“What! Shave your lip?”
“Certainly.”
“But why?”
“Because I want it shaved.”
“Santissima Madonna!” he gasped, making several passes before a chromo print of the Virgin on the back wall. “Here is a man who wants the upper lip of a woman!”
However, having called the Lady’s attention to his innocence, he shaved the lip and relieved an anxiety under which I had labored since entering the shop. For, many a barber of Italy had refused point-blank to undertake any such unprecedented defilement of the human face, and driven me forth with a nascent moustache in spite of my protests.
Nearly a week after my arrival in the capital I turned southward again, on the highway to Naples. For three days the route led through a territory packed with ragged, half-starved people, who toiled incessantly from the first peep of the sun to the last waver of twilight, and crawled away into some foul hole during the hours of darkness. The inhabitants of this famished section bore little resemblance to the people of the north. Shopkeepers snarled at their customers, the “shortchange racket” was always in evidence, false coins of the smallest denomination abounded—fancy “shoving the queer” with nickels—and, had not my appearance been quite in keeping with that of the natives, I should certainly have won the attention of those who live by violence.
There were other difficulties unknown in the north. The language changed rapidly. The literary tongue, spoken in Florence and Siena, was almost foreign here. A word learned in one hamlet was incomprehensible in another a half-day distant. The villages, almost without exception, were perched at the summits of the most inaccessible hills, up which each day’s walk ended with a weary climb by steep paths of rubble that rolled underfoot.
I found lodging at the wayside only on my fourth day out of Rome, in a building that was one-fourth inn and three-fourths stable. The keeper, his wife, and a litter of children had scarcely enough wardrobe between them to have completely clothed the smallest urchin. All were barefooted, their feet spread out nearly as wide as they were long, the thick callous of the soles split and cracked up the sides like the hoofs of horses that had long gone unshod. The wife and several of her brood lay on a heap of chaff in a corner of the room reserved for humans. The father sat on a stool, bouncing the bambino up and down on his unspeakable feet; another child squatted on the top of the four-legged board that served as table and, in awe of the new arrival, alternately handled his toes and thrust his fingers in his mouth.
“You have lodgings for travelers?” I inquired.