Visitors in the Author’s Room—Teresa di Bianca—The Old Woman up the Valley—Shyness in Shawl and Pattens—Small Children Labor in the Fields
The western end of the island is the famous Marsala wine district, and one firm controls all of the best vineyards but a few, which are gradually being forced into the monopoly. One man who was regularly employed by this company told me that he received thirty-five lire per month for ten hours’ labor per day (about twenty-one cents per day).
Catania is the exporting centre of the eastern end of a rather prosperous sulphur-mining district on the eastern coast of the island, and in this harbor are vessels constantly loading with sulphur for the American and German markets. It is estimated that about fifty thousand people derive their livelihood from this industry, and it is the one notable industry other than agriculture in the entire island. The largest though not the most fertile plain of Sicily is about Catania, and some very fine estates are to be found there, owned for the most part by wealthy people in Messina or Naples, perhaps resident in the beautiful cities of northern Italy.
The political disturbances which have made Sicily an uncertain quantity in years past, the comparative isolation of Palermo from the central government, and the effect of the traditions of the Sicilian Vespers (1282 A. D.) which are well known to every man, woman and child, topped by the natural supremacy of the educated unscrupulous over the ignorant well-meaning, have caused Palermo to become to a certain extent what Naples is,—the scene of aggregated rogueries. The past twenty years have seen malfeasances by high officials, impositions by aristocrats, commercial and political plots, and outrages by declared criminals, which brand the beautiful capital of the Sicilian state as a nesting-place of the boldest and most nefarious malefactors in all Italy. The common people are not dishonest in the degree that the Neapolitans are, but the educated classes can boast some bright and shining lights in the public and private hold-up game that should make even St. Louis or Philadelphia envious. An English officer of a Liverpool tramp steamer, who has spent a very great deal of time in Palermo when shore superintendent of a line in the lemon trade, told me that “a Palermo politician can give any Tammany district leader cards and spades, and beat him with his hands tied.”
Col. John A. Weber, of Buffalo, formerly Immigrant Commissioner at the Port of New York, thinks immigration should be encouraged to an even greater volume than at present, but that dishonest and illegal naturalization is a rotten spot in the matter. In this he is correct, and I would add that my observations have been that more men from Palermo, who have found even that city too hot for them, are engaged in the brokerage of naturalization papers in the United States and Italy than any other city’s representatives. A bill newly introduced by Congressman Gulden, of New York, is intended as a corrective, but I doubt its efficiency.
One of the first things that strikes the American visitor to the rural districts of Calabria, Sicily or Apulia, and even farther north, is the antiquated processes employed by the farmers. A man who knows what a sulky plow and a harvester are rebels at the sight of an entire peasant family spading up a field or reaping a crop with sickles, and there is a vast difference between a big green and red Studebaker wagon drawn by two good horses and loaded to the top boards with apples or potatoes, and a string of donkeys, women, and children laden with paniers and head-baskets; but the introduction of modern farming methods into Italy would have an effect equivalent to a visit of plague. The three million three hundred thousand people who live from the soil in Sicily, for instance, win for each his portion of food stuffs by hand labor on the farms or in the village workshops, where work is traded for food very often directly; and the introduction of machinery which would dispense with the labor of more than half the people would upset the system of division of products of the soil and prove a terrible calamity.
Outside of the number of a few noted vineyards where there are power plants for wine-making, the great volume of Sicilian wine, which is strong, of good nutritious quality and flavor, is produced by hand processes. The grapes are gathered in season by men, women and children, and borne in paniers or baskets to the trampling-vats, which are often two miles from the vineyard, and in some instances more. I have seen a half-dozen little girls, the youngest too small to speak plainly, the oldest not over eight, going plodding along in the dust between vineyard and press, with loads of grapes on their heads.
The grapes are dumped into the stone-built, plastered trampling-vat, which drains into a butt, and when enough, say a layer of six inches of thickness, has been put in, the peasants get in with pants and skirts rolled up, and tramp the grapes into a pulp. This trampling is usually given up to old men or women whose sight is defective, or whose hands are distorted by accident or rheumatism from years of wine-drinking, and who are thus not so valuable at picking and carrying grapes. I remember, at a press near Collesamo, seeing two old women trampling grapes with their skirts rolled up and pinned about their hips, and far up on their thighs were the purple stains of the fruit. As they tramped they sang the high, nasal, droning canto of their village.
The pulp is taken out in forms and put into a press which operates by screw power, the screw being a huge beam of wood which has had a screw thread carved on it by hand, and the power is the leverage of a pole mortised into the top of the upright screw, and sloping down to where two men can seize it, or a horse, ox or donkey be hitched to it.