Recollections of My Childhood and Youth

by Georg Brandes

He very acutely characterised his Italian compatriots: "Our intelligence amounts to prudence and common sense. At a distance we may appear self- luminous; in reality we are only passivity and reflected light. Solferino gave us Lombardy, Sadowa gave us Venice, Sedan gave us Rome. We were just active enough to take advantage of fortunate circumstances, and passively clever enough not to wreck our advantage by stupidity. In foreign novels we are scoundrels of the deepest dye, concocters of poisons and wholesale swindlers. In reality we are indifferent and indolent. Dolce far niente, these words, which, to our shame, are repeated in every country in Italian, are our watchword. But things shall be different, if it means that the few amongst us who have a little share of head and heart have to work themselves to death--things shall be different. Massimo d'Azeglio said: 'Now we have created an Italy; there remains to create Italians.' That was a true saying. Now we are creating the new people, and what a future there is before us! Now it is we who are taking the leadership of the Latin race, and who are giving back to our history its brilliance of the sixteenth century. At present our Art is poor because we have no popular type; but wait! In a few years Italy will show a profile no less full of character than in the days of Michael Angelo, and Benvenuto Cellini."

III.

Then the moment arrived when all abstract reflections were thrust aside once more by convalescence. I was well again, after having been shut up for over four months. I still felt the traces of the mercury poisoning, but I was no longer tied to my bed, and weak though I was, I could walk.

And on the very first day,--it was March 25th--armed with a borrowed stick (I possessed none, having never used a stick before), and equipped with a little camp-stool, I took the train to Frascati, where there was a Madonna Fête.

It was life opening out before me again. All that I saw, witnessed to its splendour. First, the scenery on the way, the Campagna with its proud ruins, and the snow-covered Sabine Mountains, the whole illuminated by a powerful Summer sun; the villas of old Romans, with fortress-like thick walls, and small windows; then the fertile lava soil, every inch of which was under vineyard cultivation. At last the mountains in the neighborhood of Frascati. A convent crowned the highest point; there, in olden days, the first Italian temple to Jupiter had stood, and there Hannibal had camped. Underneath, in a hollow, like an eagle's nest, lay Rocca di Papa. By the roadside, fruit-trees with violet clusters of blossoms against a background of stone-pines, cypresses, and olive-groves.

I reached Frascati station. There was no carriage to be had up to the town, so I was obliged to ascend the hill slowly on foot, a test which my leg stood most creditably. In the pretty market-place of Frascati, with its large fountain which, like Acqua Paola, was divided into three and flung out a tremendous quantity of water, I went into an osteria and asked for roast goat with salad and Frascati wine, then sat down outside, as it was too close within. Hundreds of people in gay costumes, with artificial flowers and silver feathers in their headgear, filled the square in front of me, crowded the space behind me, laughed and shouted.

The people seemed to be of a grander type, more lively, animated and exuberant, than at the fair at Fiesole. The women were like Junos or Venuses, the men, even when clad in abominable rags, looked like Vulcans, blackened in their forges; they were all of larger proportions than Northern men and women. A Roman beau, with a riding-whip under his arm, was making sheep's eyes at a young local beauty, his courtship accompanied by the whines of the surrounding beggars. A signora from Albano was lecturing the waiter with the dignity of a queen for having brought her meat that was beneath all criticism, yes, she even let the word porcheria escape her. A brown-bearded fellow came out of the inn with a large bottle of the heavenly Frascati wine, which the landlords here, even on festival occasions, never mix with water, and gave a whole family, sitting on donkeys, to drink out of one glass; then he went to two little ones, who were holding each other round the waist, sitting on the same donkey; to two youths who were riding another; to a man and wife, who sat on a third, and all drank, like the horsemen in Wouwerman's pictures, without dismounting.

I got into an old, local omnibus, pulled by three horses, to drive the two miles to Grotta Ferrata, where the fair was. But the vehicle was hardly about to start up-hill when, with rare unanimity, the horses reared, behaved like mad, and whirled it round four or five times. The driver, a fellow with one eye and a grey cap with a double red camelia in it, being drunk, thrashed the horses and shouted, while an old American lady with ringlets shrieked inside the omnibus, and bawled out that she had paid a franc beforehand, and now wanted to get out. The road was thronged with people walking, and there was just as many riding donkeys, all of them, even the children, already heated with wine, singing, laughing, and accosting everybody. Many a worthy woman supported her half-drunk husband with her powerful arm. Many a substantial signora from Rocca di Papa sat astride her mule, showing without the least bashfulness her majestic calves.

At Grotta Ferrata, the long, long street presented a human throng of absolute density without the slightest crush, for no one stuck his elbows into his neighbour's sides. The eye could only distinguish a mass of red, yellow and white patches in the sunlight, and in between them a few donkeys' heads and mules' necks. The patches were the kerchiefs on the women's heads. Folk stood with whole roast pigs in front of them on a board, cutting off a piece with a knife for anyone who was hungry; there were sold, besides, fruits, knives, ornaments, provisions, and general market wares. One osteria, the entrance to which was hung all over with sausages, onions and vegetables, in garlands, had five huge archways open to the street. Inside were long tables, at which people sat, not on benches, but on trestles, round bars supported by two legs, and ate and drank in the best of good spirits, and the blackest filth, for the floor was the black, sodden, trampled earth. Just over the way, arbours had been made from trees, by intertwining their branches and allowing them to grow into one another; these were quite full of gay, beautiful girls, amongst them one with fair hair and brown eyes, who looked like a Tuscan, and from whom it was difficult to tear one's eyes away.

After having inspected the courtyard of an old monastery, the lovely pillars of which rejoiced my heart, I sat down a little on one side in the street where the fair was, on my little camp-stool, which roused the legitimate curiosity of the peasant girls. They walked round me, looked at me from behind and before, and examined with grave interest the construction of my seat. In front of me sat an olive and lemon seller. Girls bargained with him as best they could in the press, others stood and looked on. I had an opportunity here of watching their innate statuesque grace. When they spoke, the right arm kept time with their speech. When silent, they generally placed one hand on the hip, bent, but not clenched. There were various types. The little blonde, blue-eyed girl with the mild Madonna smile, and absolutely straight nose, and the large-made, pronounced brunette. But the appearance of them all was such that an artist or a poet could, by a slight transformation, have portrayed from them whatever type of figure or special characteristic he required. In my opinion, the form Italian beauty took, and the reason of the feeling one had in Italy of wading in beauty, whereas one hardly ever saw anything in the strict sense of the word beautiful in Copenhagen, and rarely in Paris, was, that this beauty was the beauty of the significant. All these women looked to be unoppressed, fullblown, freely developed. All that makes woman ugly in the North: the cold, the thick, ugly clothes that the peasant women wear, the doublet of embarrassment and vapidity which they drag about with them, the strait- waistcoat of Christiansfeldt morality in which they are confined by the priests, by protestantism, by fashion, by custom and convention--none of this oppressed, confined or contracted women here. These young peasant girls looked as if they had never heard such words as "You must not," or "You shall not," and as here in Italy there is none of the would-be witty talk, the grinning behind people's backs, which takes the life out of all intrepidity in the North, no one thought: "What will people say?" Everyone dressed and deported himself with complete originality, as he, or rather as she, liked. Hence eyes were doubly brilliant, blood coursed twice as red, the women's busts were twice as rounded and full.