“Ch’è un rico colui quà, eh?” (“Pretty rich wine that, eh?”)
“Sanque della Vergine, caro mio, dove hai accozzato quello?” (“But, my dear fellow, where did you pick that one up?”)
But my guide finally lost his grin and became respectful, pointing out objects of interest with a face as solemn as an owl, and shaking his head sternly at his fellow boatmen when they began to joke.
Fear drove me away from Venice before I had rested the miles from Paris out of my legs—fear that in a few days more the mosquitoes would finish their wicked work and devour me entirely. On a Sunday evening I made my way to the station and bought a third-class ticket to Bologna.
Under a lowering sun our train crawled slowly into Bologna—so slowly that I was glad to get off and walk. I struck off along the ancient highway to Florence. The country was mountainous, so that when I was not climbing up I was climbing down. The people in this section were very poor, earning their living by tending cattle or by making wine. A few miles from the town the highway began to wind up among lonely mountains. Here and there a vineyard clung to a wrinkled hillside. At such spots tall cone-shaped buckets holding about two bushels each stood by the roadside, some filled with grapes, others with the floating pulp left by the crushers.
What kind of crusher was used I did not learn until nearly nightfall. Then, suddenly coming round a huge boulder, I stepped into a group of bare-legged women who were slowly treading up and down in as many buckets of grapes.
Darkness overtook me when I was high among the lonely mountains, far from any hut or village. A half hour later a mountain storm burst upon me.
For what seemed an endless length of time I plunged on. Then before me I noticed a faint gleam of light flickering through the downpour. I splashed forward, and banged on a door beside a window through which the light shone. The door was quickly opened, and I fell into a tiny wine-shop. Three drinkers sat in the room. They stared stupidly for some time while the water ran away from me in little rivers along the floor. Then the landlord remarked, with a silly grin:
“You are all wet.”
“Also hungry,” I answered. “What’s to eat?”