Wallowing through the filth of such a hamlet, I came upon a tumble-down hostelry of oppressive squalor. About the fire-place were huddled several slatternly, downcast mortals. I paused in the doorway, wondering to which to address myself. The rural innkeeper of Italy will never speak to a new arrival until he has been accosted by the latter. I once put the matter to the test by entering an inn at five in the afternoon and taking a seat at one of the tables. Many a side glance was cast upon me, many a low-toned discussion raged at the back of the room, but at nine in the evening I was still waiting for the first greeting.
Here, then, I stood for several moments on the threshold. At length, a misshapen female, unkempt and unsoaped to all appearances since infancy, fumbled in her apron, rose, and stumped slowly towards me holding out—a cent! I stepped back, and the charitable lady, misunderstanding my gesture of protest, returned to her seat, snarling in a cracked falsetto that beggars nowadays expected francs instead of soldi.
Disgusted at this invidious reception, I pigeon-holed my appetite and marched on. But I seemed permanently to have taken on the aspect of an eleemosynary appeal. Two miles beyond the village I passed a ragged road-repairer and a boy, breaking stone at the wayside. Hard by them was a hedge, weighed down with blackberries, to which I hastened and fell to picking my delayed dinner. The cantoniere stared a moment, open-mouthed; laid aside his sledge, and mumbled something to the boy. The latter left his place, wandered down the road a short distance beyond me and idled about as if awaiting someone. With a half-filled cap I set off again. The boy edged nearer as I approached and, brushing against me, thrust something under my arm and ran back to the stone-pile. In my astonishment I dropped the gift on the highway. It was a quarter-loaf of black bread left over from the ragged workman’s dinner.
Late that night I reached a hamlet with a more energetic, if less charitable innkeeper; and the next afternoon found me looking down upon the vast Florentine valley, the winding Arno a bluish silver under the declining sun. By evening I was housed in the city of Dante and Michael Angelo.
During four days in Florence I played a sort of Jekyll and Hyde rôle, living with the poorest self-supporting class, but spending hours each day in cathedral and galleries. Paupers were everywhere in evidence, fewer than in Venice, perhaps, for here they could escape. Lodgings all but the utterly penniless could afford. I paid a half-franc daily for an uncramped chamber within a hop, skip, and jump of the roasting-place of Savonarola. But those ultracheap eating houses of the canal city were lacking. Florentines on the ragged edge patronized instead a species of traveling restaurant. As night fell, there appeared at various corners, in the unwashed section of the city, men with push-carts laden with boiled tripe. Around them gathered jostling throngs whose surging ceased not for a moment until the last morsel had been sold. Each customer seemed to possess but a single soldo, which he had carefully guarded through the day in anticipation of the coming of the tripe-man. Never did the huckster make a sale without a quarrel arising over the size of the morsel; and never did the vendee retire until a second strip, about the size of a match, had been added to the original portion to make up what he claimed to be the just weight.
I spent an undue proportion of my fourth day in Florence viewing her works of art; for Sunday is the poor man’s day in the museums and galleries of Europe, there being no admission charged. When the throng was driven forth from the Pitti palace in the late afternoon, I decided not to return to my lodging and wandered off along the highway to Rome. The mountain country continued, but the ranges were less lofty and more thickly populated than to the north, and when night settled down, I was within sight of a hilltop village.
It is doubtful if there is another nation on the globe whose people are such general favorites as our own citizens. The American is a popular fellow in almost every land, certainly not the least so in Italy. Through all the peninsula there hovers about one, from that—to the Italian—magic world of America, a glamor which is sure to arouse interest to the highest pitch. More than that; there is, among the lower classes, an attitude almost of deference towards the man in any way connected with the El Dorado across the sea, as if every breast harbored the vague hope that this favored of the gods might be moved to carry home on his return a pocketful of his admirers.
Longing for America, however, does not imply any great amount of knowledge thereof. In this northern section especially, where one rarely meets a man whose remotest friend has emigrated, ignorance of the western hemisphere is astonishing.
An average village crowd, showing some evidence of education, was gathered in the hostelry of this first town beyond Florence. My arrival at first aroused small interest in the groups before fire-place and table. In ordering supper, however, I betrayed a foreign accent. Immediately there passed between the cronies of the band sundry nods and occult signs which they fondly believed were entirely incomprehensible to a newcomer, but which, in reality, said as plainly as words:—
“Now where the deuce do you suppose he comes from?”