A leather (or sham leather) cigarette case from Palermo (but, I am afraid, made in Germany).
It contains a fragment of a Greek vase picked up on Mount Eryx and given to Butler by Bruno Flury. He was one of the young men who came about him in 1892 when he broke his foot on the mountain; he afterwards settled in Pisa, where I saw him in 1901.
Two of the blue and white wine cups mentioned in Alps and Sanctuaries (ch. xxii.; new ed., ch. xxiii.), “A Day at the Cantine.”
“These little cups are common crockery, but at the bottom there is written Viva Bacco, Viva l’Italia, Viva la Gioia, Viva Venere or other
such matter; they are to be had in every crockery shop throughout the Mendrisiotto, and they are very pretty.”
The Viva is not written in full; it is represented by a double V, which overlaps, so that it looks like W, but the letter W is not used by the Italians, so there is no chance of its being mistaken by them for anything but the symbol meaning Viva.
A small horn and tortoiseshell snuff-box from Palermo.
It contains three coins wrapped in paper and a piece of the pilgrim’s cross at Varello-Sesia. The cross is mentioned somewhere in Butler’s books as being of very hard wood, so hard that the pilgrims have great difficulty in cutting pieces off it. So had I in cutting off this bit.
The day after Butler’s death Alfred came to me with the coins and said:
“I took these out of his pockets, Sir; I thought you ought to have them.”