Fear drove me forth 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 nefarious work and devour me quite. On the Sunday evening following the opening of the carnival, I fought my confetti-strewn way to the station and “booked” for Bologna. I had not yet, however, learned all the secrets of Italian railway travel. The official who snatched my ticket at the exit to the platform and the midnight express handed it back and pushed me away with a withering glare:
“No third-class on this train,” he growled, “wait for the slow train at five in the morning.”
How any particular one of the trains of Italy could be discriminated against by being called slow was hard to comprehend. Perhaps I misunderstood the gateman. He may have said “the more slower train.” At any rate, I was left to stretch out on a truck and await the laggard dawn.
Under a declining sun our funereal caravan crawled into Bologna, and I struck out along the ancient highway to Florence. Between the two cities stretches an almost unbroken series of mountain ranges, a poverty-stricken territory given over to grazing and wine-production, and little known to tourists, for the railway sweeps in a great half-circle around the northern end of the barrier. A few miles from the university town the highway began a winding ascent in Simplon-like solitude, save where a vineyard clung to a wrinkled hillside. At such spots tall, cone-shaped buckets of some two bushels’ capacity stood at the roadside, some filled with grapes, others with the floating pulp left by the crushers.
What species of crusher was used I did not learn until nearly nightfall. Then, suddenly rounding a jutting boulder, I stepped into a group of four women, their skirts tied tightly around their loins, slowly treading up and down in as many buckets of grapes. One of them, a young woman by no means unattractive, sprang out of the bucket with a startled gasp, let fall her skirts over legs purple with grape-juice far above the knees, and fled to the vineyard. Her companions, too young or too old to find immodesty in the situation, gazed in astonishment at the fleeing girl and continued to stamp slowly up and down.
Darkness overtook me in the solitude of an upper range, far from either hut or hamlet. A half hour later, a mountain storm burst upon me.
An interminable period I had plunged on when my eyes were gradually drawn to a faint light flickering through the downpour. I splashed forward and banged on a door beside an illuminated window. The portal was quickly opened from within, and I fell into a tiny wine-shop occupied by three tipplers. They stared stupidly for some time, while the water ran away from me in rivulets along the floor. Then the landlord remarked with a silly grin:—
“Lei è tutto bagnato?” (You are all wet.)
“Likewise hungry,” I answered. “What’s to eat?”
“Da mangiare! Ma! Not a thing in the house.”