How long will they still remain? Who knows? They themselves don't know it. And they bend on the fatiguing and tenacious work like brave boys asking nothing for themselves, and they give all their fatigue, strength, youth, happy in the hard striking of their picks, in the hard digging of their hoe, singing softly the ritornelli, of their native songs as if they were in their native villages beyond the mountains working in the corn fields or among the vines.
The Lava in the Tour
This large tract of Lava which thanks to the works of repair can be crossed in a carriage, has cut the town in two. From this point the streets begin again to be quiet and the houses to be inhabited, normal life seems to reign every where.
Here is Citarella street, here is Giordano street with its green orchards, and the dogs sleeping on the thresholds of the houses, and the old people bathing in the sun. But suddenly another branch of lava is standing in front of you, it is the one that has invaded the other side of the Oratorio cutting the communication with Tre Case.
It has sneaked in the town, getting in the lanes, through the orchards, assaulting the houses from behind, reversing itself from the ground-floors against which the wave has struck. I see a house completely surrounded and taken by the lava, quite in front of Pagliarella street, it is the house of a certain Giuseppe Principini. The first floor has fallen in, the lava has penetrated through a window at the shoulders of the house, it has invaded the first room, it has filled the second, it has made the floor fall in, and has then reversed itself down in a cascade which has remained petrified, looking almost like a fantastic bridge of black scories, gracefully modelled on bronze. Another little room near is full of lava up to the windows. Among the black masses, a little twisted serpent peeps out. It is all that remains of a bed stead. The wall near the house is dry, the water has evaporated, before the fire touched it.
The Sea of Lava
On the three first high steps of the branch of lava which runs to Tre Case, I met engineer Pasquale Acunzo, a technical engineer. He has been at his place untiringly, from the first moment of the danger, directing the work of dikes when the lava was coming down, and now he directs the construction of the street which must unite Boscotrecase to its nearest centers. All our communications with Torre Annunziata and Tre Case are cut off; it is the death of the country. The only road that remains open to us, is the long and rough one to Scafati. Engineer Acunzo accompanies us up the steep way, on the lava. M. Luigi Casella, worthy mayor of Boscotrecase, joins us. He has been one of the bravest and busiest in this sad fight, and has given himself entirely to the saving of his country, uncaring of himself, of his goods, of his houses which he has lost, all buried under the lava. The front part of the lava is getting higher and higher. From its brief starting point, it touches already the first floor of a house. We walk near the balconies, with their banisters split, all bent outside as if a gigantic hand had twisted them. Working men belonging to the Genio Civile, are working hard to carry away all that can be saved, to demolish what is in danger, and to prop up the rest. Gushes of suffocating smoke, come out from the cracks. Here also the silent work of fire has begun. All around the temperature is very high: it feels as if one was near the mouth of an oven.
All at once, here we are on the large spreaded lavas, opening wide and free as far as the skirts of the mountain. It is a sea, rough and upset, a race of points, pics, crests, a chain of small hills as far as the eye can reach. The sun snatches from that sea reflections of bronze which become more and more opaque with the drawing back of the wave up the mountain.
Further it blends itself in a grayish and uniform stratus. Here and there dense smoke comes out from the cracks it is like the burning of copious incense to an unknown God, a God of terror and destruction. Now and then small houses are seen. Here is a half tumbled down palace, the panes of the windows are all pierced with holes it is the home of M. Bifulco. Here is a part of a ruined wall, it is the little church that Bernardo Tanucci has built in remembrance of another eruption. And other houses, and other ruins, and everything buried under the great infinite sea, scattered everything. But as a contrast, if you look down, the slope at the left, there beyond the stretch of green orchards, behind the white girdles of the houses, far, away, at the end there is the sea ample and serene, bathed in a soft, sapphire colour just as in an April day. The sea shining as a hope, in front of the ruins of a country, which has no other confort but to hope.