Working my Way Around the World

by Harry Alverson Franck; Lena M. Franck

When drowsiness fell upon me, the hostess led the way to a large, airy room. The coarse sheets on the bed were remarkably white, although the Italian housewife does her washing in the village brook, and never uses hot water. Such labor is cheap in Italy, and for all of this I paid less than ten cents.

Early next day I pushed on toward Lecco. A light frost had fallen in the night, and the peasants, alarmed by the first breath of winter, sent into the vineyards every man, woman, and child able to work. The pickers labored feverishly. All day women plodded from the fields to the roadside with great buckets of grapes to be dumped into barrels on waiting ox-carts. Men wearing heavy wooden shoes jumped now and then into the barrels and stamped the grapes down. When full, the barrels were covered with strips of dirty canvas, the farmer climbed into his cart, turned his oxen into the highway, and promptly fell asleep. When he reached the village, he drew up before the chute of the village wine-press, and shoveled his grapes into a slowly revolving hopper. Here they were crushed to an oozy pulp, and then run into huge tanks and left to settle.

After stopping for a morning lunch I tramped through and beyond Bergamo, where a level highway led across a vast plain covered with grape-vines and watered by a network of canals. Behind me only a ghostlike range of the Alps wavered in the haze of the distant sky-line.

About the time I arrived in northern Italy the butchers had gone on a strike. That did not trouble me much, for I had eaten nothing but bread for weeks. The bread was made into loaves of the size, shape, and toughness of baseballs. Still, hard loaves soaked in wine, or crushed between two wayside rocks, could be eaten, in a way; and as long as they were plentiful I could not suffer from lack of food.

A few miles farther on, however, at each of the bakeries of a village I was turned away with the cry of:

“There is no bread! The strike! The bakers have joined the strike and no more bread is made.”

To satisfy that day’s appetite I had to eat “paste,” a mushy mess of macaroni.

I was returning next morning from an early view of the picturesque bridges and the ancient buildings of Verona, when I came upon a howling mob, quarreling, pushing, and scratching in a struggle to reach the gateway leading to the city hall. Behind this gate above the sea of heads I could just see the top of some heavy instrument, and the caps of a squad of policemen. I asked an excited neighbor the cause of the squabble. He glared at me and howled something in reply. The only word I understood was pane (bread). I turned to a man behind me. Before I could speak to him, he shoved me aside and crowded into my place, at the same time shouting, “Pane!” I tried to crowd past him. He jabbed me twice in the ribs with his elbows, and again roared, “Pane!” In fact, everywhere above the howl and noise of the multitude one word rang out, clear and sharp—“Pane! pane! pane!” My hunger of the day before, and the thought of the long miles before me, aroused my interest in that product. I dived into the human whirlpool and battled my way toward the center.

Reaching the front rank, I paused to look about me. Behind the iron gate, a dozen perspiring policemen were guarding several huge baskets of those baseball loaves. Beyond them stood the instrument that had attracted my attention. It was a pair of wooden scales that looked big enough to give the weight of an ox. Still farther on, an officer, who seemed to feel the importance of his position, sat over a huge book, a pen the size of a dagger behind each ear, and one resembling a young bayonet in his hand.

One by one, the citizens of Verona were pushed through the gate into the space where the policemen guarded the bread, to be halted suddenly with the shouted question, “Pound or two pounds?” Once weighed out, his loaves were passed rapidly from one to another of the officials, so rapidly that the citizen had to run to keep up with them. When he reached the officer sitting before the big book, he had to pause while the latter asked him questions and wrote down the answers. Then he ran on until he reached the receiving table of another official, where he caught his flying loaves and made his escape.