And now the arrival at Florence. The pleasure of dwelling on that arrival, when on the platform our friends await us with the sun of Italy in their looks! Then away we go with them in carriages drawn by those fast-trotting Tuscan ponies that are my wonder and admiration, with crack of whip and jingle of bells along the white moon-lit road to the great villa at Signa, where the vintage is about to begin.
To recall the happy labour of those precious three days of grape-picking in the mellow heat on the hillside, and then the all-pervading fumes of fermenting wine of the succeeding period in the courtyard of the Fattoria; the dull red hue of the crushed grapes that dyes all things, animate and inanimate, within the sphere of work, is one of the most grateful efforts of my memory. I see again the handsome laughing peasants, the white oxen, the flights of pigeons across the blue of the sky. The mental relaxation amidst all this activity of wholesome and natural labour, the complete change of scene, afford a blessed rest to one who has worked hard through a London winter and got very tired of a London season. It is a patriarchal life here, and the atmosphere of good humour between landlord and tenant seems to show the land laws and customs of Tuscany to be in need of no reformer, the master and the man appearing to be nearer contentment than is the case anywhere else that I know of. You and I saw a very cheery specimen of the land system at grand old Caravaggio.
Then the evenings! I know it is trite to talk of guitars and tenor voices under the moonlight, but Italy woos you back to many things we call “used up” elsewhere, and there is positive refreshment in hearing those light tenor voices, expressive of the light heart, singing the ever-charming stornellos of the country as we sit under the pergola after dinner each evening. The neighbours drop in and the guitar goes round with the coffee. Everybody sings who can, and, truth to say, some who can’t. Many warm thanks to our kind friends, English and Italian (some are gone!), who gave you and me such unforgettable hospitality in ‘75, ‘76.
But lest all these guitarings and airy nothings of the gentle social life here should become oversweet, we can slip away from the rose-garden and climb up into the vineyards of the rustic podere that speak of wholesome peasant labour, of tillage—the first principle of man’s existence on earth—and, among the practical pole-vines that bear the true wine-making grapes (not the dessert fruit of the garden pergola), have a quiet talk.
The starry sky is disclosed almost round the entire circle of the horizon, with “Firenze la gentile” in the distance on our right, the Apennine in front, and the sleeping plain trending away to the left to be lost in mystery. I want to talk to you of our experience of Italy the Beloved, from our earliest childhood until to-day.
What a happy chance it was that our parents should have been so taken with the Riviera di Levante as to return there winter after winter, alternately with the summers spent in gentle Kent or Surrey, during our childhood; not the French Riviera which has since become so sophisticated, but that purely Italian stretch of coast to the east of Genoa, ending in Porto Fino, that promontory which you and I will always hold as a sacred bit of the world. Why? There are as lovely promontories jutting out into the Mediterranean elsewhere? The child’s love for the scenes of its early friendships with nature is a jealous love.
Our relations by marriage with the B. family admitted us into the centre of a very typical Italian home of the old order. I suppose that life was very like the life of eighteenth-century England—the domestic habits were curiously alike, and I cannot say I regret that their vogue is passing. We are thought to be so ridiculously fastidious, noi altri inglesi, and our parents were certainly not exceptional in this respect, and suffered accordingly.
The master of the house, the autocratic padrone, had been in the Italian Legion in Napoleon’s Russian campaign, as you may remember, and the retreat from Moscow had apparently left certain indelible cicatrices on the old gentleman’s temper. I can hear his stentorian voice even now calling to the servant (I think there was only one “living in,” though there were about a dozen hangers-on) in the rambling old Palazzo without bells. “O—O—O, Mariuccia!” “Padrone!” you heard in a feminine treble from the remote regions of the kitchen upstairs, somewhere. Mariuccia would generally get a bit of the Italian legionary’s mind when she came tumbling down the marble stairs. Madame la Generale appeared in the morning with a red handkerchief on her head and remained in corsetless déshabillé till the afternoon. Genoese was the home language, French was for society. No one spoke real Italian. They had not yet begun to “Toscaneggiare,” as it grew to be the fashion to do when Italy became united. Don’t you dislike to hear them?