Various combinations of figures seem possible of success to the Italian who at the weekend puts some bauble in pawn with the hope that something will come his way. After the drawing, before the Sunday dawns, he is quite another person, considerably less confident of anything to happen in the future, and as downcast as a sunny Italian can be.
This passion for drawing lots is something born in him; even if lotteries were not legalized, he would still play lotto in secret, for in enthusiasm for games of chance, he rivals the Spaniard.
But Italy is not the country of illiterates that the stranger presupposes. Campania is the province where one finds the largest number of lettered, and Basilicate the least.
Military service begins and is compulsory for all male Italians at the age of twenty. It lasts for nineteen years, of which three only are in active service. The next five or six in the reserve, the next three or four in the Militia and the next seven in the “territorial” Militia, or landguard.
Conscription also applies to the naval service for the term of twelve years.
The military element, which one meets all over Italy, is astonishingly resplendent in colours and plentiful in numbers. At most, among hundreds, perhaps thousands, of officers of all ranks, there can hardly be more than a few score of privates. It is either this or the officers keep continually on the move in order to create an illusion of numbers!
Class distinctions, in all military grades, and in all lands, are very marked, but in Italy the obeisance of a private before the slightest loose end of gold braid is very marked. The Italian private doesn’t seem to mark distinctions among the official world beyond the sight of gold braid. A steamboat captain, or a hall porter in some palatial hotel would quite stun him.
The Italian gendarmes are a picturesque and resplendent detail of every gathering of folk in city, town or village. On a festa they shine more grandly than at other times, and the privilege of being arrested by such a gorgeous policeman must be accounted as something of a social distinction. The holding up of an automobilist by one of these gentry is an affair which is regulated with as much pomp and circumstance as the crowning of a king. The writer knows!!
Just how far the Italian’s criminal instincts are more developed than those of other races and climes has no place here, but is it not fair to suppose that the half a million of Italians—mostly of the lower classes—who form a part of the population of cosmopolitan New York are of a baser instinct than any half million living together on the peninsula? Probably they are; the Italian on his native shore does not strike us as a very villainous individual.
But he is usually a lively person; there is nothing calm and sedentary about him; though he has neither the grace of the Gascon, the joy of the Kelt, or the pretence of the Provençal, he does not seem wicked or criminal, and those who habitually carry dirks and daggers and play in Black Hand dramas live for the most part across the seas.