A Little Pilgrimage in Italy

by Olave M. Potter

And he fell to imitating the song of the cicalas.

Indeed for us the world was standing still. We were caught in a mesh of beauty as in a summer daydream. The waves of Time seemed to retreat, leaving us like swimmers resting on a golden shore after struggle and turmoil. It might have been Lethe whose waters sang to the stones at our feet: for we forgot the world: its voice became a dream; we found ourselves content to watch the changing lights as the hours drifted away.

CHIMNEYS AT PASSIGNANO.

We ate our meals in the unfinished dining-room which Signor Balducci is building out over the lake—a mere shell of white plaster with empty doors and windows through which the little breezes strayed. There were flowers on the cloth beside our plates, and a great bowl of oleanders, geraniums and white asters on the table. We breakfasted off golden bread and honey, and the pretty waiting girl brought tuberoses with our coffee. Outside, the lake was a tender morning blue; its surface rippled to the cool breath of the mountains, and sparkled in the sunlight. The bent and twisted sticks of the fishermen cast fantastic reflections in the water, and were beautified, as all humble and work-a-day things are beautified in Italy, by the magic of the sun. Further out two men in a rickety sampan were hauling in their nets.

It was a scene of infinite romance. The towers of Castiglione shone like ivory out of the violet mists, and many of the hills which rose above them bore turreted towns upon their crests. Behind them we knew lay Siena, Montepulciano and Chiusi, and to the right Cortona and Arezzo, and there Perugia, and Assisi there. History swept down upon us too. Thrasymene and its vine-clad slopes are full of memories of Hannibal, the stormy petrel who beat his wings round Rome in vain. Nor does it lack for gentler associations, for Saint Francis of Assisi, who had been preaching in one of the lake-side towns, was inspired, according to the author of the Fioretti, to spend Lent on an island in its midst. Which he did, in solitary prayer and meditation, eating only the half of one small loaf of bread, 'from reverence for the fast of Christ the blessed one, Who fasted forty days and forty nights without partaking any earthly food; but in this manner, with that half a loaf, chased far the venom of vain glory from him.'

Towards the hour of sunset, when the shadowed hills grew blue and misty, and the lake was a mirror of pale gold, we walked along the reedy shore of Thrasymene. The wind rustled in the silken leaves of the maize, and made a music like far-off singing in the emerald reeds. We went down to the edge of the water where the gardens sloped to the lake, and we found flowers there and herbs—mint and thyme and rosemary that scented the air, and purple vetches and clover, and the beautiful cow-parsley whose blossoms float like butterflies over every hedge and waste ground. And there we waited while the sky glowed from gold to rose, and Thrasymene seemed aflame with Hannibal's desire for Rome.

We dined in our alfresco dining-room, and afterwards we walked again by the still waters, where the frogs were shrilling a chorus to the night-crickets, whose song in the grass is like the sound of a curb-chain being rubbed in the hand. Except for these the world was still. There were no lights along that mysterious country road except the stars, and rarely have I seen them brighter, even in Africa.

'In a town we never see such stars as these,' said the philosopher. We never do. The Milky Way stretched like a girdle across the heavens, and was reflected in the lake like a pale moon. We stayed to watch it, and to listen to the voices of the night.

A train glared out of the tunnel which pierces the hill below Passignano, and tore along in the darkness beside the road, lightening our starlit gloom for a moment before its meteoric tail of windows was swallowed up by the night. Then we saw a glow-worm in a hole below the wall, and because in Italy you are pleased with little things, we stopped to look at it, and watch it turn round like a light-house lamp, now glowing clear as a star, now an indistinguishable mass of phosphorescence. And all the time the sky was growing lighter, and the mountains darker in the east.