FOOTNOTES:

[108] The correspondent of the Daily Telegraph had written that Mr. Ruskin's letter of January 10 had been translated into Italian and had set people thinking, and he asked Mr. Ruskin to write and state the case once more.

[From "The Daily Telegraph," February 7, 1871.]
THE STREAMS OF ITALY.[109]

To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."

Sir: In this month, just thirty years ago, I was at Naples, and the days were nearly as dark as these, but with clouds and rain, not fog. The streets leading down from St. Elmo became beds of torrents. A story went about—true or not I do not know, but credible enough—of a child's having been carried off by the gutter and drowned at the bottom of the hill. At last came indeed what, in those simple times, people thought a serious loss of life. A heavy storm burst one night above a village on the flank of the Monte St. Angelo, a mile or two south of Pompeii. The limestones slope steeply there under about three feet of block earth. The water peeled a piece of the rock of its earth, as one would peel an orange, and brought down three or four acres of the good soil in a heap on the village at midnight, driving in the upper walls, and briefly burying some fourteen or fifteen people in their sleep—and, as I say, in those times there was some talk even about fourteen or fifteen. But the same kind of thing takes place, of course, more or less, among the hills in almost every violent storm, generally with the double result of ruining more ground below than is removed from the rocks above; for the frantic streams mostly finish their work with a heap of gravel and blocks of stone like that which came down the ravine below the glacier of Greppond about ten years ago, and destroyed, for at least fifty years to come, some of quite the best land in Chamouni.

In slower, but ceaseless process of ruin, the Po, Arno, and Tiber steadily remove the soil from the hills, and carry it down to their deltas. The Venetians have contended now for a thousand years in vain even with the Brenta and the minor streams that enter their lagoons, and have only kept their canals clear by turning the river south to Malamocco with embankments which have unhealthily checked the drainage of all the flat country about Padua.

And this constant mischief takes place, be it observed, irrespective of inundation. All that Florence, Pisa, and Rome have suffered and suffer periodically from floods is so much mischief added to that of increasing maremmas, spoiled harborages, and lost mountain-ground.

There is yet one further evil. The snow on the bared rock slips lower and melts faster; snow, which in mossy or grass ground would have lain long, and furnished steadily flowing streams far on into summer, fall or melt from the bare rock in avalanche and flood, and spend in desolation in a few days what would have been nourishment for half the year. And against all this there are no remedies possible in any sudden or external action. It is the law of the Heaven which sends flood and food, that national prosperity can only be achieved by national forethought and unity of purpose.

In the year 1858 I was staying the greater part of the summer at Bellinzona, during a drought as harmful as the storms of ten years later. The Ticino sank into a green rivulet; and not having seen the right way to deal with the matter, I had many a talk with the parroco of a little church whose tower I was drawing, as to the possibility of setting his peasants to work to repair the embankment while the river was low. But the good old priest said, sorrowfully, the peasants were too jealous of each other, that no one would build anything or protect his own ground for fear his work might also benefit his neighbors.

But the people of Bellinzona are Swiss, not Italians. I believe the Roman and Sienese races, in different ways, possess qualities of strength and gentleness far more precious than the sunshine and rain upon their mountains, and, hitherto, as cruelly lost. It is in them that all the real power of Italy still lives; it is only by them, and by what care, and providence, and accordant good-will ever be found in them, that the work is to be done, not by money; though, if money were all that is needed, do we in England owe so little to Italy of delight that we cannot so much as lend her spades and pick-axes at her need? Would she trust us? Would her government let us send over some engineer officers and a few sappers and miners, and bear, for a time, with an English instead of a French "occupation" of her barrenest hills?

But she does not need us. Good engineers she has, and has had many since Leonardo designed the canals of Lombardy. Agriculturists she has had, I think, among her gentlemen a little before there were gentlemen farmers in England; something she has told us of agriculture, also, pleasantly by the reeds of Mincio and among the apple-blossoms wet with Arno. Her streams have learned obedience before now: Fonte Branda and the Fountain of Joy flow at Sienna still; the rivulets that make green the slopes of Casentino may yet satisfy true men's thirst. "Where is the money to come from?" Let Italy keep her souls pure, and she will not need to alloy her florins. The only question for her is whether still the mossy rock and the "rivus aquæ" are "in rotis" or rather the racecourse and the boulevard—the curses of England and of France.

At all events, if any one of the Princes of Rome will lead, help enough will follow to set the work on foot, and show the peasants, in some narrow district, what can be done. Take any arid piece of Apennine towards the sources of the Tiber; let the drainage be carried along the hill-sides away from the existing water-courses; let cisterns, as of old in Palestine, and larger reservoirs, such as we now can build, be established at every point convenient for arrest of the streams; let channels of regulated flow be established from these over the tracts that are driest in summer; let ramparts be carried, not along the river banks, but round the heads of the ravines, throwing the water aside into lateral canals; then terrace and support the looser soil on all the steeper slopes; and the entire mountain side may be made one garden of orange and vine and olive beneath; and a wide blossoming orchard above; and a green highest pasture for cattle, and flowers for bees—up to the edge of the snows of spring.

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
John Ruskin.
Oxford, Feb. 3.