooping.
He came in the evening and gave us a speech on the
need for agraian reform: grain production in Italy had
gore down unbelievably in the last few years, he said.
As more and more people left the land and less wine, wheat,
barley, oil, livestock were produced, so prices went up.
As a result of the higher prices the W orkers made more
pay demands, and this sent the prices up still further.
End result: chaost He said we needed a system like in
Russia, where the state controlled everything. I said
to this that the state could be a XE oruel landlord too:
with which he promptly agreed. (Once he has made a
speech he will often agree with the opposite argument:
the speech was only a rhetorical exercise Which mustn't
be interrupted, like a statue sculpted not for its truth
but for martial and monumental ends).
The communist party, where Gianni learned all this,


has its headquarters in the lesser of the two halves of
"town'. The main square has one socially OK road lead-
ing out of it, and another less OK road leading from the
other side. The CP headquarters are in a deep-bowelled
shop, with a bar just inside the doorway. In the evenings
and on week-ends it throbs with juke-box music and its
doorway is crammed with men. Some of them bring out
chairs to stare into the narrow roadway. When there are
lots of toursists the communist youths stare into the
roadway as if they ha d timed the revolution for next
morning and the tourists (traditionally rich and without
a care in the world, even when they are self-evidently
working class) were the forces of reaction whose is all
but over.
The CP has taken over the functions of the Church.
It is the place where the smallest man's troubles will
be heard, where justice is meted out privately. It is
a club. Dino, When you ask him where he is off to in
the evening, will say, *Al partitot gemeto the party.
No one we know would hardly dare not to be a member.
Its card is a certificate of deceney.
It gradually went round the local party that we
were tall right'. In the old days the Church would have
had to give the same social approval. Some social power
doe still lie with the Church. Not even party members
could disregard the social verdict of a priest entirely.
In the strangest way, which only Italy in her secret
heart could explain, the two work closely together.


They provide a double spearhead to find out if people
are prepotente, arrogant, too forward. Natural arrogance
has to be tamed in the Italian. It has been tamed histor-
ically and it is tamed again in every child. An old
wisdom shows that it has been the source of terrifio
violence all over the peninsula. Italy has shaken with
its results for centuries. So the first thing you learn
when you live anong them is to bide your time in a disagree-
ment, and maintain a show of respect for the other man.
Rispetto is an always more used word. You hear it on TV--e
in the documentaries about southern Italy: 'respecti',
the employers show us no respectt', twe must have respect!'
Foreigners have trespect' for each other---not Italians:
you hear it all the tine. A great fight is going on for
respect. It is pushing the old Italy under.
Nobody seems to want to buy the hundreds of hectares
of fertile land that are being abandoned. Paolo the
shepherd dreams of being a butcher, but with the same
money he could buy a piece of land which would never lose
its value. The fattori---the agents who in any other
country would be the new class of landlords now-e-are
simply entrepreneurs who hate flats and houses in town
and want to stay there, with as little direct dealing
with the hard-headed peasants as possible. Peaeants
will wrangle for hoursover a kilo of sugar. They are
on their guard; it is in their blood, at a time when
society is entering a liquid-money, industrial stage,
from an agricultural, virtually feudal one.
I wateh 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. But they pester their mother to bring them food
as before, pecking at her neck. She refuses. And they
are constrained first to fly, and then to begin pecking of
their own accord-e-to do their own shopping', as Gino says.
We drove to the sea through Volterra and found a
serappy bathing place called The Little Boat where the
beach had an amazing brilliance, like white bone shining
in the sea. This is because of a soda factory near by,
which empties its waste int o the sea. They've made a
pleasant dark restaurant of wood, low and wide like a
plantation house. The sun was misty and burned quickly.
The usual storm came up inland, reaching us eerly in the
afternoon, witth a little rain. As we were strolling along
the beach a young girl ran up to us grom a convent group
and astonished us by saying, 'Per penitenza siete di
carnagione bianca Pematas a penance, you have white skins deme
the hurried back to the other girls with a giggle. When
we walked past them later they were all saying their Ave
Marias solemnly. She probably did it for a bet. We got
home with the signs of our penance burned away ly the sun.
The courtayard was a blaze of yellow light, and the tall
cypress outaide was like a great black cone against the
brightness of the haystack at its side. Apparently no


rain had fallen. The sun was just going down.
The big threshing machines have been at work. They
oreak and rattle their way towards the farms at a snail's
pace, great red-painted affairs with belts and wheels like
a ohild's invetntion. They spew out the waste chaff through
a long pipe, and pack the straw into wired bales. They
seem a s1 tunningly labour-saving thing for this regione
Paolo the shepherd came by with four sheep and tried
to steer them into one of our empty pighouses with a stick.
They were badly frightened and one scaped, but returned
from alarm at finding herself alone. He had to carry them
in one by one, holding them by the rump and the seruff of
the neck. And there they stayed, in darkness, with hardly
room to turn in, all night. I put a tin 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 sheepe--thrown roughly in like bags
of grain. They are for tinned meat, being sick animals,
so Paolo tells us. The words "for tinning' seem to be
interchangeable for sick; where animals are concerned.
Gianni sense our cancern about the sheep and laughs.
The chicken he brought us last week is still walking about
the courtyard alive. our exeuse 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 sitting down to the evening meal Gino
called up from the courtyard and the dog started barking


like mad. The Luther-like priest was below. It was
his first visit. He has the tiny cura to which our
house belongs, his village being a kilometre away--ea
cluster of houses the colour of the earth, on top of a
hill. He saw I was eating and said he vouldn't disturb
us but would wait in the courtyard until we were ready---
there was no hurry. He spoke calmly and quietly, with
timid glances. He is a pale, thin man in his late forties,
and moves in a pained way, more a monk than a priest.
Dino told us he was the son of a peasant, had warked in
the fields as a child. And he was. good---so good!
The word 'good always carries a slight inference of
ineptitude in Italian. There is even a proverb connect-
ing the two.
We insisted on his co ming upstairs, and he sat with
us at table on the balcony overlooking the road, with a.
glass of Gino's wine in frant of hime He had bro ught us
a bag of pears, the first ones of the season, small and
green, from his ova trees.
One of the first questions was, were we catholics?
No, protes tants.
'But the same Christ,' I added.
I told him 'protestant' really meant we were in-
that we found oursleves in-ea certain 'historical sit-
uation'. It meant nothing in terms of real belief.
History had cut us off from Rome in such a way that while
we felt at home in an Italian church we didn't belorg.
He said he'd been reading a book of meditations by


a Dutch priest that afternoon, in which it was written
that to try to bring the different churches t ogether was
'an act of God', In the ecumenical council in Rome, he
said, they were disoussing the possibility of the queen
of England agreeing to the status of political head of
state while acknowledging the pope as the head of christ-
1anity. He spoke in a strangely si mple way-a-as if the
queen would in some way be forgiven her past. And pro-
testants, he hoped, would be 'received into the Church.
*That would be wonderful,' he said, 'to bring all
the churches together? (under Rome).
He looked at the wholemeal bread we were eating and
asked in a eurious way, 'Is that special bread?'. I
think he was quite prepared to hear that it was protestant
ritual bread. We told him we had it mixed ourselves.
"German' bread, we called it.
'Invece noi---', he said, 'now we on the other hand
have a different habit. We eat it white. We're used
to it.'
When we got to the dessert stage we asked him to
join us and offered him some peccorino cheese and one of
his own pears. To our surprise he said calmly, *I'11
try your bread---just a little slice.' I out him two
varieities, one baked at a 'tomn* bakery and the other
from the Agnarelli's across the valley. He didn 't 1ike
either. He said they tasted of the seed* of the wheat.
Gienni joined and made a polite nod at the priest,
with 'Buona sera, reverendo's


'Yes,' Gianni said, 'I believe white bread is lacking
in vitamins---it has none of the substance of theirs---l',
pointing to the wholemeal slices on the table.
*Our priest doesn't think so,' I said.
No, the priest 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
acfoss the valley in a yearning sort of way, as if fro free-
dom. The priest gave hima kindly but conttrained and
perhaps wary smile whenever he spoke. Gianni got up from
his chair frequently and.looked over the balcony, lit a
cigarette, tapped his foot on the ground.
"Fienni 1s seen at church very little,' the priest
said with a smile, pale and quiet. I dontt think he's
been since childhood---' And he turned a questioning
look at hime
Gianni smiled charmingly and said nothing. I broke
in with, 'But he's religious.'
*Oh yes,' said the priest doubtfully. 'He's good.
His mother's a fine woman, brought him up well. She's
really religious. She's done everything for her child-
ren,' and he gave Gianni another quick look.
He returned to our first subject and said he was
interested in what I'd said about our finding oursel ves
in an "historical situation'. He gave us what seems to
be the official Italian version of Henry v111: that this
king asked the pope for a divorce from Catherine, but of


course the pope wasn't able to grant it, the honest
fellow. And then through 'patriotism Henry had eut
himself off from Rome and declared himself spiritual
head of England.
Only ten or so people come to his Sunday morning
mass, he said with the traceof a determined look, as if
herd long ago got used to the hurt this offered him. He
felt himself lucky to have these ten, hesaid. They
were all wo,en and children. Even fewer came to his
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 stary
is so clear to him: why should people want to offer it
offence? It seems a stary of respectability for him-
touched with simple grace and goodne ess. Obey and respect
those above you. And all round him there are people who
refuse to fo that.
He asked if we'a met the family up the hill, the oouple
we rarely see, with the daughter. Yes, wera met them,
but they were always sunk in work, I said, having eight
hectares of land to look after. He paused, as he nearly
always does after a statement, to let it enter his head
slowly and painfully, then, *Ah yes,' he said, *they
have a lot of work. Too much." And, Now theytre
reli igious people. They come to church. They're
good. Very responsible.'
Yet to me they seem less good, in the ir hearts, than
other people here. I nodded non-commitally: arter 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 watch TV. He would take us round
some of his little churches---one of them went back nine
hundred years. He has a fourteenth-century wooden
crucifix in his sacristy, he says.
We felt settled by his visit. It made us feel
safer. This is still the power of the Church. We
belong. His visit is watched by the peasants. It gives
satistaction, means we have values. But we mustn't
become church-cats either. That would blacken us at
once. A nice balance is the Italian ideal.
And he was the first person of leisure we'd spoken
to for months. Only the Church purveys a dream in the
Italian countryside. It gove rns and administers the
power to dream. It brings the only feeling of a culture
that the fields allow themselves. And so, at this time
When the Church is out 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, is a possible starting place for
idylls, faney.
After he'a got into his car with t he last good bye
he pushed open the door and called out to me, 'Herel',
in his slow way, as if waiting to be rebuffed. "I've
brought you something to read.*
He gave me threemegazines, two of which dealt with
the past life of the new pope in the insipid way of Italian


ecclesiastical humbug. It was part churoh-politics,
part state-polities, mixed together in a dirty mess of
propaganda that a duck wouldn't swallow.
What can the priest offer Gianni that Gianni wouldnT
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 someone who doesn't.
No one will swallow the pathetic stuff any morea
It is because of Gianni's goodness, and Dino's,
and Gino's, that every church in Italy hasn't been rased
to the ground. And, paradoxically, this goodness of
theirs was given to them by the Church.
The Churgh is at the climax of an internal reform-
ation. Its mumbojumbo, its petty hierarchies, its
dogged philistine exclusions, its club morality,
are disappearing to save the story of Christ from
bec oming an item in the encyalopedia.
The storm this afternoon brbught more rain than usual
and less 1ightning. 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 lunchtime, there is the first rumble of
thund er. We take in everything from the balcony---
chairs, tablecloth, cushions. Then the sun gets mistier
and hotter, as the thunder draws neer, in the course of


about an hour. 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 effeet of the rain
is to make a thick heat-mist the next morning. It
seeps along the valley and turns the 'town' into a shadow
hanging on clouds, burnished by the sun like a medallion
suspended from the sky.
Another strike of the mezzadri. Gianni told us
about a big meeting he'a been to in Siena, organised. by
the communists. He gave another of his speeches. He
said that while 1t was right to work, and to work hard,
it was wrong to work hard when there wasn't a crust of
bread at home. Was it right, he asked me, sipping his
vin santo, that the man who eultivated the land and did
all the chores should give half his produce to S omeone
who did nothing? Here I interrupted. I said that the
mezzadro system he worked under didn't S eem 80 bad as
his employers took none of the produee, and less than
half the proceeds from the cattle. But he only amiled
at me connivingly. The speaker at the meeting, he said,
had been molbo in gamba, 'very capable*, and knew as much
about the rural situation as any peasant. The man had
told them, with some humour, about the *tired and over-
worked 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 was renamed *veal'.
"Marvellous the transmigrations that take place


nowadayst' the speaker had said.
And then there were the taxes and levies on the
land that went into 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. At the
end of this month the government would have to account
for this 'fund' and how it had been spent, but the govern-
ment couldn'tt The "funde had been 'lost' by a certain
Secretary General---a nation's agricultural future had
been 'lost's Where had they 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
schemest which were private in nature and benefitted
only a handfull of rich and unworthy people who should
be dragged before the bar of law and indicted for the
equivalent of treason?
No wonder, Gianni said, that 'we communists' have
such success at the elections, when things like that go
on. *And the Church can't help us : They just follow
on. Now they're reforming themselves-w-because they've
got to.
A wonderful humanity plays on Gianni's face sametimes,
when he gazes into the fistance. The light was almost
finished as he talked on the balcony, and the valley on
the other side of the road lay still and shadowy.
Guido Agnarelli who was passing below in his heavy boots


called up to us. We stood talking to him. He'd
been to a riunione in 'town", he said, a meeting connect-
ed with the strikes. He has been il1 with kidney
trouble and looks thinner, less like the 'brigand'. He
spoke in a tired and disgruntled way. He doesn't like
the idea of separating from his brother.
At about ten last night we felt a tremor under the
earth that lasted ten or twenty seconds. We had just
gone to bed. At first, half dozing, I had the illusion
that we were still in Rome and that this was the rumble
of a truck in the street below, shaking our palazzo.
Then I realised we were in hushed countryside.
Today we heard that at dawn there had been an
earthquake in Yugolsavia killing, according to first
reports, about five thousand people.
Later there were reports of earth tremors along
the Italien coast close to France.
Dino told us that Guido Agnarelli and his brother,
with their families, are leaving this valley. Their old
padrone---whom they eall a crook, while Dino calls him
7 a 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 Dino despairingly today, What ean I do to keep
them there? I haven't the money to employ workers by
the day. Where can I find another family? Why are


they moving? I'11 give them anything! But I can't give
them my blood?' And Dino's answer was, with his broad
optimistic smile, 'Town's the fashion nowg*
We spent the next evening with Guido and his brother
but they said nothing about the move. We talked about
the last war. Suddenly Guido burst out. with, 'The trouble
with Mussolini was that there was only one of himt There
ought to have been fifty thousand Mussolinis! People
need to be told, do this, or backs to the walli Then you'd
see them fly!' And he flung his brother a resentful
look.
The brother, who is tall and thin and said to be
'nervous? (that is, given to anger), replied in a mild
way, *Oh, you know, Mussolini made a big mistake getting
mized up with a German madman, and trying to oreate a
world empire.'
*That's vight,' his wife said, 'he ought to have put
Italy in, order first.
When they leave--and 1f no one takes their place-e"
nearly the whole valley between here and 'town', apart
from the podere bel onging to Peseille, will be ahandoned
soil, used for sheep grazing at best, if the shepherds
don't all decide to move as well. For miles aro und,
the vineyards have begun to deteriorate. There are
almost no young people working the land today.
Guido looks more and more disgruntled. When we
strolled over there this evening we found him lying on
a grass bank by the house, silence, slumped in the dusk.


'Hullo,' he said softly. 'Wetve just eaten.
I'm taking the cool air.'
He hates to leave. I can't understand why they
don't go to their landlord and make a deal. Guido would
do it but his brother wants to beoome a bricklayer in
"town', He talks about industries as if they will save
everything. He asks, *Why can't factories be built
round the town? Why are there regulations limiting
factories to the outskirts, just to preserve the panorama?
Because of tourism, we say: because factories can
be put anywhere; and because they're ugly, which the
panormama isn'te
'But,' he goes on, 'Id 1ike to know S omething,
and I've heard the point discussed in piazza, how is it
that people can plant as many trees as they like?
Pines, for instence? A whole forest of pines has been
planted just outside the town in recent years, and this
has begun to obsoure the panormama. Why are they allow-
ed and factories not??
Pines and pplendia panoramas aren't a contradiotion,
we say, but factories and panoramas are. Pines can be
out down, and they don't pollute the air.
'And then,* I said, twe 've destroyed enough already.
Where I was born there wasn't a tree in sight, the sky
was always dark with smoke, we were supposed to live 1ike
machines.'
But this is lost on them. They simply gaze at me.
Industries mean 11 progresso. These are interchangeable


words for them. Unlike the English labouring classes
whonf ought 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.
Dino asked us to come to see his new flat again, this
time in honour of Armida's first visit. Now the walls
are finished and the doors are serewed on.
When you ask Armida 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, and when
they were looking through the rooms I opened it with an
enormous pop which brought them hurrying into the kitchen.
Itwas sticky muck, aereted sugar-water, an Italian 'champange
that was never near a vineyard in its life. The explosion
was so loud that nothing natural could have caused it.
It no more warmed our hearts than a laboratory experiment.
Armida was doubtful all the time, peering about the
place at the bright new taps and shining tiles and marble
floors and little plastic shutters. When Dino asked her
'to say a word'ew-in his erect, laughing way, his head
thrown back stiffly, she simply turned her head away like
a young girl.
She wanted to inspect the other three flats in the
building, to see if they were better. She came to the
conclusion that they were, though Dino's rooms have the
best view and are on the ground floor. She found a tiny
defect in the bathroom and Dino gave her an admiring
look, saying he'd passed it by a hundred times.


From oneof the windows overlooking the valley
he pointed out Pescille in the dist tance, shining red.
And near by he pointed out a small modernised house.
'That belongs to a pilot. He's leaving and he's letting
the lend go to waste-ewhe doesn't carel' His hand swept
across half the valley.
Armida seemed faintly distracted and sad on the way
back. The bathroom, she complained, was * so small'
(never having had a bathroom in her life, even a bath).
I think she means small as figura---as a thing to display.
What will she do without her chickens? After we
dropped her at home we heard calling them lovingly,
for half an hour or more, as if to celebrate her return.
She has over a hundred of them. She outs grass in the
field oppsoite our fouse for her rabbits. She walks. by
with a load balanced on her head every day. It means
nothing for her to bring drinking water from half a mile
away on her shoulders-e-two cans hanging from a staff.
We do it too, but we fill two large plastic containers
that wall last us teveral days.
We promised our priest that we would be at his
Sunday mass and we went with Gianni. The church is
no bigger than a barn. The fifteenth-century crucifix
he'd told us about hung over the altar, black and smooth
as ebony. There were six others in the congregation,
women and girls, and two boy servers, sacristani, with
white smocks shoved untidily over the ir ord inary clothes.
our priest looked even more like a monke He spoke
softly and remotely, as he does in conversation, his


face pale, distraught. One of the boy servers had the
job of reading from a serappy pamphlet, Which describes
every step in the mass in Italian. Latin is now out.
*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..e The
priest now offers bread and wine, which turns to the flesh
of Christ. On your knees. He read it haltingly,
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. Bone times 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
finger-lioking and shrugging and signing, then, in the
shopping-list voice, 'Let us pray.' For an hour or
more we were bobbing up and down like corks.
Afterwards we walked round the empty churoh and
our priest showed us the sacristy. He told us that
the prized orucifix had came to the village only a
century and a half ago-e-the priest of that time had
bought if off one of Napoleon's troops. In the sacristy
we found another crucifix which he said was made of plaster
and 'insratistic' but if anything it is nicer than the
other one and is actually made of wood. A thick layer
of plaster is spread over the wood to take colours.
He showed us his vestments, which are surprisingly splendid--
a whole wardrobe. There were magnificent brasses candel-


abra. He gave me more magazines, W ith their neneer of
devout concern. Oneof them contained . an attack on
André Gide as 'shameless', a seurrilous paragraph on a
man 'who calls himself a e ommunist, yet hasa chauffeur*,
andta diagnosis of a ommunism in Italy' which made -no
mention of the agraian problem or the government fund
which is said to have been 'lost'.
He showed us an arch of red bricks in the wall of
his house. It was the relic of a mediaeval hostel,
he said. At that time the narrow track we were stand-
ong on had been a pilgrim's road to Rome. Probably it
went from monastery to monastery aeross the hills.
The tiny village lay silent round us. We went to his
house, attached to the church, and met his sister.
Tou go into a cool hall with a bare room beyond wh ere
the TV sits. No books or easy chairs, no signs of
thinking. The kitehen as always is the centre of life,
with an old inglenook big enough to sit in.
'There,' he said, poiting at it with the slightest
ripple of pleasure across his face,' is where I like to
be best of all, in the winter. His sister affectionately
dusted some chalk off his sleeve.
His mind seems to lurk somewhere behind his words,
undeveloped. Not one new idea seemed to have entered
his life, changed him. He seems an easier dupe of
publicity than the peasants. This is what they like
about him-e-his innocence. It means they can discount
him, need not fear him.


He's numbed. Something has been erased from his
acc ount of life. The debit and eredit figures of exper-
ience aren't entered any more.
For the first time in many days it hasn't clouded
over in the afternoon or rumbled with distant thunder.
The heat mist (which began to spread a harmful fungus
among the vines) has disappeared and the day is clear
and still, with the first faint suggestion of autum.
The sunlight glitters 1ike water. We can see right
across the valley as far as the hills above Siena-
not a good sign. The summer is passing before it
came into being. July isn't yet out.
The ox with tuberoulosis is still here and refuses
to put on weight, in spite of bran and wholewheat and
linseed added to her grass diet. She has a sentitive,
wide-eyed air. She dislikes being alone and is against
being moved around. All Gino's efforts to seal her
have failed, though he told us some time back that a deak
had already been made. So she stays. The other oxen
are bought and sold but she stays. She eats little when
she's alone in the stall, but- the moment another ox comes
in she feeds heartily again. I think she knows our
sounds---the dog, the car, the sound of the cans when I
bring polluted water from the well for washing up.
Now she has two other oxen with her. They do the
work and she's the guest. This morning I went in and
spoke to her, and she looked round in her wordering e
slightly fretful way, the vhites of her eyes showing.
And she made me a sort of grunt. When we were away


for two nights recently she didn't eat. Half an hour
after we were back, with our familiar scunds, she put
back several loads of forage.
When I told Gino that the classical treatment for
tuberculosis was plenty of air, and that it was ridiculous
to expect a creature to mend in darkness night and day,
he shook his head quietly and said,"Well, you see, it
isn't our habit to keep them out of doors.' Partly this
means he would feel ridiculous if he did keep her outside.
But partly he doesn't want to treat her as a living
creature. The peasants hide from considering thétr
animals as creatures, because then there is the obligation
of considering what kindness they owe theme
Gianni sat in the back of the car and gave me
another speech-e-on whores this time. He said he hadn't
touched one since his arny days. There were three reasons
against having a whore: first, they cost more y; second,
you had to wear a contraceptive; and third they a idn't
give a damn for you.
Later he strolled up the hill with us and we sat at
the side of the rocky path, in the stillness of the after-
noone Round us there were sea-shells of every size,
some of them barely fossilised, so that you could break
them in your hand. They make it seem that the sea was
here only yesterday. Yet the sea is over eighty kilometres
off. At Gianni's housethe earth is a flaming red.
This was due to the earth being burned by lava in the
prehist orie eruptions. There is the seme flaming earth
near siena, in the plains, where the lava flowed most,


hence 'Siena red'. We found a snail, complet ely
fossilised.
We talked about these things until we felt giddy-e
the Ice Age, the prehistoric animals that stalked or
flew about, the eruptions, the fieree 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 dis-
appeared slowly into a crack in the earth. 'Paurosot'
he creid. "Fearfull His eyes seem blue when he talks
like this, though they aren't: they seem to have the sea
in them. He too looks Etruscan, as I imagine the Etrus-
cans. And, strangest of all, he has their slight smile
on his face, naturally, in repose. If you sculptured
his head it would have the same - smile as the Etruscan
head-eeas the Apollo of Veii.
When you think of those dark, cold ages before the
human creature, you.see we 're one people: the Etruscans
were only yesterday.
Gino told us that he'd been called to a 'eonferencet
by the landlady. She said she e culdnst continue the farm
as it is now, with him taking two thousand lire a day and
producing nothing 1ike that in yield. He on his side
said that he was unable to manage all the work alone,
especially during the wheat-harvest and the vendermia
(wine harvest). She was still angry at having a sick
ox. He must sell it, she says, sell it quickly, quiokly.


But instead he sells one of theothers, because it is
pregant, and buys another two for little more than the
same price.
The farm here yields hardly enough wine, oil, wheat,
fruit or vegetables to justify transporting it to the
market, or paying taxes on it,, much less making improve-
ments. The sale of the oxen probably covers Gino's
wages---just. She says she will leave the land to go
to ruin like everyone else. Gino asks her, in that case
might he rent the land for his own use on an annual
basis? But she won't hear of it, as it would only bring
her forty or fifty thousand lire a year. She will be
forced to it perhaps. All the abandoned land is being
let in this way, gradually, to indifidual peasants.
They will return as omers, and so perhaps the land will
readjust 1tself in time.
Even running this farm, just keeping the plants
going, seems impossible. The landlady can't afford
bags of oopper sulphate and sulphur for the spraying,
nor the manure and fertiliser, even if Gino had time to
do all the hoeing he should. In pruning the vines he
leaves too long a stem before tying back-wea technique
that produces a bigger yield this year but weakens the
plant for next. You can look after three or four
hectares of land if you live on the spot, but he doesn't.
Most of his wark is emergeney Work, to stop the worst
heppening.
When rain threatens, the church bells start ringing


like mad. Usually Don Dino sends his sister into the
bell tower to do the pulling.
*Who knows,' he said to me one day with a wistful
look, if it doesn't set up some sort of vibration and
disperse the clouds. He also said, You see, people
believed that the devil caused storms. The devil was in
the black clouds.' He looked into the sky, squinting.
I felt he hadn't quite given up the idea.
The aneient rite will die soon if it goes on raining
like this, unpredictably and almost every day. a spot
of rain in the dog days was thought a danger before, to
the vines. But now all they can do is shrug and spray
harder than ever before.
When the black clouds come the peasants light fires
too. Smoke drifts over the fields. This is said to
keep off the hail.
Both owners and peasants seem to derive a malicious
pleasure from abandoning the land. It is an ancient
revenge on each other, though it ruins them both.
They seem frightened to think, either side. Nothing
could be sillier than having a farm hardly bigger than a
field devoted to a dozen different crops, fruits and
vegetables, yet dependent on one man alone, without
machinery. To cap this, two or three oxen need a mount-
ain of forage twice a day and leave the stall for perhaps
seven whole days in a month, for ploughing and cutting
and hauling. If whole farms were turned over to wine they
could conceivably be worked by one or two men, and would


yield far more, even at the present low prices which
genuine wine (as opposed to chemically treated wine) is
fetching. Everyone is talking these things over.
*C oncentrated'yineyards will come in, easy to hoe with
hand machinery, in dense files, not spaced in terraces
with erops between them. On the other hand erops sewn
between vines do them good. You plant maize one year,
wheat the next, beans after that. It keeps the earth
frehs. And then there are stories that the concentrated
vineyards are more prone to disease, and give spectacular
yields for a limited time whereas the old vines last forty
years without any trouble.
Multi-crop farming was designed to supply a large
family with all it needed. Three generatiors Worked the
land simultaneously from one farmhouse. But the sons
are in factories, Workshops now. The children are at
school. Machines and one-erop farming go together,
the one making the other economical. on the other hand
machines are difficult to handle in small, hilly country.
So bulldozing has to - be done. Hills have to smoothed
down, valleys built up. It is starting already.
We asked Dino why Paclo the shepherd didn't buy a
decent piece of land at the present throw-away prices
and work it himself, instead of getting a buteher's
shop in competition with a dozen other better-experieneexperienced
men in the same town, and he seid, Because the land is
dirty work.'
Apparently the Agnarelli brothers did go to their
landlord with a proposition. This proposition, natur-


ally, was that he should give them a higher percentage
than the official fifty three percent of the mezzadria
system. - But he threw up his hands and said that even
now he could barely pay his taxes or buy the fertilisers,
the concime for feeding the cattle and the fowl, or mend
their roofs. At a higher percentage he would have to sell
everything. But he agreed to buy them a tractor, which
will halve their work in the summer and spare the over-
worked oxene If you lay down thirty percent of the price
of any machine, the government will loan you the rest at
a tiny percentage.
A speaker in town said that our vivilisation now
depends on a cohesive agriculture, that is a real country
1ife again. The Anglo-Saxons have turned the country-
side into a factory. The result is disease, 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 of life. The answers
have to be different from the Anglo-Saxons ones: based
on what men need, not on puritan caleulations of teconomy'.
It is amazing to what extent the old Italy had a
satisfactory system of life. While mezzadria flourished
the farms were like jewels, set out on the hills like a
great fertile jigsaw puzzle of green and grey and red.
Willow trees burst out red every few hundred yards. By
the early spring they were ready to be snipped off in
long strands to tie the pruned vine-stems down with.
The earth was ploughed in impeccable parallel lines.


The men burst with health. Some people say that Italy
always did well, even in the war. There was always some-
thing to be found to eat and drink. Even in the south,
people say, the sun healed much of the deprivation.
You can't look at unemployment figures as you can in
other countries, and judge from theme The Neapolitans,
for instance, like to take a job for a few weeks, or
months, then throw it up and kick their heels for a bit
and then look round for so amething else. They won't be
machines. They want to go on savouring life. Their
ability to savour life is one of the most extraordinary
survivals in a country which has become ind ustrial and
copes with about thirty million foreign to urists a year.
Then there are the plentiful church holidays, the
Republic days and Independence days and Victory days.
This strange land keeps a style of life among its poor=
est which only deliberately self-liberated people in
other lands achieve. They keep their palates and,
underneath the drudgery, a personal, solfish freedome
Every Italian is a vagrant. Every Italian wanders an
the face of the earth, alone. He has no friends.
When you know that you know Italy.
The fattore came on behalf of the landlady and
peeped into the downstairs or 'peasant' rooms. He
is negotiating with a family to take occupation in Jan-


uary, he says, and to rent the land and half the house.
Gino will rent part of the land and vork in with theme
We're doubtful if it will work out, and the fattore
seems doubtful too. It may be a sort of political move
on her part to get us to take the whole house over, but
I don't think so.
The wheat is being brought in from our farm in
sheafs and laid down where there is a flat, sandy space
outside, to form a massa, a great round stack. Then
in a week or ten days the threshing machine will come
creaking along and the grain will be beaten from the
straw, and the straw-blocks will be stacked under the
cypress tree, to shine fresh at its side.
The fields are cleared of their sheafs in rotation,
everyone helping the other in neighbourly groups. They
start soon after dawn and go on until past dusk. 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 Gino's kitchen) and twelve or fifteen exhaust-
ed people sit down to eat, with plenty of wine. I don't
think it will be much of a celebration though.
It turns out that the 'peasant family* negotiating
to come to this house is Guido Agnarelli or 'the brigand'.
He was helping with the massa this morning and told us.
The priest stopped in 'town' this morning and gave
me more literature, with a bag of fruit from his own trees-es
plums and pears. His goodness makes him press everything
on me, but at the same time he gives the megazines a wistful


look, 1ike a child in 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
the passage dealing with the schism'nin England, when
Henry V111 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 watoh
His TV one evening. Tomorrow is the feast day of the
'town' saint, with a sung mass and lots of flowers, and he
rec ommends us to go. There will be an orchestra in the
ca thedral. I'm sure he feels we're ripe for Rome. We're
'good people, that is ripe to become Christians, that is
catholics. A non-catholio isn't really a Christian in
Italy. Christian means 'human being'. So a non-catholic
is slightly less than a human being.
Gianni sat on our terrace in the darkness while a
chicken was roasting in the oven for hime His mother hasn't
an oven so he brought it down to my wife. He and Luigi,
with Silvano and three others, are going to the sea tomoorrow
(the saint's feast day) and have hired a car and driver.
He and Luigi fuss like old Women. Should they take a
small suitoase? how are they going to get all the 'luggaet
into the car? what about plates and knives and forks?
will they need salt? should they take wine? It makes
it like a childhood trip. Their talk makes the kitchen
glow. They are to leave at half past six in the morning.
The chicken is roasted in silver paper--ewe tell them
this is a good succulent way. Ours is the only gas oven


this side of the valley. Otherwise it would have meant
building a wood fire over at Pescille, where they are all
still busy stacking the wheat.
Gianni gave us a speech about women. Tuscan women
were much teasier 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 with her for ghree
months without onee 'going to her house', that is, getting
engaged to her. In that time she might let you be int-
imate with her. But if she did you warned all your
friends not to think of her as a possible wife. You told
them, 'I've been with her. And for her to go with me
she must have been with plenty of others too.' You will
tell your friends about her in any ease, beoause whenever
you have sex you boast about it afterwards, you expose
the woman involved. More, if the womanhas permitted
intimacy this rules out even marriage between you and
her: intimacy before betrothal is the death of a woman's
reputation.
At half past six in the morning they still hadn't
gone. I strolled up the rocky path and there were festive
soun ds from below---Gianni calling, Siloano asking some-
thing urgent. At last the car doors slammed and there
was a great collective shout, the day seemed all space
and sunlight, with that special gleaming magio of a
voyage---and they drove off. Ciaot The women waved.
There are more thunderstorms, with heavy rain:
but at dawn now. The other night we watched a cloud


hanging over the Sienese hills, under a full moon, with
1ightning flashing inside it like a storm-scene in a play.
The valley with its endless groves, its single vines 1ike
shad ows, twined round a tree, look haunted and in a peculiar
way ravished. We could even see the 'town? in the light-
ning, perched on its hill like a piece of carved rook,
gaunt and unbending.
Inthe dead of the night the valley 1s so still that
it seems the most unbelievable madness to suppose that
we could master' it for a moment, the silence of outer
space.
Our priest took us to the tiny hill-village of
Montepulero, where there are only two families left, and
a shepherd. It was stormy and the wind swept across the
muddy path below the church. The clouds were dark,
moving swiftly. The road to the village rises steeply
between wheatfields and cypresses. The biggest house
lies abandoned, its windows shuttered, with planks nailed
across. Not long ago fifteen people lived in it.
We could see across a deep valley to the country south of
Siena, with its small hill towns clear in the brooding
storm-darkness. Don Dino pointed out the towering jagged
ruin that sticks out of the earth by the Colle val d'Elsa-
Volterra road, and told us that in the middle ages it had
been a look-out post commanding the whole valley, during
the sporadic wars with Volterra.
We were to meet the priest of Montepulero and he came
out of his house calm and smiling as soon as he heard the


car. He looks like a peasant, lean and weather-beaten,
with shrewd, unyielding eyes under blondish eyebrows.
Don Dino looks frail and unhealthy by him, a bag of bone
and sinew. The church-house is the only one in good re
pair, and we peep into a pleasant-looking study--his
'offide'---as we pass. First we had to see the church,
which is bare apart from a copy of a Sienese altar, and
a Madonna and Child with St Michael slaying the dragon,
and St Peter. The walls are painted (cement underneath)
in imitation of the black and white stone motif of the
cathedrals in Siena and Florence. The priest complains
ina voice hardly more than a whisper that the rain comes
in from the bell-tower, and he shows us the dtreams of
damp down the wall. The wind is so strong up here,
he says in his disturbingly insincere sootto voce, that
there is no way. of stopping the rain penetrating.
There has never been such weather before, he says.
The tower had never in all its hist ory been put to such
a test. In the old traditional waether an earthquake
might have brought it down but never wind or rain.
He was aching to talk politics. The moment we
were in the open air again he pointed to the abandoned
house and said, still in his whisper, There were four
families there not above two years agol* He added more
loudly, 'They're all going away, the peasants. This wi 11
be a dead village soona And why? Economics? NOS'
His face became sharp and fierce. 'Psychological!
It's all paychological! They want the town, they want


the industrios---thay think they do, at least!
our priest nodded palely, seeming to only half-
listen.
*Soon there'1l be a crisist' the other man said.
'And God only knows if we'1l pass it safely!' Not in
our country only, I believe, but everywhere.'
Take meat, he went on; the production us going
down swiftly, the 8 talls are empty; with the lend 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-e-! But there could be such
plenty as to make you go green in the face thinking about
its If, for instance, the valley below produced a hundred
thousand quintali of wine instead of a thousand or ten
thousand, it 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 farms that comprised this valley at
present were 9 a dozen luxuries we could 1ll afford.
With low prices we could make the countryside habitable
again. Cooperatives were the answer.
He was about to demonstrate how this would be when
Don Dino said in his soft voice, 'Yes, people are drift=
ing into the towns now, they find life more amusing there
and see?
The other priest pounced on him with his sharp look,


touched with the slightest of grim smiles, 'No, not
You haven't understood. Let me explain. There is no
cinema up here. Agreed?' Yes, our priest agreed obed-
iently. 'well, then, we put a cinema heret But at fifty
lire a seat instead of one or two hundred. The result is
that not only people in this village come to the cinema
but those from the town as well, because it's half the
usual 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 yourfields
under a similar programme and you cut your prices automat-
ically? The demand is there-e-the au pply*s only a
matter of intelligence?
To which Don Dino nodded palely and said, shivering
in the bitter July wind, 'Let's go inside shall we?
The other mannled the way, swift and ereot, his
head forward, still buried in his theme. The officet
he led us to was cool and silent, with lace curtains
over the windows and a heavy velvet teen cloth on the
table. There was a large straight-backed armchair
covered with bright eushions at the head of the table,
cape
*for the bishop 18 heever KEKES. And he offered this
to my wife with a gracious gesture.
As soon as we were seated he started again.
'Everything comes from the earth---there's nothing you
can mention that doesn't involve the earth at somestege
in its production---s0 if you abandon the earth you


abandon your lifet
His eyes glanced about the room, sometimes blindly
and sometimes piercingly. Outside, the wind howled as
it might on a winter's night. And our priest sat meekly
by the table, rather rigid, gazing across.at his friend--
whose soul he seems to fear for.
Then the other man laune hed into the famous affair
of the 'lost' agricultural funds.
Five hundred miliard
million
lire? (about three hundred **ENt pounds) rcolleoted in
taxes from the countryside cannot be tracedi Perhaps a.
fifth part might be recovered, but the rest has disappear-
ed---some say into the Secretary General's pooket, some
say into various government departments which happen to
be in debt, some say into new industrial sohemes from
which certain minis ters stand to profit!'
Don Dino deprecated this, raising his fragile bony
hand for a moment: 'Is that quite certain?'
'Yest' the other priest shouted ferociously, his
voice ringing across the room ina strange passionate
scream, quite different from his ecelesiastical whisper.
'It ist Quite certains The depertment can tt account
for five hundred miliard lires And they call it a
government! Thiefst Ladril Ladrit' And he pounded
the table. *They should be brought to lawt There
should be the severest penalty for stealing from govern-
ment fund s-e-which means stealing from the peoplel'
our priest's lips quivered a little at this.
'Oh dear,' he murmured, mistakes are bound to happene


of course, there are scandals. They happen in every
country.'
'But five hundred miliard? A mistake? A mighty
mistake that wast The man had the cheque on his desk
and it was lost under the blotting paper I suppose! It
was no mistake: It was a design: It was a deliberate
criminal's design---to steal from the people. Youtre
simple, Don Dinot Tu sei troppo semplice!'
our priest put his hand up again, shrugging slightly,
but couldn't get a word in.
*Mistakes aren't bound to happent the other man went
'But they will happen if they're not punished! The
maximum penalty, that's what it needs!
'I suppese, our priest said to this, Mis lips still
quivering slightly, 'poeple 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 thecrimes they committ! It's England, France, every-
where in the civilised World---the maximum penalty for
stealing from the peoplet'
Don Dino turned to us with a little smile-me My
friend has rather strong opinions.' He added, 'He works
on the land hins elf -
Apparently the other priest has a large podere of
sixty or seventy hec tares, and he has followed his own
doctrine thoroughly by putting the land under a programme.
The result 1s, according the peasants, that he's making
a lot of money.


It told him about our farm, that it would soon be
abandoned like the rest; or with luck it might be rented
for a paltzy sume Wouldn't it be better to turn it over
to one crop, I asked---say, wine? And his answer was,
with a mysterious and rather exeited smile, that it was
all a question of money, that the people wh o owned the
land invariably had no money or else wère unwilling to
put it back into the land. You needed money to change
the erop in that way, he said, because you needed time.
IC you wanted to turn it over to olives for instance
you had to wait for between five and ten years for a
good yield from the trees. And wine took about five
years. Although the mezzadria system was psychologically
unpopular at the moment (because the peasant has the
impression that he gives half his yearly produce to an
idler), it was the best agricultural system ever devised,
for fairness and efficiency.
'The actual dividend reaped from this system by a
good landowner is about six or seven pereent of the
produce, after taxes, equipment, new plants, repairs
have been paid for: about the same percentage as a
clever business man gets on his capital. I pay out
eighteen thousand lire a day in wages, to eight or
nine workers. I have no mezzadri. With large farms,
producing massive supplies, the mezzadria system is
ungorkable. But the country might return to it.
After all, people have 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 came


back. What I can't unders stand is that young people
actually want to give up the chance of a healthy life
out of doors? How marvellous, 2 he said, his narrow,
rather Chinese eyes shining, to be out there under
God's sun, getting brown, with things growing all round
you! What could be better then that??
He quoted two brothers he knew-e-one worked in the
valley below, the other in a factory in a nearby town.
And when you compared their faces, he said, it was 11ke
comparing a piece of dried chalk with a plump, rape fruit:
And in the end this would all lead to disease and poor
human stock. The countryside had to be made exeiting
again, he said, and unfortunately a government of thiefs
and liars? was incompetent to do anything except line its
own pockets.
Don Dino turned to us and said, quoting the name of
a high government offic ial, N OW therets a good mane
A real Christian, with same excellent ideas,' at which
the other priest nodded ironically, with a little twinkle
in his eye, and said with a laugh, The biggest liar of
allt'
As we got into Don Dino's tiny car - again the other
priest watched us calmly, his arms folded, a slight satis-
fied smile on his lips. He was so dafferent from oub
Don Dino. The pe asants only respect him in a gingerly
and distant way. They laugh with him, they admire him,
but Don Dino is more their idea of What a priest shoula
be. They say of Don Dino, 'There aren't a hundred like


in all Italy.'
Dino tells us of the Montepulero priest, with a
laugh, that he likes his women. *Watch your wife when
hets about---no woman's safe with that prelate!' And
others call him a communist, I've never heard a priest
soream his sermons as vehemently as this one, He some-
times preaches in the catherdral. The health of the fields
surges through his body. His voice rasps, cuts. His
face shines red, bronze in the dim light of the church,
with Ghirlandaio frescoes glowing from the walls. Tae
congregation shifts about, yawns, the children make their
little noises. Vehement sermons are simply a performance
in Italy. They have all been heard before. They aren tt
associated with serious action. They are just words.
His words shriek down the church, exhorting the people to
change. Eyes sometimes glence up at him lazily, half
open. The words are just forme At a communist party
meeting it would be different. There the words are
meant to meane In church they are a kind of music.
Communist O? not you like to hear the old music now and
then, wi th the children nicely dressed up. Every family
saves for the childrents communion. It never costs less
than between fifty and a hundred pounds per childe
Anybody who didn't provide for his child in this way
would be an unthinkable larbarian. A photograph of
the child in white, standing at the altar, hands clasped
in prayer, must go on to the veneer-wood sideboard.
Dino daid that the Montepulero prelate had been


caught with his trousers down one day, literally.
The husband had come in at the front and he had jumped
out of the window at the back. He ran aeross the field
holding his cassock up like a skirt, with bare legs und er-
neath.
Sometimes you see him in one of the "town? rest-
aurants with some of his Workers, red with oily food
and wine, laughing. He is a little sensitive at not
being taken seriously as a man, because a preist.
He carries his serious themes inside him 1ike secrets,
which make his eyes gleame He seems to burn secretly
from being misunderstood. ob perhaps he lurns secretly
from being understood all too well.
On the way back from Montepulero our priest
murmured, *Yes, it's true what he says. The government
have a plan for the country now, but itts too late. We
needed it long ago. Now everybody has left. We have
a proverb about the government, we say they are closing
the stable door after the horse has bolted. You see,
there are no amusements in the country. No TV, no
cinema orbars---often no electricity, water.' And he
added, sadly, 'Even for country priests itts boring.
There isnet really enough for us to do, you see.'
That evening I had a long argument with Gianni.
The night was stormy and rather cold. It began by his
putting a strange question to me. He'd been talking to
one of the peasants at Pescille who claims that the white
smoke from the chimey at St Peters in Rome, when a new


pope is elected, means that God has made his choice.
At first I didn't understand, and Gianni repeated the
stages of the argument carefully; Firts, When a pope
dies a new pope is elected. Right?'
Well, then cardinals come to Rome to elect him.'
*And when they vote, the ir papers are put in a stove
and bumed. If the smoke outside, which can be seen from
St Peterts square, is black, it means the election has been
unsuacessful, in other words that the cardinals haven't
agreed on who should be the pope.' Cormect?'
*Very well, then, did Christ do the selecting or the
cardinals?* And he stopped. I was still no nearer to
understanding.
He tried it again.
*Who exactly elects the pope?* he asked.
*The cardinals,' te said.
Yes, but suppose three cardinals nominate one man,
five another, ten another---what happens then??
*well,' we said, fno pope is elected. They couldn't
agree among themselves. And they have to agree before
the new pope can be made.'
'So the pope is made by the cardinals? Gianni asked.
*Yes, of course!*
And not by God??
'But how by God?' we asked.


'Put it this way,' he said. 'How does the black
smoke came??
'By the paper,' we answered. *The election papers.'
*And the white smoke?'
'By straw, to show that the election was successful.'
*Then thedifference between the black and the white
smoke is made by the material used-e-s omething different
in the stove?*
*There,' Gianni said, 'you see, I was right. I
argued with that man 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 aeross the name he
wanted he turned the black smoke into white miraculously,
and then everybody understood what pope he wanted.'
The man had got very heated about it, he said.
He had told Gianni that therewas absolutely no doubt
in the matter---his father, his grandfather and his great
grandfather before him had all said the same.
It is easy to see what people used to be taught.
Then we somehow got on to politics. He said that
the agreement just made between America and Russia and
England not to have any more atomic tests was a great
step forward. I said it wasn't anything of the kind.
It was a hurried agreement to try to stop other powers
making a stock of bombs and thus threatening the division
of world power between America and Russia. I said it


was a desparate attempt to freeze the present balance
of political power inherent in possessing bombs. Also
America and Russia now had more bombs than they needed.
Thirdly, further atomic tests were 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 eitàer side in the
agreement; and they both gained by being called saviours,
in as spurious a publicity as had ever existed und er
nazism.
Gianni said to this that any disarmament was good,
to which I said that this wasn't disarmament. I called
him a dupe of dublicity and reminded him that one of
these saviours of mankind had a year or two before ex-
ploded twenty-one be ombs on twenty-one successive days,
and that the other saviour had exploded a hydrogen boms
in the stratosphere while knowing that it would ca use the
most devastating magnetic strosm all over the earth.
I said that space craft were the newweapons. Gianni let
out a yell and a laugh, and said, 'Surely you don't
satellites
believe that mxaxtk are for military use?* I asked
him what he thought they were for and he said, 'To
discover another planet.'
Outisde, the wind suept hard sl eet against the
windows, like on a Dee emle er night. Gino had flung a
tarpaulin over the massa, to stop the wheat from rotting
inside.


Evacuation.
The last few days have been full of the S ound
of threshing, like a s1 trange beast coughing regularly.
The towering red mac) hine with its chutes and turning
cables came to our courtyard before dawn this morning.
It fills the air with a fine dust, a pleasant wheaty
smell. The Agnarelli children came over and are
helping with the baling of the straw. They fix the
wires in strips and the machine does the rest, binding
the oblong blooks round. Guido Agnarelli and his tiny
wife Emma and Gino are at the topf ot the massa forking
wheat on to the conveyer belt which then tumbles it into
the puffing machine. Gianni sets the sacks at the taps
where the separated grain pours out. Guido's brother
and Armande (from the Pescille ferm) haul the straw
blocks into a new stack with hooks, as they tumble off
the belt. The hardest work is at the top of the massa,
forking, and they change every hour or soe The machine
only stops briefly at lunchtime. As its hire is paid


by the hour, not a second must be wasted. So this too
has the enjoyment squeezed out of it, because of concepts
of mean economy deribed from the misria of the past.
st the end of the day the new haystack is neat and
symmetrical. A pile of charf nearly as high as the house
has formed just outside out bedroom window. At one time
this was given to the animals to eat, mixed with other
foods, but now it joins the silo. There are dozens of
sacks filled with grain in the courtyard, already being
divided 53%-47% between the landlady (represented by the
fattore) and Gino. Tallies are being made in little
books by the head machinist: he has to send in a bill
later. Everybody is raw-red from the sun, but under a
veil of yellow chaff-dust. Nobody speaks. Movemen ts
are heavy. The silence is tremendous when the engine
shuts 'down.
Two tables are set up in Gino's kitchen by the women.
It is dark. We eat pasta with meat sauce, then chicken
and fried veal, with some of last year's wine. The talk
is soft and desultory. Not even Gianni jokes. But after
two or three glasses of wine tongues atart moving. The
fattore talks to us about his san, who is training as a
civil pilot. His presence and ours put a polite edge
on what would otherwise be mostly silent gorging. The
women stand by with their great saucepans and frying pans.
This is the most expensive item of the day. It is the
expected form of payment for Working in with your neigh-
bour. Next day you eat precisely the sam meal at another


farm. Nothing but the best wine is expected. And
there must be at least two meat courses, usually chicken
and veal or beef.
There is great awe of the machine: it exeites and
captivate S evryone. They aerve it willingly and hurriedly.
The men who bring it try to look like magicians, because
this is how they're regarded. They peer into the thing
mysteriously, saying nothing, while the peasants hurry
round them in a flattered way. The noise enslaves them.
It means hope, movement. Like roads, it points to free-
dom.
The meal passed quickly, without a olimax of merriment,
only munching and quiet talk, and chuckling. When it was
over we took Gino's family back to "town and sat in their
tiny flat for a Bew minutes. Both the ir sons were there:
polite, reticent youths, with hardly a trace of the peasant
any more. Town-ldfe is more colto, everyone says-e-more
cultivated. Their kttohen is spotless. Gino's sons
work in a wood factory, and helping on the land is a
penance for them, a descent into the past. It means a
day stripped of self-respect.
Immediately after the meal the threshing machine
moves off, wobbling and creaking down the bouldery path
to the road, its lights on. It clatters in the still
night for at least an hour, crawling towards another
farm where it will be lodged for the night. The mechanics
will be back before dawn, and at first 1ight the coughing
sound will start again.


The night is clear, but with storm-clouds gather-
ing inland. The threshing on most of the other farms
was done in bad weather, with rain and bitter winds.
Gianni complains about the heavy meals at threshing
time: sometimes twice a day-e-chicken and pasta, steak
or veal.
'I can't stand so muoh meat! he says temperementally
Then, 'Stance, stancol'---he's tired. And he throws
himself down on our divan and promptly falls asleep like
a child.
The storms have gme and the air is sparkling and
clear, as it usually is much later in the year. People
say there have been earth-tremors in Tuscany, in the
Romagna and Emilia, byt we felt nothing. A man tolld
me that at, the sea he watched three separate storms from
a hill, close to each other, like clouds with dozens of
fireworks inside theme
Gienni barges in to the courtyard every hour or so
in the morning. He whistles, clowns, aings. At home
he walks up and down the kitchen steps with a humourous,
half-anguished restlessness. When he fidgets his mother
shouts, 'Vagabondos Haven't you work to do?9 When-
ever he shouts a question up to the kitchen she sereams
angrily, 'Madonna canet Che vuoi. 11 gii?---what the
devil do you want down there?


Last week he told us secretively that he'd found
a job. He was to drive a truck. It meant leavingg
at dawn. But at half past six the next morning he was
in our courtyard again. The truck had *broken down'.
When would it be ready again? on Sunday.
But on Sunday it turned to Monday. Then it seemed
forgotten.
But one day, perhaps when the summer is over, he'11
suddenly appear and say, I've been truck-driving for a
weekt
Sometimes he goes from house to house in the valley,
talking, sitting. I walked with him to Pescille yester-
day and he suddenly lifted up my hand and walked me alcng
as if we were a royal ccuple in a Tudor play, his steps
long and light, while the peasants chuckled at us. Some-
times our talk is fiercely hilarious, in replies and answers
that are rapped out in a strange, mad logic, as if we had
rehearsed it before. He imitates anger, haughtiness,
indignation.
The days are dull again, with brief, light falls of
rain. There isntt thunder any more, but the land broods
under a thick sky. We went to the sea, and along a
narrow strip of the coast there was hot sunlight, like a
blazing corrdidor down the sand.
Now there is the annual fever of ferragoste: August
15 is called the Feast of the Assumption, but the time
bel ongs to the people, really to their paganism; it


brings out an ancient restlessness. Best to be in the
cities at this time, as they are empty and silent. The
'town swarms wi th people who don't seem to know why they
are there.
Again there is a erisp touch of autum in the air.
It makes me think of Rome-eethe glow of lights on dark
mornings. When it rises the sun shows bright red trees
in the woods above us. It plucks out the red quite
suddenly, like a stage-light. The leaves have turned in
the last few weeks. Yet this ought to be the hottest
time of the year.
We sat at the top of our hill and watched the thresh-
ing at a farmhouse far below---the same machine that came
to us a week back. People fed the chute with sheatres in
the same unresting way, hurried by the sound of the machine.
They looked like puppets. Most hard Work here is done in
a joyless fever. That is the Tuscan way.
The machine went on pounding with its odd hoarse
cough, while the women hurried to and fro from the house.
You could see their excitement, the unusual way in which
they hurried. The work was almost finished. The straw
was piled into a neat stack the size of a barn. Then the
machine died down, the cables and chutes were dismantled,
the tractor with the engien that had Worked everything
crawled 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 eat with
grunts, smacking their lips and reaching for bread,


and when the last mouthful was down and the cigarettes
were 1it, that would be the end, and they would get up
to go. They say about the Tuscan that he doesn't linger
over his meals. He eats to work. Whereas in Rome you
could write a history of every meal.
Last night, while the sky over us was olear and the
crickets throbbed calmly, there were sudden flashes from
the direction of the coast, so bright that they 1it up
the dusty roadway 1ike a full moone When they ceased for
a moment the darkness seemed uneannily dense. There
wasn't a sound of thunder, not the slightest distant
rumble. It was 1ike continuous fireworks along the
whole length of the coast. We were walking back from
Dino's, and the path was lighted for us the whole way.
At the same time, on the other side of the clear sky,
there was a sborm, a single dark cloud perched in the
air above Florence, flashing intermi ttently.
The sea-storm was drawing inland fast but it took
nearly two hours to reach us. The silent flashes
became brighter. We could see the wooded slope out-
side our bedroom window under a continuous silver light.
The crickets stopped suddenly, just a moment before
the soft rain came. There was a first rumble of thunder,
but it was muffled, high in the air, behind clouds.
This was the nature of the flashes too-e-they were tsummer


lightning', diffused and glowing. There were no sharp
crashes, no crackling or reverberating explosions as in
the earlier storms of the year. The rumbles got nearer
and nearer, until they were almost overhead, with the
flashes going on irrespective of them. Then they passed
further 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. At the moment when
everything felt safe again the crickets began to chirp.
There were slight earth-tremors this week, near
Foggia this time.
I walked Gianni up the hill. His mother was wrapped
in a man's winter jacket, though it was hot. She says
she gets cold however hot it is. Upstairs in the kitchen
we drank a glass of wine together, and Gianni sat dandling
Paolo's child on his knee. We went to the little nursery
garden and he cut small marrows, beans, tomatoes for me to
take home. His mother put two eggs into my hand.
'He's a birbante!' she shouted, flinging a glance
at him. 'A wretcht He does nothing! I've suffered
today---going to town on foot, to get my pension: He's
bad---everybody says it, even the catt
Angelo stood gazing across the yard, smiling.
'The doctor gave her some pills today,' he said. 'It's
the stomach.'
I told her, "Gianni's good---you've a clever sont
At which shr burst out, *That only means he's turned


you into a birbante as well!*
Why don't you take him? she asked. 'If you like
him so much---employ him, take him into your home as a son!o
She added quickly, *Are you afraid he 11 seduce your wife?*
*Well, then, take him into
'He's too old,' I said, laughing. 'He's twenty three!*
*What difference does it make? He's got good armst
You can get plenty of work out of him, if you like him so
mucht Idontt want himt', and she and Angelo went quickly
back to their work in the barn, he turning the wheel while
she fed the cutter wi th bundles of grass.
Suddenly five goats appeer just outside our 'gate',
under the shade of the old cypress. raclo brought them
down. Two of them are pure white. Then more appear,
from Pescille. They stamp their pretty, obstinate feet.
They frown through the ir hair and make their mildly petulant
bleat. They are so pleased to meet each other-e-it seems
they're strangers. They sniff each other pleasently and
the latest comer make shis "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 C ome down with deeo thud on
their front paws and clap the ir horns together. Then
they look at each other intimately as if to say, 'It's
good to be here, isn't it?* They are off to market to
be sold-e-for milking, not slaughtering.
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, terrify him. He
lies there, stricken. He buries his head in a delicate,
sorrowing way. e People are horribly cruel to animals
when they believe they have no souls.
I notice that all young things---dogs, children---
gravitate towards Gianni. He tricks them, jokes,
laughs, tickles them. Paolo's little child weeps bitterly
if anyone says, "Gianni's naughty!' She won't have it.
It is aga inst all the evidence.
In our field below the road you can feel the past,
how the wines and the bamboo-stalks in the gully and the
mossy boulders that protrude out of clover and grass,
and the rough yellow paths that wind down from the house,
have been there for centuries with the heat drenching
through them, the sunlight golden on the terracotta
palazzo of Pescille that borders it. Now it is only a
reminder. Its special soothing dip is EX unowned.
The gold has been melted out of it by the endless rains.
It looks like the garden of a ruined house. It has a
different story to tell you at each time of day---
golden, sparkling, bright in the morning, mellow and
still in the afternoon, cool, secretive in the evening,
but these things aren't its character any more, only
shadows that pass across it.
The "hunting'season has nearly started: the first
Sunday in September. We were woken at dawn by 'hunters'


stamping about in rubber boots outside, with yapping
half-breed dogs round them. They're supposed to be
training the dogs to point. 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,
because pagan fears linger as strong as they ever were.
And they seem to want an. audience more than a prey.
They're all townspeople, or from one of the villages.
A peasent has no time to play. They love to stride
along a tarred road with a gun. slung over their shoul ders,
the ir boots-e-turned down at the ankle for extra effect-
making a solem thudding noise. They pay twelve thousand
lire a year for their 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 or thirty kilometres
deep.
The. 'hunting? has an undertone of fascism, though it
existed in exactly the same form long before fascism was
thought of. Few Italians can resist the fascination of
a firearm. It make a bang (its greatest ree sommendation),
it can kill without risk or effort to the killer, and it
endows you with a war-like and masculine appearance.
When he shbots he is really taking revenge on a 1ifelong
sense of being ineffee tual. Fascism was that revenge on
a bigger scale.
The first Sunday will be a pandemonium from dawn


bnwards, Gianni says. They will park outside our
courtyard, perhaps inside too---motoroyoles, cars,
scooters and pop-popping three-wheelers. Nothing is
private unless you put up a notice to say it is, and
for this you have to pay the government money. The
thunter' may stride through any property, any garden
he wishes, provided it has no fence or barbed wire
round it (minimum height five feet).
It is cold and dark, yet we're still in August.
We have just heard that during the strange storms a
few nights ago a tornado swept along the coast and
rooted up trees, tore motor-boats out of the sea and
flung them on to the beach. It could be seen appracch-
ing inland like a vast eloud stratohing dom to sea-
level.
A posteard came from Gianni saying he was sorry to have
*missed' us: from Messina, in Sicily.
The scund of Armida singing---a snatch of an old song,
at seven o'cloek 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
sungshine, after the cold tramontana ar mountain breeze
last night. For a moment there isn't a sound of a car
or oyele, no engine of any kinde The valley lies in
its original quiet---a few birds sing briefly, there
is the metallic sound of a.spade from Pescille, someone
turning the earth over.
The exciting B ound of cantering hoofs. The dentist


from S oggibonsi rides past on his white horse. He
takes a ride every morning before breakfagt. The
hoofs sound busy, passionate, absorbed in their own
pace.
Before the war everything here was on horseback or
was horsedrawn. Every farm had a horse or two. Dino
told me that the road outside was always clattering with
hoofs and wooden wheels. One or two barouche-like carts
go past on market morning, the wheels rumbling.
The Agnarelli farm looks fine and idyllic on the
other side of the valley in the early-morning sunshine,
with the mist drifting by, thoough its great holm oaks.
It stands on a raised 1sland, with a steep drop to the
fields. But the idyll is false. The Italian arist-
ocracies were always urban. They didn't leave fine
traces on the countryside, a sense of the idyl1, as they
did in England and France.
We met the landlord of the white house 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 hetd
seen a TV programme about how to feed the increasing
populations of the world. It seemed there were great
possibilities---millions of acres of land remain uncultiv-
ated---marshland, tropical bush, desert, the sea-bed.
He struek his hand on the table smartly: *We sit
and watch this nonsense on our sereens and outside-ee'


he turned towards the window, with Pescille below-ee
'there are thousands of acres of our own land idle-e
perhaps the richest land in the warld, basking in the
richest climate---and we have to go to trppical lands
three thousand miles away to find our foodt What
idiocy! There's more than enough food for all of us
outside in those fieldst We sit watching these programmes
while we squander the inheritance of centuries---the
vines we inherited are going rotten, the clive 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 fac ts under their noses are
withheld from them?'
He said that only Mussolini had dared to tackle the
problem, thirty years ago, and foresaw 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 undisciplined people.'
The collapse of fascism struck down an energetic,
intelligent, unpleasant class of mene You can see them
sitting about the squares today---men with nearly dise
tinguished faces, idle, malevolent, embittered: semi-
intellectuals, semi-gentilemen. They would like to do
viobence to life again perhaps-e-but they can't break free
from their own timeless natures. Reform is si mply
against the Italian genius. Their attempts at it-e-
like fascism---end in disaster. They don't believe in
the world and the flesh sufficiently.


It turns what they do believe into rhetoric.
Al1 Italian life outside Rome has this rhetorieal
overtone. This gives foreigners the mistaken impress-
ion that Italy is eentimental, because of her rhetorical
pleasure in sentiment.
Foreigners are the signori who bless places by their
presence. They bless the hated countryside, the hated
antique houses. our presence in this valley had 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 1s unrhetorical. Rhetoric 1s provincial,
the fear of vulgarity. This is why Gianni makes set
speeches: he is flying above the basie vulgar chaos.
Rhetoric is so powerful that it may lead a man to
eat what he dislikes and enjoy it more than What he
likes. The peasants who live near the dentist of
Poggibonsi talk about his riding before breakfast with
a certain puzzlement. They say, *Yes, he rides for
amusement! It diverts himg' They. can't really under-
stand why he doesn't go by car. But if he put on a
uniform, with shining black boots, and had a retunue of
attendants, they would understand. It would be rhetor-
ical, he would be making a fine figura.
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, fierce-looking.
There was no growing heat as


usual on an August day. The invigorating chill
remained. Sometimes you feel it is a summer scirocco,
because of the warm stillness; then it seems November.
Now thunder is rumbling in the distance, and a storm
seems to be drawing near.
Guido Agnarelli brought the yeast over for our
bread and told us that the agreement for him to move
into this house in January was already fixed. All the
produce will be his. He will give our landlady the
tiny sum of fifty thousand lire a year, hardly enough
to pay the taxes. He told us that his brother will be
leaving the land for good---he e'11 start as a buil der's
mate, earning three thousand lire a day instead of the
two thousand he would get as a labourer on daily hire.
'I'd do that myself,' Guido said, "but I'm too old
to change.
The peasants don't seem to realise what vast knowledge
they have, about the crops. They count it nothing.
They assume that I, being educated, know just as much as
they do about how to till the rows for vines, prune the
olives, cast the seed, beat the bean-pods when they're dry
with flays, tend the cattle at night when they give
birth, feed the hundreds of geese and ducks and chick-
ens, transfer the first wine and to vats and squeeze the
juice of dry, sweet grapes into it. They know the
influence of the moon---how the wine in the barrels
rises at full moon, filling the glass bowl at the top.
They know not to plant when there is no moone They


know the signs of the sky. But the collapse of the
seasons is toppling their work. Their predictions no
longer wark. They can no longer reliably read the sky.
Anything may happen at any time. There could be a storm,
a sudden avelanche of rain in a clearish sky, fallowed
by fierce sunlight bringing disease to the vines. And
so it seems that even God is against their going on with
the oldwark.
We had a chat about food, tn the darkness of the
courtyard. Guido said he would put the food-adulterators
'up against the vall* (a favourite expression of his,
though he's the mildest man on earth). Most of the man-
ufacturers laughed at the fines imposed on them he said.
Their profits were so big that they could afford a
periodical fine. At one time, he said, he used to buy
his wine in town, but then he began to wonder why he
always felt bad. He had eramps in his stomach. These
stopped soon after he began drinking his own produce.
He stillwondered if that wine was what had given him
kidney trouble.
The first Sunday of September: the 'hunting'
season is on us. All day there have been motor-cyoles
and cars outside the house. At dawn the woods began to
reverberate with thuds and thamps, from various types of
cartridge. At about noon they began to retire, with


hares, pheasants and rabbits hanging from their belts.
Dino's brother got a hare soon after dawn. The first day's
carnage is always the greatest---the animals aren't ex-
pecting you.
Dino described how a dog follows the pheasant's
scent. The pheasant believes she is being followed by
the eye, and thinks it enough to wriggle under leaves and
bracken, and lie there quietly. But the dog stands stock
still, close to thwhere she lies, waiting for the hunter's
signal to leap forward; the pheasant flies up in panic
and you shoot. This is the theory anyway. The hunters
and their mongrels make such an unbelievable din that
the pheasants are warned wall in advance. Like Cyrano
de Bergerac' 's nose, the hunter's noise precedes him by a
quarter of an hour.
The season began unofficially last nighte Just after
we got to bed a scooter stopped outside the courtyard and
we heard a hunter plod slowly past our bedroom window in
his rubber boots. A few minutes later a shot rang out
at the edge of the woods, followed by another. There was
bright moonlight. Shooting at night is a grave offence.
You may shoot after sunrise and before dusk. The penalty
is the loss of your licence or even imprisonment. The
road below is was being patrolled by keepers at the
time. We wondered about this wild, lonely hunter,
bent on his quarry in the moonlight. Drunk, perhaps.
Or one of the keepers.
All evening there had been an atmosphere of zero


hour. In 'town* there were groups of rubber-booted
warriors, youths were polishing their guns. There was
a lot of talk about the carnage to take place the next
day-e-hands being rubbed, conniving glances being exchanged.
All false: sad, mean, underneath. Another little bit
of rhetoric. Gianni, if we catch a hare in our head-
lights, shouts at once, *Drive fasti Fast! Kill itt
An animal means by definition that which is to be killed.
Smilingly the peasants say that Christ laid it down---
animals for us to eat, green things for animals to eat.
Smilingly the priests had let this be known. That Christ
never said any such thing is absolved by the smile.
The cabins in the woods will be used for shooting
birds. When the first Pheavy* hunting has died down
the men with slimmer rifles will plod up the path to
their cabins, to sit hidden behind reeds. They will
take cages of female blackbirds and thrushes with them.
These will sing like heaven let loose. And male birds
will be drawn ecstatically down to them, and will be
shot.
Meat-eating in Italy has an obsessive side, due to
centuries of miseria. Traditionally the peasant watched
the landowner eat meat. He had an occasional rabbit ot
chicken himself. Daily meat-eating is a symbol of the
new prosperity. On the whole vegetarianism is thought
stupendously iditotic and unthinkable. Pity for animals
is largely absurd. Everyone refers to la povera bestia,
meaning that some thought and charity are due to creatures


which lack souls. Wanton cruelty is ruled out. At
the same time animals are not thought to suffer as men
suffer. When they behave with more delicacy and deceney
than men, this is noticed and some confused philosophising
takes place.
Killing animals is also in the nature of revenge.
They are in the same world as the spirits of the woods,
as devils and all dark things. Animals are close to the
hellish regions. Part of the eleverness---end the real
wisdom--of the Church was that it taught men to be so
afraid of the dark, of solitude, of nature as to think
of devoutness as a sound policy of survival. In a bed-
room at night you shut the windows tight againat the bad
spirits. In a world like that you feel you need God.
Flouting the Church meant exposing yourselves to these
bad things that poured in from the *iganimate world of
animals and growing things. The Church retained an
extraordinary hold on the Italian mind until well on in
the twentieth century by the expedient of perpetuating
pagan attitudes.
The 'hunter' shoots into the dark region of his
fears and disgusts. Sometimes he uses a sort of sub-
machine gun, spraying bullets like a Chicago bandit,
only with the amiable difference that he 1s playing.
And some people say that hunting is his only
escape from a suffocating family life
Ke is shooting
at his mother in law.


Don Dino, our priest, brought along two ordinands
from the English College in Rome. We sat on our bale any
drinking tea, talking half in English and half in Italian.
Don Dino cautiously leaves his teaee-he isn't used to it,
he says. Protestantism, tea and wholemeal bread mean a
strange and violent world for hime We all laugh at the
gingerly way he pushes the cup aside.
At noon he stood us up and said the angelus, reading
from his prayer book. I noticed how much fweer the
English were. They really seem the children of protest-
antism, compared with him, though they are as 'Roman* as
he is. They joke about some of the saints, with mild
impatience, and actually seem to be thinking out Oheir
religion. Don Dino seems never to have thought in his
life, only to have accepted and followed. You can see
that their consciences are alive.
After two bright, sparkling days-e-the first in
September---the sky fills broodingly again. There were
black clouds and alternate sturfy heat and freshness.
During those first bright days you could feel the other
weather coming, in a peculiar nervous expectation, like
an electrical throbbing in your body. When the first
massive clouds came the air went stock still, the press-
ure was enormous, with sudden shafts of burning and
blinding sunlight. There was a brief storm and then


came a light autumal rain of the sort you get in the
mountains, making a mournful dripping from the leaves
and a mist that drifts through the branches. People
are irritable, eyeing the leaden-grey clouds, Sometimes
the sky is swift, sometimes fixed sullenly.
Yet the heat hasn't gone, for all the rain. We
decided to go to the sea but turned back at Volterra.
There were low, misty clouds across the whole barren
range of salt-hills east of the towne We found la tiny
lake far below the road, with a hill sticking up at its
side like a monstrous ant-heap, sheer on all aides.
We sheltered from the rain in a peasant house and the
onwer pointed out the abandoned houses all round: a
fine palazzo surrounded by oypresses on the other side
of the valley---abandoned, together with its tenant
houses. of about three hundred peasants who used to
live in the area fewer than thirty remain. At or time
the farm up the road had forty or fifty head of cattle,
but now there were hardly more than three.
Suddenly, in the middle of the night, a fierce wind
started up-e-doors and windows slammed, there was a boome
ing noise down the chimmey. The trees outside bent over.
Branches flew off. The oracks in the windows whined.
We rushed to take the geranium vases down from the balcony
walls. It was quite dark---three or four o'clock.
After twenty minutes it stopped so suddenly that we could
hardly believe that it had taken place, and the night was
still and warm again, with heavy clouds.


The pitter-patter of rain on the tiles is usual
now. Sometimes it gives way to the thunder of hail.
The lights are cut off.
We got a load of gunshot in our bedroom window
this afternoon but luckily the shitters were closed.
I rushed to the window and shouted down, 'Vagabondit
che fanno? vuoi ammazzarci? etc. I realised they
couldn't hear a thing as they were sitting on their
motor cyeles with the engines still one There were three
of them. They sat there like clowns out of Shakes-
peare. I dashed down to the road and pinned on one,
a pale, surly-looking puleinello.
'Did you fire just then?*
'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?'
Yes, they had fired and -e-madonna la troiat-e-t they
had missedt The bird had got awayi They knew it was
wounded but it had limped away. They kicked through the
bushes to within a foot of our bedroom window.
*Do you realise that you just now fired into our
window?'
*What?' They gaped, their eyes still blazing from
the excitement of the chase.
Then they came to. 'Impossible:' one of them said.
'I fired theret' And he pointed straight at the bedroom
window.


'It made a hole this big,' I said, making a hole
the size of a potato with my fingers.
'So you've taken this old house, have you?' the
homely man asked. "I've seen you in town."
'I can't find itt yelled the other one, kicking about
in the macchia. 'I know I wounded it. A blackbird:
Madonna canet'
Then he calmed down. They turned their cyeles round
and with a cheerful good-evening rode off.
The hunting makes the woods seem gloomy and savage,
especially with the iron clouds overhead. A peculiar
clowning trio comes at dawn. They call out to each
other dramatically through the trees while their dogs yap
and squeal. When they bag something one of them makes
a sort of high-pitched eroon as if Harlequin had hit him
over the head with a rubber truncheon. You expect mech-
anical tears to squirt out of his eyes. *HoO-hoo-000-
hoo-hool* he goes.
Gienni came back looking exhausted and pale after a
week on the road. I asked him to return in the evening--
"Come and tell us all about it, what you saw in Sicily,
the people you met.' He looked puzzied by this, but he
came dutifully. At once he plunged into a set recital
that lasted an hour. It was a kind of school-résumé
of provincial differences in the South. I suppose he
thought that was what I wanted. When it was over I
asked him, did he get enough exercise? Oh yes, he
got enough exereise, unloading and then reloading the


truck every few hundred kilometres. And then there were
the halts on the road.
Three or four minutes later he said that one of the
troubles was, you didn't get enough exercise. You were
leaning over a wheel all the time.
*And all that filth they serve up in the restaurants,
especially the meat-e-the further south you go the Worse
it is. You wonder if it's not a dog or a cat youtre eat-
ing. One of our drivers can't work any more-e-he's gone
down with stomach trouble, his nerves are wreckedt* He
then made a speech about youthe 'Youth today isn't sat-
isfied with a piece of bread and a bar of chocolate on it
as a treat like it used to be. We arentt so easily sate
isfied, not like our mothers and fathers!
I asked him, supposing the government made a good deal
for agrioulture and inereased daily-hire earnings to, say,
three or four thousand lire, would he come beck to the
land? Yes, yest He'd return gladly if he could make a
decent living---as good asxa factory-worker could have.
The land would then represent a future for him, not some-
thing to fall back on when his luck was down.
I desoribed the farms in Germany with their huge
elm trees, the horses end tall wooden houses, the sense
yau got there, not only in the south, in Bavaria, but
close to Hamburg as well, of a great thriving land-
tradition which had got stronger tirough industries, not
weaker. There were familes, I said, with ten or eleven


children. The young still worked the land, because it
was a solid and even rich life.
"Ah yest' he said. 'In Russia toot The peasants
get a good deal there toot
Russia means the land of happy peasant-omners, in
Italy. Dino's father-in-law has Stalin's picture on his
bedroom wall. It balances the madonnina over the bedeee
it is the male dream that the Church failed to provide.
In some houses it replaces the madonnina altogether.
It is suddenly cold. The rain pours down steadily,
with low grey skies and drifting mists. We need winter
clothes, though it is only the first week in September.
The hills beyond the valley, towards Siena, look barren
and chill. In an hour's time it could be hot. A still,
clear night can cloud over in a few minutes and a storm
suddenly rise. The peasants say, *One can't understand
antyhing any morel', meaning the sky. Non si oapisce
nientet
There are said to have been floods in Trieste, snow
along the Alto-Adige.
Italy gives way completely to the weather: interiors
are bare, waiting for a shaft of sunlight to gild theme
Sunlight is part of the Italian character, necessary wlike
water. In the rain everything waits-e-the trees, the
houses, people. It is dark and still all day, with the


slow rain. But people are mildly excited too, by the
abnormality. At market yesterday there was an atmosphere
of hilarity. The rain brings intimaey, and no Work.
The hired workers 1ike Dino stay at hom, and aren't paid.
That brings a holiday feeling. He told me that last
winter, because of the endless rain and cold, everybody
ran up bills at the shops---they werentt earning. They
'planted nails', as the Italian calls debts--piantavane
chiodit Some, he added with his honest, wistful snile,
were good enough to honour their bills when they were
earning again, but others---took their custom elsewhere...
Angelo came down yesterday wrapped in a brown over
coat, with water dripping from his nose, and asked if we
could take his mother into "town'. We said yes, and we
waited 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 furnit-
ure. He probably meant sicily. It was better this way,
he said-e-wi ith Gianni earning enough to pay for his own
cigarettes and a suit of clothes now and then. He,
Angelo, worked the land but there was never enough money
to 'put aside.' Money still means savings in the peasent
world, not spending material.
We call our latest pig Giacomoa Gino lets him out
to roam the field below the road for perhaps an hour a
day. At the end of this eventful life, in four or five
months' time, he will have his throat cut, with five ar
six men leaning on him, and bleed to death, sereaming.


But more and more they are subs stituting the slaughterer's
pistol for this method.
Some snatohes of quite strong sunlight today. But
there is none of the usual September calme The air is
weak and dampo Mist drifts aoross the hills north of
Siena. I walked down into the vineyard this moming and
the grapes are still far behind. They should be a deep
orimson colour now. The white ones should be yellow and
plump, but they are all still pale. If there is really
strong si nlight far the rest of September some wine might
come out of it, about ten degrees of alcohol in strength,
but otherwise it will be hopeless. Dino has found us
some wine of thirteen and a half degrees which we can store
for two or three years. on the whole peasants dontt like
matured wine. They say it's too 'flat', too heavy. They
like the young wine which is still vivacious and sparkl.ing.
They are sceptical about our wine lasting as many as three
years.
Gianni appeared briefly again, with a brand-new
wristwatch. He has beon to Calabria, He already talls
about the told days? when we joked together, as if they
were deep in the past. He looked matter of fact. He
made no speeches. To keep himself awake for night-
driving hetd drunk seventeen cups of coffee one day, he
said. since much of the coffee is ground barley, orzo,
its stimulating effect is small. Their grain at home
had been threshed the week before, he told us, and wetd
missed the ir harvest supper. *But it wouldntt have


been any good without met' he added gailye
The weather seems to be settling into winter,
and winter olothes feel more and more comfortable, though
it is not yet the third week in September. A certain
grim nullity begins to settle on people, as if what charm
they had, which was really very little, is going into
hibernation. Only Dino keeps his bright smile. His
whole face is a smile, always, not just his mouth.
Today Giacomo was so happy to be let out of his
dungeon that he ran full tilt down the road towards Volterra
and Gino had to chase after hime He then did the same
aoross the field. He has a witty turn of mind, The
other day he ran into the cattlehouse to inspect it, and
when Gino chased him out he climbed up the steps to our
entrance, sniffing madly. He got a kick in the side of
the face for that, which made him squeal, Gino says he
won't let him out again. He makes too mich *fuss', So
he mist spend the rest of his short life in darkness,
with just room to move round in. He can hardly support
himself on his back legs as it 1s, through over-feeding
and over-canfinement.
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 townts province-e
from Pisa and Massa Carrara and Viareggio---to be drawn
in procession. We errived when the candles were already
alight---hundreds of tiny tapers framing the windows and
porches and arches and even rooftops, 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 Lucchese
humour surged through the narrow streets. We parked
the car on top of the immense wall that has preserved
the town's intimacy for centuries, and will renew it
when traffic is barred once and for all. The wonder-
ful overladen shops and busy cafés glowed on either side,
The theatre, a quiet, sedate, baroque building, looked
like a miniature palace under its candlelight, standing
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, 80 that it seemed
to float and roll in flames with a strange and wila
movement. We passed the little churoh of S. Frediano,
humped and modest, lying under one-are-lamp, neglected
by the festa, watching humbly and a little gloweringly.
The cafés were full. People were erowded at the windows
and balennies. The baker shops were selling ring-shaped
sweet loaves with currants in them. On the square bef ore
the cathedral there were stalls for doughnuts and toys
and sweets. The procession was forming up in different
parts of the town. The night was clear and warm, and we
were in our summer clothes again. People were sweeping
into the town from all the gates, hurrying.
Then the ordinary lights went out. We stood in
front of one of the doughnut stalls, with the hot fat-
smoke in our faces, and the owner unscrewed the electrie
bulb over our heads. The procession started. A band


struck up. The hum of voices grew louder. The erowds
surged. There were children in arms, old men, staring
young wamen, boys close together, priests. And the first
toppling cross came slowly along, above people's heads,
borne like a treasure, swaying slightly, high in the air,
clasped in the arms of a si ngle man, making him bend his
knees with the effort, while two others stood close to
relieve him of it every few yards. And this man made a
strange slow dance with the cross in his arms, so that it
turned in the air, the dead Christ seemed to jig, the
crucifixion had become the victory, the joy. Christ
seemed to bow and leap. He was black, jet-black, and
shining, and they had draped a gol den robe round his
middle, with a tassle dangling down, so that he swayed
and danced in the air with a s1 trange eestatic grief,
clothed delicately and though atfully 11ke a marvellous
child. Then came banners and smaller crosses, and men
in black cloaks with pointed hoods 1ike mons 1 ters of the
Klu Klux Klan, and thick candles held high above, on
sticks, followed by a joycus farting band. And again
there was a toppling Christ, this time with sprays of gold
leaf pouring out from his arms in great tinkling gl Lobes
as he swayed along, a shower of light in the darkness,
the gold swathing his broken and patient body round with
colour.
The procession swept along with one raucous band
after another, clashing and echoing in the night.
There were monks, priests, servers, youths dressed as


mediaeval soldiers with long heir that mad e their
faces look real and dark and virile. And suddenly,
as one of tho last erosses passed, swaying above its
bearer 1ike a tower, there came a burst of light and
smoke and shattering noise from one of the roofs as
fireworks went up, making a silver blaze over the town
like the eye of a great animal watching and flashing.
And as each new cross passed people clapped and cheered.
The orowd was thick and hot. Bells rang out. There
was the wildness of faith, delicate and loud and joyful
in harmonious contradiction, with masses of sound and
colour and light, the kind of worshbp that to its shame
the Church put out, in safety-first.
The rain has let up and again the hunters are out
at dawn, prowling round the house like stage detectives
and calling to their dogs. There is little game left,
after the first day's massacre. Hardly a shot rings
out.
We recognised one of the noisiest of the dawn
marauders: the village carpenter, a thin, pale man.
I got my desk from him, for very little. At the top of
the hill we saw a little gathering of hunters in the ir
usual gear, standing about military commanders. They
reminded me of photographs of fascist officers from the
last war, standing at the edge of woods before an attack,


The wet weather produces a certain surliness in theme
The other day we were standing at Pescille talking to one
of the families, about eight of us on the road, and a
hunter passed on a scooter in his pantomime gear. He
draw to a stop at our side and murmured with an unpleasant-
ly abashed smile, *The road is public, you know.' We
smiled at him and said, *There's enough room for you,'
and he drove unsteadily on towards his kill.
The other day, in the gloomy weather, I drove over
one of our pigeons, coming into the courtyard. The tyre
must have pinioned one of her wi ings, drawn her und ler.
Her mate flew quickly up, with an unusual rushing move=
ment which I noticed inside the car.without realising
what I'd done. We got out and went upstairs, and only
there, after a few ninutes, when I happened to look out
of the window casually, did I see the pigeon sunk into
the mud, almost flat. The male was in the 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 Gino to.see. There wasn't a
scratch on her body--I realised by her darker markings
that she was the female. I climb ed up to the nest and
found the tiny, featherless squabs, sitting huddled
together. I wasn't sure that the male would continue
to look after them. I shall get him another female,
but only aftor these young are reared. He would desert
them if mated again too soone


All the following morning he didn't appear. Gino
said that almost certainly he was out finding food. And
later I found him sitting placidly in the nest with the
squabs under hime He didn't stir when I looked in.
It made feel gloomy and restless. Sometimes he
appraoches the female of the other couple and the male
walks firmly across his path, puffing his breast.
Dino 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 loaded d'ee-because
there are more women than jobs for them.
The g irls were pasting red and golden labels on the
fiaschi as they jerked past. There was a young man
called 'the chemist'. The fiaschi emerged fram a cireul-
ating platform, where they were filled mechanically from
taps. Here an old man was sitting, thein and tight-faced,
with sharp but strangely naked and lifeless eyes. Like
the girls he was very pale. He leaned on a stick, as
he took cleaned bottles of the belt and fixed them under
the taps. I took him for a peasant but Dino said, "The
owner.'


The old man showed us round while the girls looked
on listlessly, like condemned prisoners. There were thick
hosepipes issuing from cement vats, and these supplied the
taps.
*So cleant' the owner said proudly, and Dino echoed
him: 'Clean, cleant'
The chemist's little office was pointed out. 'Here,*
Dino whispered to ne, '1s where they do the fixing.' 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 and ascorbic acid, used
to correct the low acid content of the wine and not harm-
ful in themselves. I noticed that the hosepipe feeding
the circuler platform with wine didn't in fact come from
the cement vats at all but passed through a wall to a
half-hidden tank on the roof outside. I saw that access
to this could only be reached through the ovmer's private
quarters above. I asked was this hidden tank to 'cool'
the wine before it went into the bottles? But the owner
brushed 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). I formed the idea
that this was how the chemicals reached the wine, with-
out any apperent presence of chemical subatances in the
factory itself. If an inspector came round all you
would have to do is to disconnect the pipe and run it
straight through the vats. The inspector Would know


perfectly well what had gene on but he might not feel
inclined to press the point.
When Dino said, out of earshot to the workers,
"Now show us how you mako wine from waterl', the old man
smiled with a quick, gleeful, roguish expression and
noddad, 'Sifa, si fal'---yes, yes, itts done, wine is
made from watert But today he couldn't show us how.
On a Sund day. 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 or
white wine while we were there, gulping it greedily.
I took a cautious sip and it tasted authentic. He
told us that he produced over a thousand litres a day,
and two truckloads a week went south, to Rome and Caserta.
He sends big consignments abroad, as far as America.
He showed us two gleaming machines for filtering the
wi ine and said proudly, *They cost six millions each.'
The work of constructing the factory on modern? lines,
out of barns, cost him sixty millicn lire. The firm was
now Worth twice that sum, about eighty thousand pounds.
'And you started as a peasant!' Dino said with his
beaning warmth, "Just think of thatl'
'Yes,( the old rogue said, limping up the stairs
like a character in Dickens, 'I'm worth a lot of more y!o
Like the produce of most of the wine factories here
the Chianti it sends out has nothing Chianti about it.
Some of the wine used as a base comes from the Milan
area---cheap vinegary stuff of about eight degrees


alcohol. The rest comes from Apulia, a thick, strong wine
not pleasant to drink or expensiva to buy. The two are
mixed, and chemically adjusted so as to retain the right
colour and acheive despite its misty origins some sparkling
clarity. A small amount of citric acid will bleach a
dark wine REst into a bright Chianti glow, and other acids
will secure it against going bad in the heat or suffering
from long journeys. Another factory here gets 1ts wine
from the Romagna, a thirteen-degree wine of poor quality
at the price of a ten-degree Chianti (though there is no
nat tural way of getting a thirteen-degree wine out of the
Romangna soil). This is mixed with Milaness slop,
and adjusted. It all goes out as Chianti, and wise wine
philosophers in foreign cities talk about that reliable
Chianti seal on the bottle.
Mixing win sugar with wine to push up the alcohol
value is still prohibited, but peasants are adopting it
more and more as the weather fails. If the Si ummers
fail to provide the stifling, rainless conditions under
which clusters of fat grapes thrive, it will be difficult
to get more than ten or eleven degrees out of the wine
round here. Too much water is ruinous. The wine-
doctor in 'town' told me that in France sugaring had
been allowed ever since the plentiful supplies of heavy
Algerian wine had ceased, because in the old days this
had been used to suuplment the low-degree home growths.
He said that almost no Wine locally could do without
sugar, mixed at the fermentation stage.


As we were walking up the narrow mediaeval street
at the side of the factory I asked Dino, Why dot hose
girls stand for it-e-isn't there a trade union---Whydo
they allow a man to poison people like themselves, all
over the world? And aren't there inspectors?
He smiled and took my arm in his ereet way: *There
are inspectors, caro miot There are laws---strict laws
and striet inspectors! But the inspectors are badly
paid. A little addition to their inc ome each month is
wele ome, it helsp their chi ildren, it brightens their
homes! And our old friend there knows how to keep
people quiet, he knows the human weakness for moneyi
So what use are strict laws?'
As for the girls, he added, they could talk if they
wanted to, but they would lose their jobs. *why work
for me then?' the old man would say. Besides, to whom
would they talk? To an inspector?
n The sky's daily habits have changed for the better
but they are still uncanny. The air is balmy and warm,
the best temperature for the grapes. But the cl ouds
gather in the afternoon and a rainstorm breaks in the
evening, suddenly. Then, after heavy masses of rain,
there is a serene starry sky, with hardly a breeze,
and the grilli echo hopefully across the vineyards
again.


Even the cl ouds don't seem quite right when they
come. I've never seen this light in Italy before.
Italian rain has always been soft and drifting. I
don't remember these separate, iron-dense, heaving
clouds, day after day, producing a si nlightweewhen it
breaks through---that belongs to the north, thin and
sparkling and spacious. The Italian sun, north and
south, always had a deeper quality---a stupendous glow
close to the earth that pervaded and penetrated every-
thing not with blinding cool shafts but an expanding,
throbbing warmth. Even in Rome the sun is watery now,
not at all the relentless Roman sun of August, that
seemed to crack the stones, that turned the tarmac under
your feet into a soft cushion.
At first light teday the hunters began climbing
into the woods with their dogs. In the immense still-
ness of dawn their voices sound dry and unenchanted.
Sometimes the men here gaze before them like their own
oxene
I'm beginning to like Paolo the shepherd. He has
fought hard for his life. He no longer seems to take
us for puppets. He beamed at us today and eried out,
'It's been cold, hasn't it? Nearly winter last weekt
Then he gazed at us qistfully with his shining red face
and sharp nose. Now he's made money he feels he can
afford to soften his heart, 1ike signori, like foreigners.
We took Armida to het annual fair? above Çastel


Vecchio. It looks straight across a wooded valley,
itself a rim of clean, rolling fields. We strolled
to the top of the high plateau. There was the usual
chiasso of an Italian ga thering, in the distance---
voices raised, bells, hooting horns, whistles, laughter.
Ten years ago the fair was the big annual event for which
people walked ten or twenty miles, and some of them came
on horseback. 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 bot
drunk and sang at the top of their voices.
But all we found were four or five solitary booths
selling sweets, toys, oddments like bootlaces and pocket
knives. There was an air of self-conscious desolation.
We looked for cattle, horses, sheep: nothing. Armida
shrugged and laughed---'How things have changed!'
A few men sat drinking white wine at a wooden table
in a perplexed, vacant way. People were ill-dressed,
rubbish lay everywhere. There was one shy-looking woman
in impeccable peasant costume, standing alone, not knowing
what to do while her husband sat at a table drinking.
She was like a figure wandered in from history, looking
round and recognising nothing. Youths slouched about,
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 ? The
cost tumed woman's white cloak gleamed proudly. A shepherd
had serubbed himself and his two ch: ildren so clean that


they looked polished. 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. Empires, regimes, societies have come and
gone so often.
'Beter to stay at home ironingt Armida
said.
The Agnarelli family asked me to write a letter of
thanks for them---to a lady in Switzerland who had sent
them photographs. They naturally assume that I am less
foreign to their own language than they are. Even the ir
language isn't their possession. By being educated, I
know more of its secrets, have more of a right to it.
They look over my shoulder like foreigners as I write.
Language is a very fluid matter in Italy. If the for-
eigner finds it difficult mastering the subjunctive,
the average peasant has never tried. Italians who
correct your grammar punctiliously always have an attitude
of same kinde-ma mild self-conscious nationlism. They
would like you to believe that a fixed and authentic
national language exists, but it doesn't. It is C oming
into being thraugh the newspa pers and TV, but it means
the end of Italy not a new start, for the simple reason
that Italien life is regional or nothing at all.
Italiam life is the expression of the practical require-
ments of the human creature, not of thoughts or ideal
systems or power in more than a strictly personal sense.
This is why the family has always been its most important,
its only social unit.


This morning, Sunday, a convoy of cars, small
trucks and se ooters come and park themselves round atxis
us before first light. It is a military operation---
voices raised, dogs barking, rifles being cocked.
They walk under our bedroom window talking as if it was
full noone Their voices in the early morning are dry,
barren, dusty, unenchented by a moment's enlightenment,
that is, sense of deliberate individual choice. The
enlightenment missed Italy. The Italien character
thrived on its absense. That is, life remained grounded
on the creature and not on prine iples. The enlight-
enment is coming through TV and foreign films, through
cities where civility replaces intimacy. And the Italian
character stumbles, cannot see the way.
There has just been the rost flood in Italy since the
war. A wave said to be a hundred metres high swept down
the Piave from Lake Vaiont through villages, swept them
away, uprooted trees. The whole Alpine area is silent
and devastated, without a sign of life. Thousands of
people were buried or drowned.
The papers say that in the seventy years after 1889
there were four great dam bursts in the world. In the
last four years there have been seven.


Gianni is off again, this time to Rome. We were
away in Lucca when he called last. We tajk about him
t ogether, wondering if he will get 'blunted'.
With the return of the warm weather there are thunder-
storms 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 sterted.
The swifts were forming up on the wiresthis morning,
for their migration. They were side by side along the
two parallel witres as far as we could see, stretching far
down into the valley, like hundreds of tiny soldiers.
Then they flew off south in a dark fluttering mass, as if
by a silent signal.
I went down into the vineyard and tasted the grapes.
I tried Gianni's suggestion---biting them st raight off the
vine without touching them with my hands. They taste so
fresh that they burn the throat. Every vine tastes diff-
erent, and every part of each vine tastes different.
Comparing the tastes, I found those on the higher ground
were the best. An old man once told me that the best
wine came from grapes grown in the pergola form. His
wine, he said, would keep for four or five years without
spoiling, and S ometimes ten.
One of our vines, with white grapes, stand 8 alone
and has grown as tall as a fruit tree, supporting itself
on a pear-tree at its side. The grapse are for eating,
swollen and juiey.


Many of the bunches aren't ripe even now. Some
of the vines are blighted and their grapes hang in
shrivelled clusters, like dried raisins. This is partly
due to excessive rain and partly due to Gino's failure
to spray at the right time. The raindrops have 'boiled'
in the leaves, and started a fatal mildew. Also the
vines are 'hungry'. They haven't been given the usual
manure---often human sewage from the farmhouse.
This
is taken out in great barrels on carts, and the wh ole
area stinks for a day. But Gino has a distaste for
uncoverdng out black well' as it is called.
It is suddenly normal early-autum weather, with
radiant, warm sunshine and a cool breeze. Everybody
rubs their hands. These last few days will push the
wine up to ten or eleven degrees at least. Much depends
on the last fifteen days. The vineyard lies in 1ts hot,
still basin, glorying in it. The flies come back, as in
July. I killed our second scorpion.
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 çaserta and
north to Bergamo, where it was very cold, he said.
Tiring?* I asked.
'Not, not tiring at alls But-e-it's too much.'
He wants another kind of job. Far from being
blunted, he seems frailer.


The golden weather ceases, the sky darkens and then
unloads such an unbelievable quantity of water that our
well is full in a few minutes and a cascading river has
formed down our rocky path again. It pours down relent-
lessly and everyone says, "Now-e-now the wine's finished!'
But then the glowing weather takes over again, and
holds for five or six splendid days that by being perfectly
natural for Italy now seem an uncanny dream: something
had on false pretences; a kind of escapism indulged by
nature.
The escape is brief. It begins to rain again.
An extraordinary darkness cames over the valley, like
night in the middle of the afternoon. The gullies oute
side quickly form rivers once more. 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 1s thundering with its force, so powerful that the
massive walls, which have stood the wea ther of five
centuries, seem about to collapse at last.
We help eut the grapes in the few hours when the
sun appears. Gino has left the vendemmia as late as
possible in the hope of putting on a few more points in
the alcoholic content, but now there is a rush to get it
all in before they start to rot. The wasps oluster
round the heavy bunches-eea sign that they are sugary
enough to out. Like everyone els e we bite off a few


grapes while we work. We hurl the bunches into narrow-
mouthed wooden bigonei which are easy to haul on to the
cart. We mash the bunches down with thick sticks stained
a deep red, until most of the grapes have loosened from
the stems and begun the work of fermentation. A few of
the vines have vivid red Jeaves---the grapes from these
are used to stain the wine a good colour, and have little
strength. They spread over the hands like blood. The
bigonci stand at the end of the file waiting for Gino to
come round with the oxen, then they are loaded and roped
round. He digs into the bigonei with hishands, squeezing
the jouice out of the grapes. one of the delights is to
lick your hands when you havedone this. Up in the court-
yard he tips it all into great wooden vats where the *boil-
ing* will take place. The cutting takes two or three
days, with all his family working, and with some help from
paolo's the shepherd's family too. Paolo's old mother
talks to herself as she cuts the bunches down with a short
kitchen knife. She has an unceasing incomprehensible
dirge about the sadness of everlasting work, and the ease
of the landlords. But as she pays no rent for the house
she lives in, and her son will soon be a prosperous butcher
she has less to croon about than most, and the dirge
sounds weak, a fact which she seems to know. The
peasants can't quite believe yet that their new riches
won't be snatehed from theme At the same time as agric-
ulture collapses, and industrial conditions improve,
there is more land available for cultivation, and there-


fore cheaper rents. As the cities grow, the need for
food grows, and the farmer's opportunities grow. The
old kind of farming is collapsing, a new one is taking
its place not based on the family-unit, and these are
the growing pains. The countryside is emptying itself
of intimacy, to become a basically industrial c oncern as
it is in most other countries. It is a wrench for the
heart in a country wh: ich has virtually no society ready
outside the family-unit. The almost total destruction
of the Church as an active social force by the last war
makes the wrnech all the more dramatic, since the Church
was the ever-present protector and solace of family life.
The vat in the dark cellar gets fuller and fuller.
Little midges hover round the twigs at the surface in
thousands. Gino elimbs up on an improvised ladder and
pushes the stems down with a stick, to stop the wine
going vinegary. First the wine will "boil* or ferment
in this vat for two or three weeks, then it will go
into barrels minus its debris of stems and grape-skins.
A glass tube will be cemented at the top of each barrel
so that the wine when it sweals periodically in the
fermentation. will rise into it and release its gas with-
out reaching the air itself. Over the glass tube a
cover will be placed, floating in water, so that the
escaping gas 1ifts it gently and sends up a bubble up,
with a great satisfying bullont
Gino uses no sugar. He reckons the wine---swilling
the first sweet mixture through his teeth-e-at about ten
degrees. A 'small' wine that will not last the next


summer's heat through without a small admixture of
citric and ascorbic acid, about a teaspoonful to a
demijohn of fifty litres. In previous years Gino has
had eleven and twelve degrees with no trouble. His
quantity too 18 much dom this year. of course a ten-
degree wine will fetch less meney.
When we first saw the cellar it was during a normal
summer. It offered a relief to the throbbing heat out-
side; the walls shone mellow from the blinding sunlight
that emerged from a tiny window with olive branches in
it to keep out insects. It was as dry as a bone.
Now damp is climbing up the walls, the floor is sodden.
A damp cellar is bad for the wine in formentation.
Dino is moving house. He showed us their bed-
room just before removing its furniture. There was one
large bed for himself and Armida, and a smaller one at
its side for their son silvano, who is over thirty.
Families sleep together partly for safety. There is
still fear of the dark, of loneliness. If Armida and.
Dino stay talking with us in our kitchen after dark
sivano calls to them from down the lane: Mammas
Babbot Vienit Dino smiles and says, *He's afraid',
but it is accepted, not felt as an unmasculine quality,
simply recognition of the dark facts of life.
If Dino's move was simply to another farmhouse he
would use a cart and a couple of oxen, in the old way.
But this is a move intoa new world. It requires a
truck. Something is arranged with a friend. The


truck arrives and the loading begins: beds, wardrobes-e-
peasants do with few stick s of furniture. No cerpets,
no lamps, no settees. They will sell their dresser,
and a table. They leave the house dark and silent,
given over to the mice. Waiting for them in the new
kitohen is a refridgerator in a great polythene envelope,
a red plastic table surrounded by plastic-seated chairss,
also with their polythene protectors, and a kitchen dreseer
to match. And these will soon be followed by the TV set.
The little plot of land that served Dino for a
vegetable patch will be used by Bepe, the oldest man at
Pescille, who still has the blue, wondering eyes of a
child and a bright bronzed face. He has no children
and seems to listen for their arrival on the breeze,
leaning against his spade.
Foschero and Piera, the young couple with two
children, are preparing to go too. We heard it this
morning. Foschero has found a job as a labourer
working by the day, on the other side of 'town*. They
too have found a flat, grander than Dino's, with marble
everywhere.
Up the hill, of the three houses in the woods, only
one will be oocupied, that of Gianni's family. Paolo
the shepherd is leaving in the winter. We passed his
new gleaming butcher's shop, just inside the Etruscan
gate. He was standing inside by the cash desk looking
shy. His house will be abandoned, on its cool plateau.
The owner, who lives far away, thinks it too isolated


to attract a new tenant. It stands at the edge of the
woods like a miniature mediaeval castello, its old bricks
glowing. Rooks appear in the fields round it. The air
is pure and chill. In the hunting season it involuntarily
becomes a lodge for the hunters. They sit in the court-
yerd, ask for water. Their shots echo deep into the
woods. There the sun goes down later. In the old days,
when three large families occupied it, the house must
have looked like a thriving townlet, its walls glitter-
ing in the sun.atk Its position, once a refuge from
the wxmpmenztng terrific baking heat of the valley, is
now a disadvantage. The wine no longer achieves more
than eight or nine degrees of alcohol. The frosts are
sevrere. The wind is chill even in the dog days. The
woods are dark and dank, with the iron clouds drawn to
them, whereas in the old days they were the source of
pleasant cool piney breezes that drfited across the
courtyard, bringing health that was impossible below in
the sweltering basin of Pescille. Paolo said, *We
shall miss the air up there, but nothing elset*
As for the white house just up the hill, that too
will be empty soon. The grown-up daughter is to marry.
She will no longer watch Gianni taking a short cut aeross
her courtyard with its polished boulders, no longer say
something gently moral to him, with the faint suggestion
that if he changed his life he might get her in marriage
instead of the bronzed sia-footer with no mind whom she
had her eye on.


We have our eye on her house for next year. It is
as clean as a bone, and dry, and the rooms have been kept
neat. The landlord is willing, So one day we shall
get Dinots oxen out and load our sticks on his cart and
trudge behind them up the rocky path with its numberless
bleached fossils. The house was a monastery once, they
say-e-at least five hundred years ago. The local August-
inians used it for the summer months, and ealled it the
hermitage'. The quiet is abolsute up there. The Volterra
road is hidden to it by trees. on the other side of
its courtyard lie the woods, twenty kilometres deep.
Then we shall look down on all the abandoned houses
below. Psecille will have two old couples who mean to
move to town when they can. The Agnarelli will be gone
by the winter. Guido will move to the house which
until now has been ours, but the peasant rooms will be
his---where the water cascades down the chimney. He
will stick it out for a year, he says, while his son is
in the army, then he too will move to town'. A pension
is due to him, for some service in the army long ago.
Dino's house is already closed up, with mice
seuttling about inside. Its garden is a seas of mud.
Next year there will be no children's Voices echoing
across the valley.
We put Gianni on to someone who found him a job in


Germany. He had to sign a form that he was competent
as a carpenter. He told us he had once worked at a
hardboard factory; but he would have signed it anyway.
The Italian is naturally C ampetent for almost anything
you like to put him to.
Gianni settled down in Germany at once. He found
the work easy. What the German called a hard day's
work he found less than a light day on the farm.
Work in the bad sense means getting dirty, slopping
about in wet cow-dung, fetching pig swill. Clean
ordered work can be done more or less indefinitely.
The Italian is always in crisis, personally---always
at the frontier, with the problem of survival before
him. He keeps a graps on the basic necessaties.
However rich he bec omes he almost never boses his
gift for primitive improvisation. It is a knowledge
of basic survival passed on from generation to generat-
ion, through one invasion after another. The skills
die out but the practical flair reamins. This would
keep a semblance of Italy going though the heart had
died.
Gianni stayed in Ger,any three or four years,
co oming back for a Christmas or a summer hobiday.
He looked paler, with less hair on his head each time.
He began to complain about the food up there---too much
pork. He began not to feel well.
Like most of the other two million Italian workers
in Germany and Switzerland he was saving most of his


earnings. This is the sacrificio nearly every Italian
makes at some time in his life.
And then, after four years, he came back and swore
he had finished. In a few months he had bought a farm
with three hectares ofland, t ogether with a small car.
They were now established. No more of the rocky path
up the hill, freewheeling down it on the scooter to
save petrol. He was now a 'prince', the peasants said.
Their head-shaking about him was forgotten. It had
turned out that a little imagination wasn't such a
diaadvantage after all. He was a clever one---yes,
they had to admit that: Always had been clever,
painted little madonnass as a childi And now he had
returned home like a prince, and set his family up-e
the poorest family in the district. Not that they
talked about him much. They just acknowledge the new
facts and forgot. After all, he had worked for h im-
self, hadn't he, not for them? Well, egotism was
expected of every man. You don't talk admiringly for
long about a man with sufficient common egotism to line
his pockets. He had simply become authentic. And
they paid him the respect due to that.
When he bought the farmhouse he took me aside
and said in a whisper, There are two and a half heot
ares of land, but if anybody asks you how much I've got
tell them three or four. And if they ask the price
tell them five million* (he paid half).


A Sicilian ramily---refugees from Sicily's devast-
ating earthquakes and floods---took over Gianni's house.
They let the ir pigs roam down through the woods, to the
other farms, a most un-Tuscan procedding. They say that
the farm has gone right down, that the vines are worth
nothing now.
Paolo the sheperd became a butcher for a year, and
got fat and. pale from standing about. the shop. Some-
times he took a hand at the cash desk, but. it wasn't his
life. Suddenly he bought a small holding close to the
'town' for a few million lire and let the shop to some-
one else. Within a few months his eyes were sparkling
again, his face was urddy and sharp as before. He
worked the land for wine and oil and grain, but never
touched sheep again. About the namepastore or sheperd,
there hangs the lowest social implications. It means
dirt, illiteracy, holl-w-eyed staring into space for
days and weeks while the sheep munch.. The idea is
that you quickly make. your money out of your flock---
and much can be made on the peccorino cheese alone---
and then sell out. The association of the shepherd's
life wi th innocence is a bad one in a world where innoc-
ence means st tupidity.
The summer after Gianni left there was an earth


tremor-e-quite usual in this district. People ran out
of their homes at Pescille. We slept through it, while
they dozed the night through in the fields, thinking we
were away. Next afternoon it happended again. The
house shook, the doors tattled violently as if somebody
was pulling at the handles, a thunder grew und ler the
floors, the walls seemed to separate a fraction of an
inch from the rafters overhead, and then it died away,
leaving us staring at each other in a quite animal terror
which until then we hadn't known was in us.
This was during the three-weeks heat. *Three-
weeks heat' had become normal now, from about the middle
of June to the first wekk of July. Apart from that the
pattern was as before-e-with more or less s tretches of
the told weather. People began to talk of the *old
spring-e-the nimble air that made you feel good through
and through and which the ch ildren of today may never
know.
The Corpus Domini procession at the beginning of
June is nearly always und er a big watery sky now, with
chill breezes coming down the narrow, stone-walled
streets. Delight has left the Italien sky.
+n the autumn one year a wind started up, trees
bent over as usual, a firce torrential rain was released
from the sky, windows were shattered, the little Elsa
river swelled up, it swept away the stout brick bridge
over it, tore the mas onyy down like matchwood, and the
road lay collapsed in its swirling currents. One river


flooded another until the Arno burst its banks and all
Florence lay under water. Her flood became famous all
over the world. At Grossetto it was as bad, and took
more lives. It was the high peak of a process that had
been going on year after year, in miniature tornadoes and
frosts and floods and fierce magnetic storms that hovered
in the sky and proliferated for hours on end. The sea
raged.
Dino and Armida and Silvano felt snug in their new
flat. The sky could do its Worst, they weren't in the
country any more. The make-believe of cities had scooped
them in, served with television. The rain thundered on
the roof two floors above. The wood-stove in the kitehen
was lit. There was no work while the water flooded down.
Every evening they sat and watched a new world unfold on
the little box. The barns and cattlesheds of Pescille
were empty. The thundering rain, the sudden blinding
lightning even in winter, the unexpected rivers down
rocky paths, made *town' a good place to be.