Italian Journeys Part 13

Brother, Pruder, Bruder.

Father, Vada, Vater.

Mother, Muter, Mutter.

Sister, Schwester, Schwester, Stone, Stone, Stein.

A general resemblance to German and English will have been observed in these fragments of Cimbrian, while other words will have been noticed as quite foreign to either.

There was a poor little house of refreshment beside our spreading haw, and a withered old woman came out of it and refreshed us with clear spring water, and our guides and friends with some bitter berries of the mountain, which they admitted were unpleasant to the taste, but declared were very good for the blood. When they had sufficiently improved their blood, we mounted our mules again, and set out with the journey of an hour and a quarter still between us and Fozza.

As we drew near the summit of the mountain our road grew more level, and instead of creeping along by the brinks of precipices, we began to wind through bits of meadow and pleasant valley walled in by lofty heights of rock.

Though September was bland as June at the foot of the mountain, we found its breath harsh and cold on these heights; and we remarked that though there were here and there breadths of wheat, the land was for the most part in sheep pasturage, and the gra.s.s looked poor and stinted of summer warmth. We met, at times, the shepherds, who seemed to be of Italian race, and were of the conventional type of shepherds, with regular faces, and two elaborate curls trained upon their cheeks, as shepherds are always represented in stone over the gates of villas.

They bore staves, and their flocks went before them. Encountering us, they saluted us courteously, and when we had returned their greeting, they cried with one voice,--"Ah, lords! is not this a miserable country? The people are poor and the air is cold. It is an unhappy land!" And so pa.s.sed on, profoundly sad; but we could not help smiling at the vehement popular desire to have the region abused. We answered cheerfully that it was a lovely country. If the air was cold, it was also pure.

We now drew in sight of Fozza, and, at the last moment, just before parting with Brick, we learned that he had pa.s.sed a whole year in Venice, where he had brought milk from the main-land and sold it in the city. He declared frankly that he counted that year worth all the other years of his life, and that he would never have come back to his native heights but that his father had died, and left his mother and young brothers helpless. He was an honest soul, and I gave him two florins, which I had tacitly appointed him over and above the bargain, with something for the small Brick-bats at home, whom he presently brought to kiss our hands at the house of the Capo-gente.

The village of Fozza is built on a gra.s.sy, oblong plain on the crest of the mountain, which declines from it on three sides, and on the north rises high above it into the mists in bleaker and ruggeder acclivities. There are not more than thirty houses in the village, and I do not think it numbers more than a hundred and fifty souls, if it numbers so many. Indeed, it is one of the smallest of the Sette Communi, of which the capital, Asiago, contains some thousands of people, and lies not far from Vicenza. The poor Fozzatti had a church, however, in their village, in spite of its littleness, and they had just completed a fine new bell tower, which the Capo-gente deplored, and was proud of when I praised it. The church, like all the other edifices, was built of stone; and the village at a little distance might look like broken crags of rock, so well it consorted with the harsh, crude nature about it. Meagre meadowlands, pathetic with tufts of a certain pale-blue, tearful flower, stretched about the village and southward as far as to that wooded point which had all day been our landmark in the ascent.

Our train drew up at the humble door of the Capo-gente (in Fozza all doors are alike humble), and, leaving our mules, we entered by his wife's invitation, and seated ourselves near the welcome fire of the kitchen--welcome, though we knew that all the sunny Lombard plain below was purple with grapes and black with figs. Again came from the women here the wail of the shepherds: "Ah, lords! is it not a miserable land?" and I began to doubt whether the love which I had heard mountaineers bore to their inclement heights was not altogether fabulous. They made haste to boil us some eggs, and set them before us with some unhappy wine, and while we were eating, the Capo-gente came in.

He was a very well-mannered person, but had, of course, the bashfulness naturally resulting from lonely life at that alt.i.tude, where contact with the world must be infrequent. His fellow-citizens seemed to regard him with a kind of affectionate deference, and some of them came in to hear him talk with the strangers. He stood till we prayed him to sit down, and he presently consented to take some wine with us.

After all, however, he could not tell us much of his people which we had not heard before. A tradition existed among them, he said, that their ancestors had fled to these Alps from Marius, and that they had dwelt for a long time in the hollows and caves of the mountains, living and burying their dead in the same secret places. At what time they had been converted to Christianity he could not tell; they had, up to the beginning of the present century, had little or no intercourse with the Italian population by which they were surrounded on all sides. Formerly, they did not intermarry with that race, and it was seldom that any Cimbrian knew its language. But now intermarriage is very frequent; both Italian and Cimbrian are spoken in nearly all the families, and the Cimbrian is gradually falling into disuse. They still, however, have books of religious instruction in their ancient dialect, and until very lately the services of their church were performed in Cimbrian.

I begged the Capo to show us some of their books and he brought us two,--one a catechism for children, ent.i.tled "Dar Kloane Catechism vor z' Beloseland vortraghet in z' gaprecht von siben Komunen, un vier Halghe Gasang. 1842. Padova." The other book it grieved me to see, for it proved that I was not the only one tempted in recent times to visit these ancient people, ambitious to bear to them the relation of discoverer, as it were. A High-Dutch Columbus, from Vienna, had been before me, and I could only come in for Amerigo Vespucci's tempered glory. This German savant had dwelt a week in these lonely places, patiently compiling a dictionary of their tongue, which, when it was printed, he had sent to the Capo. I am magnanimous enough to give the name of his book, that the curious may buy it if they like. It is called "Johann Andreas Schweller's Cimbrisches Worterbuch. Joseph Bergman. Vienna, 1855."

Concerning the present Cimbri, the Capo said that in his community they were chiefly hunters, wood-cutters, and charcoal-burners, and that they practiced their primitive crafts in those gloomier and wilder heights we saw to the northward, and descended to the towns of the plain to make sale of their f.a.gots, charcoal, and wild-beast skins. In Asiago and the larger communities they were farmers and tradesmen like the Italians; and the Capo believed that the Cimbri, in all their villages, numbered near ten thousand. He could tell me of no particular customs or usages, and believed they did not differ from the Italians now except in race and language. [The English traveller Rose, who (to my further discomfiture, I find) visited Asiago in 1817, mentions that the Cimbri have the Celtic custom of _waking_ the dead.

"If a traveller dies by the way, they plant a cross upon the spot, and all who pa.s.s by cast a stone upon his cairn. Some go in certain seasons in the year to high places and woods, where it is supposed they worshiped their divinities, but the origin of the custom is forgot amongst themselves." If a man dies by violence, they lay him out with his hat and shoes on, as if to give him the appearance of a wayfarer, and "symbolize one surprised in the great journey of life."

A woman dying in childbed is dressed for the grave in her bridal ornaments. Mr. Rose is very scornful of the notion that these people are Cimbri, and holds that it is "more consonant to all the evidence of history to say, that the flux and reflux of Teutonic invaders at different periods deposited this backwater of barbarians" in the district they now inhabit. "The whole s.p.a.ce, which in addition to the seven burghs contains twenty-four villages, is bounded by rivers, alps, and hills. Its most precise limits are the Brenta to the east, and the Astico to the west."] They are, of course, subject to the Austrian Government, but not so strictly as the Italians are; and though they are taxed and made to do military service, they are otherwise left to regulate their affairs pretty much at their pleasure.

The Capo ended his discourse with much polite regret that he had nothing more worthy to tell us; and, as if to make us amends for having come so far to learn so little, he said there was a hermit living near, whom we might like to see, and sent his son to conduct us to the hermitage. It turned out to be the white object which we had seen gleaming in the wood on the mountain from so great distance below, and the wood turned out to be a pleasant beechen grove, in which we found the hermit cutting f.a.gots. He was warmly dressed in clothes without rent, and wore the clerical knee-breeches. He saluted us with a cricket-like chirpiness of manner, and was greatly amazed to hear that we had come all the way from America to visit him. His hermitage was built upon the side of a white-washed chapel to St.

Francis, and contained three or four little rooms or cupboards, in which the hermit dwelt and meditated. They opened into the chapel, of which the hermit had the care, and which he kept neat and clean like himself. He told us proudly that once a year, on the day of the t.i.tular saint, a priest came and said ma.s.s in that chapel, and it was easy to see that this was the great occasion of the old man's life.

For forty years, he said, he had been devout; and for twenty-five he had dwelt in this place, where the goodness of G.o.d and the charity of the poor people around had kept him from want. Altogether, he was a pleasant enough hermit, not in the least spiritual, but gentle, simple, and evidently sincere. We gave some small coins of silver to aid him to continue his life of devotion, and Count Giovanni bestowed some coppers with the stately blessing, "_Iddio vi benedica, padre mio_."

So we left the hermitage, left Fozza, and started down the mountain on foot, for no one may ride down those steeps. Long before we reached the bottom, we had learned to loathe mountains and to long for dead levels during the rest of life. Yet the descent was picturesque, and in some things even more interesting than the ascent had been. We met more people: now melancholy shepherds with their flocks; now swine-herds and swine-herdesses with herds of wild black pigs of the Italian breed; now men driving a.s.ses that brayed and woke long, loud, and most musical echoes in the hills; now whole peasant families driving cows, horses, and mules to the plains below. On the way down, fragments of autobiography began, with the opportunities of conversation, to come from the Count Giovanni, and we learned that he was a private soldier at home on that _permesso_ which the Austrian Government frequently gives its less able-bodied men in times of peace. He had been at home some years, and did not expect to be again called into the service. He liked much better to be in charge of the cave at Oliero than to carry the musket, though he confessed that he liked to see the world, and that soldiering brought one acquainted with many places. He had not many ideas, and the philosophy of his life chiefly regarded deportment toward strangers who visited the cave. He held it an error in most custodians to show discontent when travellers gave them little; and he said that if he received never so much, he believed it wise not to betray exultation. "Always be contented, and nothing more," said Count Giovanni.

"It is what you people always promise beforehand," I said, "when you bargain with strangers, to do them a certain service for what they please; but afterward they must pay what you please or have trouble. I know you will not be content with what I give you."

"If I am not content," cried Count Giovanni, "call me the greatest a.s.s in the world!"

And I am bound to say that, for all I could see through the mask of his face, he was satisfied with what I gave him, though it was not much.

He had told us casually that he was nephew of a n.o.bleman of a certain rich and ancient family in Venice, who sent him money while in the army, but this made no great impression on me; and though I knew there was enough n.o.ble poverty in Italy to have given rise to the proverb, _Un conte che non conta, non conta niente_, yet I confess that it was with a shock of surprise I heard our guide and servant saluted by a lounger in Valstagna with "_Sior conte, servitor suo_!" I looked narrowly at him, but there was no ray of feeling or pride visible in his pale, languid visage as he responded, "_Buona sera, caro_."

Still, after that revelation we simple plebeians, who had been all day heaping shawls and guide-books upon Count Giovanni, demanding menial offices from him, and treating him with good-natured slight, felt uncomfortable in his presence, and welcomed the appearance of our carriage with our driver, who, having started drunk from Ba.s.sano in the morning, had kept drunk all day at Valstagna, and who now drove us back wildly over the road, and almost made us sigh for the security of mules ambitious of the brinks of precipices.

MINOR TRAVELS.

I.

PISA.

I am afraid that the talk of the modern railway traveller, if he is honest, must be a great deal of the custodians, the vetturini, and the facchini, whose agreeable acquaintance const.i.tutes his chief knowledge of the population among which he journeys. We do not nowadays carry letters recommending us to citizens of the different places. If we did, consider the calamity we should be to the be-travelled Italian communities we now bless! No, we buy our through-tickets, and we put up at the hotels praised in the hand-book, and are very glad of a little conversation with any native, however adulterated he be by contact with the world to which we belong. I do not blush to own that I love the whole rascal race which ministers to our curiosity and preys upon us, and I am not ashamed to have spoken so often in this book of the lowly and rapacious but interesting porters who opened to me the different gates of that great realm of wonders, Italy. I doubt if they can be much known to the dwellers in the land, though they are the intimates of all sojourners and pa.s.sengers; and if I have any regret in the matter, it is that I did not more diligently study them when I could. The opportunity once lost, seldom recurs; they are all but as transitory as the Object of Interest itself, I remember that years ago when I first visited Cambridge, there was an old man appeared to me in the character of Genius of the College Grounds, who showed me all the notable things in our city,--its treasures of art, its monuments,--and ended by taking me into his wood-house, and sawing me off from a wind-fallen branch of the Washington Elm a bit of the sacred wood for a remembrancer. Where now is that old man? He no longer exists for me, neither he nor his wood-house nor his dwelling-house. Let me look for a month about the College Grounds, and I shall not see him. But somewhere in the regions of traveller's faery he still lives, and he appears instantly to the new-comer; he has an understanding with the dryads, who keep him supplied with boughs from the Washington Elm, and his wood-house is full of them.

Among memorable custodians in Italy was one whom we saw at Pisa, where we stopped on our way from Leghorn after our accident in the Maremma, and spent an hour in viewing the Quattro Fabbriche. The beautiful old town, which every one knows from the report of travellers, one yet finds possessed of the incommunicable charm which keeps it forever novel to the visitor. Lying upon either side of the broad Arno, it mirrors in the flood architecture almost as fair and n.o.ble as that gla.s.sed in the Ca.n.a.lazzo, and its other streets seemed as tranquil as the ca.n.a.ls of Venice. Those over which we drove, on the day of our visit, were paved with broad flag-stones, and gave out scarcely a sound under our wheels. It was Sunday, and no one was to be seen. Yet the empty and silent city inspired us with no sense of desolation. The palaces were in perfect repair; the pavements were clean; behind those windows we felt that there must be a good deal of easy, comfortable life. It is said that Pisa is one of the few places in Europe where the sweet, but timid spirit of Inexpensiveness--everywhere pursued by Railways--still lingers, and that you find cheap apartments in those well-preserved old palaces. No doubt it would be worth more to live in Pisa than it would cost, for the history of the place would alone be to any reasonable sojourner a perpetual recompense, and a princely income far exceeding his expenditure. To be sure, the Tower of Famine, with which we chiefly a.s.sociate the name of Pisa, has been long razed to the ground, and built piecemeal into the neighboring palaces, but you may still visit the dead wall which hides from view the place where it stood; and you may thence drive on, as we did, to the great Piazza where stands the unrivaledest group of architecture in the world, after that of St. Mark's Place in Venice. There is the wonderful Leaning Tower, there is the old and beautiful Duomo, there is the n.o.ble Baptistery, there is the lovely Campo-Santo, and there--somewhere lurking in portal or behind pillar, and keeping out an eagle-eye for the marveling stranger--is the much-experienced cicerone who shows you through the edifices. Yours is the fourteen-thousandth American family to which he has had the honor of acting as guide, and he makes you feel an illogical satisfaction in thus becoming a contribution to statistics.

We entered the Duomo, in our new friend's custody, and we saw the things which it was well to see. There was ma.s.s, or some other ceremony, transacting; but as usual it was made as little obtrusive as possible, and there was not much to weaken the sense of proprietorship with which travellers view objects of interest. Then we ascended the Leaning Tower, skillfully preserving its equilibrium as we went by an inclination of our persons in a direction opposed to the tower's inclination, but perhaps not receiving a full justification of the Campanile's appearance in pictures, till we stood at its base, and saw its vast bulk and height as it seemed to sway and threaten in the blue sky above our heads. There the sensation was too terrible for endurance,--even the architectural beauty of the tower could not save it from being monstrous to us,--and we were glad to hurry away from it to the serenity and solemn loveliness of the Campo Santo.

Here are the frescos painted five hundred years ago to be ruinous and ready against the time of your arrival in 1864, and you feel that you are the first to enjoy the joke of the Vergognosa, that cunning jade who peers through her fingers at the shameful condition of deboshed father Noah, and seems to wink one eye of wicked amus.e.m.e.nt at you.

Turning afterward to any book written about Italy during the time specified, you find your impression of exclusive possession of the frescos erroneous, and your muse naturally despairs, where so many muses have labored in vain, to give a just idea of the Campo Santo.

Yet it is most worthy celebration. Those exquisitely arched and traceried colonnades seem to grow like the slim cypresses out of the sainted earth of Jerusalem; and those old paintings, made when Art was--if ever--a Soul, and not as now a mere Intelligence, enforce more effectively than their authors conceived the lessons of life and death; for they are themselves becoming part of the triumphant decay they represent. If it was awful once to look upon that strange scene where the gay lords and ladies of the chase come suddenly upon three dead men in their coffins, while the devoted hermits enjoy the peace of a dismal righteousness on a hill in the background, it is yet more tragic to behold it now when the dead men are hardly discernible in their coffins, and the hermits are but the vaguest shadows of gloomy bliss. Alas! Death mocks even the homage done him by our poor fears and hopes: with dust he wipes out dust, and with decay he blots the image of decay.

I a.s.sure the reader that I made none of these apt reflections in the Campo Santo at Pisa, but have written them out this morning in Cambridge because there happens to be an east wind blowing. No one could have been sad in the company of our cheerful and patient cicerone, who, although visibly anxious to get his fourteen-thousandth American family away, still would not go till he had shown us that monument to a dead enmity which hangs in the Campo Santo. This is the mighty chain which the Pisans, in their old wars with the Genoese, once stretched across the mouth of their harbor to prevent the entrance of the hostile galleys. The Genoese with no great trouble carried the chain away, and kept it ever afterward till 1860, when Pisa was united to the kingdom of Italy. Then the trophy was restored to the Pisans, and with public rejoicings placed in the Campo Santo, an emblem of reconciliation and perpetual amity between ancient foes. [I read in Mr. Norton's _Notes of Travel and Study in Italy_, that he saw in the Campo Santo, as long ago as 1856, "the chains that marked the servitude of Pisa, now restored by Florence," and it is of course possible that our cicerone may have employed one of those chains for the different historical purpose I have mentioned. It would be a thousand pities, I think, if a monument of that sort should be limited to the commemoration of one fact only.] It is not a very good world,--_e pur si muove_.

The Baptistery stands but a step away from the Campo Santo, and our guide ushered us into it with the air of one who had till now held in reserve his great stroke and was ready to deliver it. Yet I think he waited till we had looked at some comparatively trifling sculptures by Nicol Pisano before he raised his voice, and uttered a melodious species of howl. While we stood in some amazement at this, the conscious structure of the dome caught the sound and prolonged it with a variety and sweetness of which I could not have dreamed. The man poured out in quick succession his musical wails, and then ceased, and a choir of heavenly echoes burst forth in response. There was a supernatural beauty in these harmonies of which I despair of giving any true idea: they were of such tender and exalted rapture that we might well have thought them the voices of young-eyed cherubim, singing as they pa.s.sed through Paradise over that spot of earth where we stood. They seemed a celestial compa.s.sion that stooped and soothed, and rose again in lofty and solemn acclaim, leaving us poor and penitent and humbled.

We were long silent, and then broke forth with cries of admiration of which the marvelous echo made eloquence.

"Did you ever," said the cicerone after we had left the building, "hear such music as that?"

"The papal choir does not equal it," we answered with one voice.

The cicerone was not to be silenced even with such a tribute, and he went on:

"Perhaps, as you are Americans, you know Moshu Feelmore, the President? No? Ah, what a fine man! You saw that he had his heart actually in his hand! Well, one day he said to me here, when I told him of the Baptistery echo, 'We have the finest echo in the world in the Hall of Congress.' I said nothing, but for answer I merely howled a little,--thus! Moshu Feelmore was convinced. Said he, 'There is no other echo in the world besides this. You are right.' I am unique,"

pursued the cicerone, "for making this echo. But," he added with a sigh, "it has been my ruin. The English have put me in all the guide-books, and sometimes I have to howl twenty times a day. When our Victor Emanuel came here I showed him the church, the tower, and the Campo Santo. Says the king, 'Pfui!'"--here the cicerone gave that sweeping outward motion with both hands by which Italians dismiss a trifling subject--"'make me the echo!' I was forced," concluded the cicerone with a strong sense of injury in his tone, "to howl half an hour without ceasing."

II.

THE FERRARA ROAD.

The delight of one of our first journeys over the road between Padua and Ferrara was a Roman _cameriere_ out of place, who got into the diligence at Ponte Lagoscuro. We were six in all: The Englishman who thought it particularly Italian to say "S" three times for every a.s.sent; the Veneto (as the citizen of the province calls himself, the native of the city being Veneziano) going home to his farm near Padua; the German lady of a sour and dreadful countenance; our two selves, and the Roman _cameriere_. The last was worth all the rest--being a man of vast general information acquired in the course of service with families of all nations, and agreeably communicative. A brisk and lively little man, with dancing eyes, beard cut to the mode of the Emperor Napoleon, and the impressive habit of tapping himself on the teeth with his railroad-guide, and lifting his eyebrows when he says any thing specially worthy of remark. He, also, long after the conclusion of an observation, comes back to himself approvingly, with "_S_!" "_Vabene_!" "_Ecco_!" He speaks beautiful Italian and constantly, and in a little while we know that he was born at Ferrara, bred at Venice, and is now a citizen of Rome. "St. Peter's, Signori,--have you ever seen it?--is the first church of the world.

At Ferrara lived Ta.s.so and Ariosto. Venice is a lovely city. Ah! what beauty! But unique. My second country. _S, Signori, la mia seconda patria_." After a pause, "_Va bene_."

We hint to him that he is extremely fortunate in having so many countries, and that it will be difficult to exile so universal a citizen, which he takes as a tribute to his worth, smiles and says, "Ecco!"

Then he turns to the Veneto, and describes to him the English manner of living. "Wonderfully well they eat--the English. Four times a day.

With rosbif at the dinner. Always, always, always! And tea in the evening, with rosbif cold. _Mangiano sempre. Ma bene, dico_." After a pause, "_S_!" "And the Venetians, they eat well, too. Whence the proverb: '_Sulla Riva degli Schiavoni, si mangiano bei bocconi_.'

('On the Riva degli Schiavoni, you eat fine mouthfuls.') Signori, I am going to Venice," concludes the cameriere.

He is the politest man in the world, and the most attentive to ladies.