Meanwhile, at the further end of the room, by the dim yellow light of the twinkling lamp we had already noticed, another man is busy shovelling a rich dark-brown substance into bins against the wall. This is the so-called sansa, the olive pulp from which the oil has been expressed. “It goes down to Galluzzo (the township at the foot of the hill),” said the man, in answer to my enquiries. “There they treat it with sulphuric acid, and get machine-oil out of it.”
At last the pulp in the network baskets is pressed dry, the press is unscrewed, the fresh sansa shaken out ready to be shovelled into the bins, and the various utensils that have been used plunged into the boiling water of the cauldron that steams in one corner of the room. The trap-door is now raised, and the oil carried across the yard to another room, the walls of which are lined with huge red terra-cotta vessels kept carefully closed. Into one of these the oil is poured and left to settle, sansa being heaped well up round the vessel to maintain a high temperature within. When the oil is finally poured off it is of a lovely golden colour, as clear and transparent as water. But it is not destined to reach the public in this Arcadian state. Scarcely has it left the hands of the peasants, before it is manipulated and adulterated to such an extent that even in Florence pure olive oil is almost unobtainable. Cotton oil, colza oil, etc., are mixed with it, rendering it absolutely hurtful to the consumer. The Italian government has offered prizes for the discovery of a method of exposing the adulteration. At present no more certain way has been found than that of Professor Bechi, a well-known Italian chemist. He treats the oil in question with nitrate of silver, and judges of the adulteration by the resulting coloration.
And now, business being over for this week, we are free to go and sup with our peasant acquaintances. Crossing a second courtyard, round which stand houses and stables for the donkeys and oxen (Italians do not work with horses), we pass under a second archway and enter our friend Ciuffi’s picturesque kitchen. The rough, uneven stone floor, that looks as though it might have been washed last year, the stout nondescript table, the chairs loaded up with every kind of extraneous matter, the picture of the Madonna with the tiny lamp burning before it, the rows of gaudy crockery over the sink, the cat purring contentedly in the chimney-corner—all these are illuminated, harmonized, almost glorified, by the caressing light of the huge wood fire, whose flames dance and crackle under the great projecting chimney. And beside the fire sits Ciuffi’s youngest daughter Armida, a girl of that fair, refined type that occasionally asserts itself startlingly among these black-haired, swarthy-complexioned peasants. She is sitting holding the frying-pan over the fire, but the menial occupation is forgotten as we watch the delicate poise of the head and stretch of the arm, the exquisite Greek profile, the lustrous dark eyes gazing dreamily into the fire, the fair wavy hair coiled into a knot at the back, and the soft pink of the common little cotton kerchief, which, tied with the point under the chin, is thrown up by the dark dress, and sets off the spring of the graceful neck.
And when, the rough white cloth being spread in the visitor’s honour, the family cluster round the mediæval oil-lamp that makes a little ruddy blot in the darkness beyond, we are more than ever struck at the wonderful ease and good-breeding displayed in word and movement by these peasants who do the hardest work and live the roughest of lives. The women especially have something indescribably lady-like about them, as they sit eating contentedly, perhaps without any plate, or pass from one to another one of the pocket-knives which are the only cutting implements on the table; or, it may be, question “my man,” as to the length of time that will be needed on the morrow to gather in the olives from a certain part of the podere. The more one has to do with these Tuscan peasants the more constrained does one feel to adopt the cant phrase, and call them emphatically Nature’s aristocracy.
A TUSCAN FARMHOUSE
Of all my experiences among the Tuscan peasants of the Pistoiese, none, perhaps, was more thoroughly characteristic than a three days’ visit at a farm-house just above the village I was staying in. I had just returned from the woods with my hammock, and was feeling rather listless in the absence of my peasant companion, when the farmer’s wife, who happened to be in the village that day, said to me, half joking, half in earnest:—
“Come home with me to the Cavi, Signorina; come and sleep there to-night.”
I jumped at the proposal, borrowed a big kerchief from my landlady, put a few things into it in the most approved peasant fashion, and we started off together.