One thing that keeps the Sicilian down is the pride with which he remembers his past and the obstinacy with which he clings to his ancient customs and ways of doing things. It is said by certain persons, as an excuse for backward conditions of the country, that even if the landlords did attempt to introduce new machinery and modern methods of cultivation the people would rebel against any innovation. They are stuck so fast in their old traditional ways of doing things that they refuse to change.
I have sometimes said that there was a certain advantage in belonging to a new race that was not burdened with traditions and a past—to a race, in other words, that is looking forward instead of backward, and is more interested in the future than in the past. The Negro farmer certainly has this advantage over the Italian peasant.
If you ask a Sicilian workman why he does something in a certain way, he invariably replies: "We have always done that way," and that is enough for him. The Sicilian never forgets the past until he leaves Sicily, and frequently not even then.
The result is that while the Negro in Africa is learning, as I saw from a recent report of the German Government, to plow by steam, the Sicilian farmer, clinging proudly to his ancient customs and methods, is still using the same plow that was used by the Greeks in the days of Homer, and he is threshing his grain as people did in the time of Abraham.
CHAPTER IX WOMEN AND THE WINE HARVEST IN SICILY
It was late in September when I reached Catania, on the eastern side of Sicily. The city lies at the foot of Mt. Ætna on the edge of the sea. Above it looms the vast bulk of the volcano, its slopes girdled with gardens and vineyards that mount, one terrace above the other, until they lose themselves in the clouds. A wide and fertile valley below the city to the south, through which the railway descends from the mountain to the sea, seemed, as did Mt. Ætna itself, like one vast vineyard.
This was the more noticeable and interesting because, at the time I reached there, the harvest was in progress; the vineyards were dotted with women carrying baskets; the wine presses were busy, and the air was filled with the fumes of the fermenting grape juice.
Although it was Sunday morning and the bells in a hundred churches were calling the people to prayers, there was very little of the Sunday quiet I had somehow expected to meet. Most of the shops were open; in every part of the city men were sitting in their doorways or on the pavement in front of their little cell-like houses, busily at work at their accustomed crafts. Outside the southern gate of the city a thrifty merchant had set up a hasty wine shop, in order to satisfy the thirst of the crowds of people who were passing in and out of the city and also, perhaps, to escape the tax which the city imposes upon all sorts of provisions that enter the city from the surrounding country. Country wine was selling here at a few pennies a litre—I have forgotten the exact sum—and crowds of people from the city celebrated, something after the ancient custom of the country, I suppose, the annual harvest of the grapes.