The vintners creep through the vine-rows, clipping, clipping with their clumsy shears, and tossing the fruit into the osier baskets strapped on their backs, while they sing the strange old songs that have been sung at the vintage since the days of Servius Tullius; the women’s white head-coverings and dark blue skirts and scarlet bodices blaze out against the gold and green of the vine-rows, and as they carry their baskets—on their heads, after immemorial custom—to the man waiting on the wagon, they move with smooth, stately steps, like caryatides released from the marble. Towards midday the first wagons are full and go trailing up to the wine press near the house; the “treaders,” the strongest of the young men, have been sitting on the stone bench in the shade, for their work is all before them and they have to keep limbs and garments clean. Now the wagon is drawn close to the vat, and the vintagers, working like demons, toss in a ton or two of grapes till the huge receptacle is piled high above its edges with a mountain of purple fruit. A ladder is set against it and the treader scrambles up, his bared limbs gleaming like copper in the sun, and the next instant he is a young Dionysus, leaping and dancing on that piled sweetness, chanting the song to which his feet keep time, while the rosy froth streams from the opening below into a second vat that ere long becomes a lake of dimpling crimson must, whose heady fragrance floats out intoxicatingly on the October air. Ah, the good days! It would indeed have been a poor heart that could not rejoice in them!
More than once it was my good fortune to watch this almost sacred process in the villa where I happened to be spending the summer, and, though I am jealous for the glories of Romagna, I must admit that it is far more picturesque and attractive in Tuscany. The whole atmosphere there is imbued with a purity and calm unknown to the perfervid rollicking South; the hills are the hills of Umbria—of Perugino’s and Francia’s backgrounds, pale and clear, rounding into little knolls that are more silvery than golden when the sun kisses side or summit; the mulberry and the acacia and the olive throw fans of timid tracery against the elusive sky; where the olive rustles to silver in the breeze a thousand shades of grey delight the eye, and on every ridge the sparse spires of the Tuscan cypresses, so feathery slender that the tapering points are fragile as a fern’s fronds, delimit the view in lines of dark delicacy most restfully symmetrical and definite. All is ascetic, yet tender, save where, far off on the plain, the low red wall of a city lies like a sword across the land. In the distance Umbria, with its clean, pale landscapes, so significant and lucent under the quivering dome of white, seems less of earth than Heaven, almost breathlessly impersonal, a country more for angels than for men; but nearer at hand she smiles at you, like some saint turning from the ravishments of contemplation to encourage a fellow-being whose vision is not clarified to behold what she has seen.
If you stand where I used to stand, on the terraced eminence of a Tuscan “podere,” you find yourself at the apex of a net of deep and wide grassways, diverging from you in every direction till the lines are lost in a froth of greenery, trained along avenues of mulberry trees that humbly support the airy garlands twenty and thirty feet from the ground. The trees are set with perfect regularity, but wide apart, and the grapevines fling themselves from one to another in sweeping curves that are a joy to see. In Romagna the vineyard has little beauty of its own, for the modern cultivator keeps his grapes within a few feet of the ground; often he pulls them up every year, stores them carefully, and replaces them in the spring. But further north the stocky stem is encouraged to grow and harden for all time; time bestows upon it the proportions and ruggedness of a tree; and the fruit, gloriously confident of its parent, throws out bunches sometimes two feet long; of incomparable fulness and flavour. Around Chiusi, in the heart of Etruria, the grapes are all muscatels, big globes of pale green jade, freckled with agate, and the perfume they distill is that of the white Roman rose—a fragrance indescribably exquisite, and individual to that fruit and that flower alone. In my girlhood there were times when I was not very strong; life was almost too full, and I had to rest from it sometimes. Then my angel mother would make me lie down in her favourite room, the one where the walls were rose and old-gold, and the ceiling a vault of mother-of-pearl seen through Tuscan grapevines, and she would set a bunch of those white roses and a tiny Venetian goblet of amber-coloured “Est-Est” beside me, and leave me alone for hours, while the fountain played in the courtyard and the Roman dusk came down and made shadows in the room. Then I used to close my eyes and play a little game, trying to find out which was rose and which was wine—and fall asleep before the point was decided—to dream that I was angel or butterfly—all wings, anyway, free in a world where language was scent and music. Spoiling? Surely. But it was training, in a way. Why not develop all the senses that can help us in the long, long march of life?
There was nothing languorous in the Tuscan airs. Even in the hottest hour of summer one was eager, interested, glad to move about; and when early autumn brought the vintage, life simply bubbled in one’s veins. I could stand all day watching the oxen crawling up those grassy roads between the trellised vines, with the splendid loads of grapes, or hover near the vats where the white-clad youths, who looked like Carpaccio’s pages, danced and leapt as they trod the wine-press. We had to come away before the vintage was over, so as not to miss too much of the October loveliness at home, but the grapes followed us all the way. There was one station—that of Chiusi, I think—where the “ristorante” consisted of a little hand-cart with a high rail all around the sides; the rail was hung with hundreds of bunches of those scented, freckled grapes—two sous a bunch, if you please—and the vendor pushed it up and down the platform close to the carriage windows. It was a hot day, and never was fruit more welcome!
In the “spacious days” of the earlier part of the century the Borghese family, being, though not the most ancient, the wealthiest in Rome, used to mark the crown of the year by giving in their villa certain entertainments, intended chiefly for their own tenants, but the hospitality of which was extended to the entire population. The princely lavishness of these festivities resembled nothing that I have ever heard of in modern times; it recalled indeed the days of Roman Emperors whose only claim to the throne rested on their popularity with the people. On the Sundays of October the villa was thrown open at sunrise, and from all the “castelli” of the Sabine and Alban Hills, and from the sea-coast too, the peasants, who had been watching all night (and in some cases all the previous day), having heard Mass, trooped in with their wives and families, to eat and drink and enjoy themselves. Those were the times when every district had its distinctive costume, and the dazzling effects of colour were such as we shall never see again. The coast towns are very Greek, and the dress of the Nettuno and Fano women is almost Greek still—a clinging skirt and close-fitting coatlet of vivid scarlet, the tint that makes the eyes swim and wince—imparted, by secrets of their own, to a cloth of such velvety purity and softness that it lasts through three and four generations, and cost them (it is probably unobtainable now) five dollars the “palmo” of ten inches—half a dollar an inch. The hair was worn in two long braids hanging down the back from under a small cap of the same cloth, set rather far back on the head, and cap and bodice and skirt were stiff with gold embroidery. The effect was magnificent.
Very different was the dress of the Albanese, with which, in a modified form, most travellers are familiar, since the women of Albano still have the privilege of nursing the aristocratic babies of Rome. Their costume consists of a long full skirt of flowered silk, pale blue or cinnamon colour, brocaded with red carnations or pink roses; the “busto” or corset, as well as the tight long cuffs that reach from wrist to elbow, are of that same scarlet cloth and trimmed with heavy gold braid; but the chief beauty of the costume is in the fine lace of the voluminous “fichu” which is pinned low down in folds behind to leave the strong young neck bare, and folded in to the corset in front, over a camisole of finest linen, also much adorned with lace. The fichu leaves all the throat—such a column of ivory!—and some expanse of chest bare to rise and fall under half a dozen strings of dark faceted red coral, huge beads bought by the ounce and treasured for hundreds of years; the earrings are great danglums of dropping pearls, and the headdress a crown of ruffled ribbon three or four inches wide, set tight round the coil of braids and held in place by big pins of gold filigree, while two long streamers of the ribbon hang nearly down to the hem of the skirt behind. A lace apron, like that which Hungarian ladies wear with court dress, completes the costume, and nobody can quarrel with “Balia” for holding her handsome head very high when she wears it.
No greater contrast can be imagined than that presented by these two costumes, of which one or the other strikes the type all through Romagna; and the men, in old times, were as picturesquely clad as the women, though deprived of the gold and lace in which the latter delighted. Fancy hundreds and hundreds of these splendidly attired beings, with the beauty which is still the land’s blessed heritage, streaming up the different avenues under those noble trees and then gathering in to the feast prepared for them in the private garden—a large open space laid out in variegated flower-beds of quaint design, and, on these famous Sundays, converted into an open-air banqueting hall where, at long tables loaded with good things, the crowds could eat their full, quenching their thirst at one of the fountains which ran with wine from dawn to dark. None were debarred from sharing the Prince’s hospitality, whether they were his own people or strangers, and the “plebs” of Rome, who poured out in thousands, were as welcome as all the tenants and labourers on his many estates. My dear old stepfather, who saw it all when he was a young man and described it to me, said that what most impressed him was the perfect order that prevailed all day, the Romans having the happy gift of being able to enjoy themselves without becoming riotous.
One of the great features of the villa is the “Teatro di Siena,” the amphitheatre on the Pincio side of the principal avenue. The base is a green expanse of turf, from which rise several tiers of narrow terraces marked in white marble and also paved with turf. The summit of the circle is guarded by a ring of tall stone-pines which close it in and make an admirable frame for the spectacles of one kind and another which have taken place there. The prettiest I ever saw was the tournament given at the time of the Duke of Genoa’s wedding, in which the present King of Italy, then a young boy, took such an animated part.[9] In the October days of which I was speaking a still more interesting show was provided in the form of chariot races, copied exactly from the ancient Roman ones, the charioteers, bareheaded youths in classical costume, standing in the gilt “bigas” and urging their teams to wildest speed round the broad race-course, while the bands filled the air with stirring music, and the people stood up in their seats and yelled and cheered, and laid their money on this or that chariot, just as their ancestors did in the Coliseum or in Nero’s circus two thousand years ago. Now, as then, the only official reward for the victor was a laurel crown and the renown that came with it.
The upheavals of 1848 made an end of the old feudal ways and festivities; but, though it may appear incomprehensible to the philistines who rule the world to-day, they furnished mighty strands in the ties of sympathy and good-will which hold class and class together and keep a country sober, contented, and law-abiding. All healthy human nature needs healthy excitement from time to time, and, if that be unattainable, the craving is so imperative that it will find satisfaction in other and less wholesome ways.