The alphabet was my first practice in worldly affairs and I learned it in a rush of enthusiasm. Without knowing why, I found myself wishing to attend school—the school at Predappio, some two miles away. It was taught by Marani, a friend of my father. I walked to and fro and was not displeased that the boys of Predappio resented at first the coming of a stranger boy from another village. They flung stones at me and I returned their fire. I was all alone and against many. I was often beaten, but I enjoyed it with that universality of enjoyment with which boys the world around make friendship by battle and arrive at affection through missiles. Whatever was my courage, my body bore its imprints. I concealed the bruises from my mother to shelter her from the knowledge of the world in which I had begun to find expression and to which I supposed she was such a stranger. At the evening repast I probably often feared to stretch out my hand for the bread lest I expose a wound upon my young wrist.
After a while this all ended. War was over and the pretense of enmity—a form of play—faded into nothing and I had found fine schoolmates of my own age.
The call of old life foundations is strong. I felt it when only a few years ago a terrific avalanche endangered the lives of the inhabitants of Predappio. I took steps to found a new Predappio—Predappio Nuovo. My nature felt a stirring for my old home. And I remembered that as a child I had sometimes looked at the plain where the River Rabbi is crossed by the old highway to Mendola and imagined there a flourishing town. To-day that town—Predappio Nuovo—is in full process of development; on its masonry gate there is carved the symbol of Fascism and words expressing my clear will.
When I was graduated from the lower school I was sent to a boarding school. This was at Faenza, the town noted for its pottery of the fifteenth century. The school was directed by the Salesiani priests. I was about to enter into a period of routine, of learning the ways of the disciplined human herd. I studied, slept well and grew. I was awake at daylight and went to bed when the evening had settled down and the bats flew.
This was a period of bursting beyond the bounds of my own little town. I had begun to travel. I had begun to add length after length to that tether which binds one to the hearth and the village.
I saw the town of Forli—a considerable place which should have impressed me but failed to do so. But Ravenna! Some of my mother’s relatives lived in the plain of Ravenna and on one summer vacation we set out together to visit them. After all, it was not far away, but to my imagination it was a great journey—almost like a journey of Marco Polo—to go over hill and dale to the edge of the sea—the Adriatic!
I went with my mother to Ravenna and carefully visited every corner of that city steeped in the essences of antiquity. From the wealth of Ravenna’s artistic treasures there rose before me the beauty and fascination of her history and her name through the long centuries. Deep feelings remain now, impressed then upon me. I experienced a profound and significant enlarging of my concepts of life, beauty and the rise of civilizations. The tomb of Dante, inspiring in its quiet hour of noon; the basilica of San Apollinare; the Candiano canal, with the pointed sails of fishing-boats at its mouth; and then the beauty of the Adriatic moved me—touched something within me.
I went back with something new and undying. My mind and spirit were filled with expanding consciousness. And I took back also a present from my relatives. It was a wild duck, powerful in flight. My brother Arnaldo and I, on the little river at home, put forth patient efforts to tame the wild duck.
CHAPTER II
MY FATHER
MY father took a profound interest in my development. Perhaps I was much more observed by his paternal attention than I thought. We became much more knit together by common interests as my mind and body approached maturity. In the first place I became fascinated by the steam threshing machines which were just then for the first time being introduced into our agricultural life. With my father I went to work to learn the mechanism, and tasted, as I had never tasted before, the quiet joy of becoming a part of the working creative world. Machinery has its fascinations and I can understand how an engineer of a railway locomotive or an oiler in the hold of a ship may feel that a machine has a personality, sometimes irritating, sometimes friendly, with an inexhaustible generosity and helpfulness, power and wisdom.