North Italian Folk: Sketches of Town and Country Life

by Alice Vansittart Strettel Carr

IN THE FIELDS AT SAVIGNONE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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