Roccaraso, September 8, 1898.

We left Rome, the heat already somewhat abating, on the 2d of September. Though we had been so anxious to get away, it took an effort of will at the last. Action of any kind was abhorrent, the dolce far niente had us in thrall. We finally got off at nine o’clock one morning, and arrived here at seven the same evening, having changed cars at Solmona, the home of Ovid, where we had an hour and a half to see the sights. Solmona is a good-sized town with paved streets, interesting churches, several inns,—at any of which one might risk putting up,—and a market-place, Piazza Ovidio, where we bought a basket of pears and a flask of wine: one or the other made us very ill; it is much safer to bring along provisions for such a journey. The train next passed through a wide valley, one vast orchard, red with apples “ripe and ready to drop”; then the engine began to tug, tug, up into the mountains. The road is a strategical railway, built not to meet any demand of traffic or travel, but for the transportation of troops.

“Roccaraso is the highest railroad station in Europe,” said the proud person in uniform who took our tickets. Government owns and operates all railroads; the employÉs are gold-laced, red-tape government officials; this one controls telegraph, mail, express—all intercourse with the outer world. We therefore forbore to mention Brenner, the station in the Alps between the Austrian Tyrol and Italy, which I believed to be even higher.

The town of Roccaraso is above the station, a castello perched aloft on a spur of one of the upper Abruzzi. Below us is a wide, flat valley, all around us are crowding blue mountains, head rising above head, like inquisitive giants peeping over one another’s shoulders. The air is like rarefied electricity; the water has been tested and guaranteed absolutely pure—you know bad water is the danger of these remote, primitive villages. Our friend, the Marchesa di V., asked the engineer who laid out the railroad (it has been open only a few months) to find her a healthy place for the summer. He recommended this

unknown mountain fastness. Here she retired with her bambini early in June. Having made herself comfortable, she prepared to make us so: hired a pleasant apartment for us,—it belongs to the widow of the ex-mayor, lately defunct,—ordered the landlady to give it three coats of whitewash, engaged Elena, a stout wench, to scrub, do the heavy work, and fetch water from the village fountain, and bade us “come on.” We came, bringing our guardian angel Vittoria, the tall seamstress, to cook and take care of us. Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, must have looked like our Vittoria—calm, gentle, with rare sweetness and remarkable beauty. We sent up from Rome oil, wine, vinegar, and groceries enough to last out our stay. The Marchesa has a loaf of bread come by mail every day from Rome for the babes; she is a woman of resource, she does the impossible, the only thing worth doing! Elena’s mother makes bread for us; it is coarse and rather hard, but it suits us well enough. This is the most primitive Italy we have yet seen. Neither butter, meat, nor Parmesan cheese (quite as important) can be had here. The wine is detestable, vino cotto (cooked wine), brought up in goatskins from the valley below on muleback. We are above the grape and olive belt; our meat comes twice a week from Castel di Sangro, four miles off; our butter, every other day, from Pesco Costanzi, two miles away, via the girls express established by the Marchesa.

Our apartment (it costs fifteen dollars a month) is over the village school; it has its own separate entrance, through a grim paved court-yard, where Vittoria keeps the turkey or chicken she is fattening for us. You ring a bell; whoever is within pulls a string which lifts the latch. You go up two flights of massive stone stairs to reach the living part, where we have a decent bedroom, a fair, formal salon, dining-room, and a kitchen—such a kitchen! The ex-mayor’s family must have lived in this room, except on high days and holidays, when they perhaps sat upon the deceitful parlor chairs and sofas—which had all been pasted together for our benefit and broke down at the first trial. The kitchen is an immense, smoke-browned room, with a big fireplace at one end, where all the cooking is done. Copper pots and kettles hang from the iron crane, a spit stands on the hearth, strings of red peppers swing from the rafters. There are no bellows; to coax the blaze, Elena, the vestal, kneels and blows through a long iron tube, her breath coming out through the mouth of the snake’s head at the end. It is cold to-night; the kitchen is the only warm place; I am writing close to Elena’s rousing brushwood fire. Outside there is a howling wind, inside a leg of mutton revolves slowly on the spit. Every moment I expect to see the King of the Golden River blow down the chimney and beg for a slice of that savory roast.

Roccaraso, September 16, 1898.

We are living in the pastoral age! Each family in Roccaraso supplies its own needs, asks little of its neighbors and of the outside world—nothing but salt, wine, and oil. Life is set to the tune of “The Poor Little Swallow.” We wake in the early morning to “povera rondinella, O povera rondinella!” sung by the women and girls trudging up from the valley with bundles of fagots on their heads for the winter woodpiles. They are busy preparing for the long, cold season, which falls early hereabouts. Acorns for the pigs, fodder for the cows, goats, and sheep, dried peas, beans, and corn for the humans must all be carefully stored away. For several days we have watched the women winnowing the chaff from the wheat. At sunrise yesterday half a dozen girls started, each with a heavy sack of grain on her head, to walk to the nearest grist-mill, seven miles away. At sunset they came back carrying the precious flour, which must be preserved with extreme care. Good or bad, it is their mainstay through the severe winter; if it should mildew, they would eat it all the same, with the fear of the dreadful pellagra in their hearts.

The government doctor, who goes periodically about the country to visit the sick and is an intelligent man,—standing rather too much on his dignity for comfortable intercourse, but a perfect mine of information,—says that pellagra, endemic in some parts of Italy, comes from the poor food the people eat, chiefly from the mildewed flour. It is a skin disease, which produces a painful red eruption, and all sorts of nervous and other horrors. From the autumn when the few green vegetables they raise are consumed till they are again ripe the following summer, the people live on polenta, made of cornmeal, macaroni, potatoes, dried peas, and sheep’s-milk cheese. In case of illness a little meat to make broth is procured, otherwise the diet is vegetarian, except on Christmas and Easter, when several families club together to make a feast, and one peasant kills a sheep or a goat, having agreed with his neighbors which part of the animal shall be allotted to each.

We have made friends with our opposite neighbor the belle of Roccaraso, a modern Penelope. We found her at her loom as usual, in a tiny stone cottage, the floor plain, trodden earth, the walls roughly plastered inside. She is even prettier seen close at hand than through the window; she wears the Roccaraso dress—you know each village has its own special costume. This is plainer than many of them, but good and appropriate. Over her head she wears a square of linen edged with lace, folded to cover the neck and lower part of the face (older women are particular to hide the mouth), a full skirt of dark homespun, a black apron, and a bright jacket, showing a colored kerchief and a full white shirt.

“Will the gentry do me the favor of entering?” she gently invited us.

“We would not interrupt your work.”

“Enter, enter!”

“If you will go on with your weaving.”

She sat down at her loom before a web of rough linsey-woolsey and shot the shuttle threaded with red linen across the woof of black wool. We ordered a dress pattern of the same stuff as that she was weaving, and some heavy white flannel striped with corn-flower blue, delicious in color and fabric.

“The signori are North Americans, yes? They come from Pittsbourgo?” Penelope began.

“North Americans, yes, not from Pittsburg.” She was disappointed, but a visiting-card partly consoled her.

“How do you call yourself?” J. asked.

“Mariuccia, per servirla.”

“This yarn you weave with, Mariuccia, tell us where it came from?” She seemed astonished at the question, took a distaff from a nail, and showed us how she used it.

“’Gnor, I made the yarn with this rocca; so, how else?”

“And the wool, where did you get that?”

“’Gnor, from my own sheep.”

“Can you spin flax also, and weave linen?”

“Altro! “She lifted the cover of an old marriage-chest—it smelt of lavender.

“Behold my corredo.” The chest held the linen she had woven for her marriage,—towels, sheets, table-cloths, and napkins, enough to last her lifetime.

“See what Andrea sent me “for Natale” (Christmas). She took out of the cassone a pair of high-heeled, pointed-toed boots—they would have crippled her in a week—and a pair of American storm rubbers.

“The accursed ones of the Dogana forced me to pay three francs duty upon these original shoes; in confidence between us two, I cannot wear them.”

“The cioce are better for you. Where did these come from?”

“My husband, he sent them to me.”

“From Pittsbourgo?”

“’Gnor, si, he is a cutter of stone at that place.”

“Why are you not with him?”

“’Gnor, the great fear of the sea. Besides, Andrea is a good husband, he sends me money every month from Pittsbourgo.”

There you have the secret of Mariuccia’s superiority: Andrea is a good husband and sends her money from Pittsburg, therefore she alone of all the women is exempt from work in the fields. She is personally neat and keeps her two rooms clean. Her cousin, a slatternly creature, living next door, and evidently the beauty’s guardian,—asked us into her house. In spite of our curiosity to see interiors we quailed at the threshold of that hovel inhabited by the village naturale (simpleton), who is brother to Mariuccia’s cousin, a large turkey gobbler, and several hens.

As we took leave, Mariuccia shyly pulled my sleeve. “When the signori return to America they will take a passeggiata one day to Pittsbourgo to see my Andrea, yes?” she whispered.

“Figlia mia, from our paese it would take twelve hours’ travelling, even by the railroad, to reach Pittsbourgo.” Mariuccia smiled incredulously, she did not believe us but was too polite to say so.

J. says that when Mariuccia goes to mass she carries the American shoes on her head (I think when he met her she must have been taking them to show to some friend) and wears cioce on her feet. To fit the cioce to the foot of the wearer, a square of cowhide, with the hair still on, is soaked in water till it becomes soft and

pliable; a hole is then made in each of the four corners of the hide; the foot is placed on the damp leather, leathern thongs are passed through the holes and wound round and round the leg and tied at the knee, so that the ciociari, as the wearers of the cioce are called, go cross-gartered like Malvolio. When the cowhide is dry it has taken the shape of the foot, and this simplest of all footgear is ready to wear.

The flat pad worn on the head to support the water-jar is Mariuccia’s pocket. It is the obvious place to carry things. When there is no heavier burden of wood or water, her knitting or door key takes its place. I sent Elena with a packet to the Marchesa to-day—of course, she put it on her head. As it contained nothing but chiffon, the wind sent it whirling, and Elena said “Sfortunata!” Her little sister, Tina, three years old, balances a block of wood on her head and toddles alongside when Elena goes to draw water at the fountain; she is learning the art of burthen-bearing. Marta, who is six,—the age at which the vestals were admitted to the novitiate,—has sole charge of the household fire. When her mother and grandmother toil up from the valley with their mighty loads of fagots, Marta trots gallantly beside them under her small load of brush for kindling.

“Why does not your brother, Francesco, help to carry up wood?” we asked Marta. She shook her firm little head:

“’Gnor, questo non Èlavoro da uomo (That is not man’s work).” Francesco is eight; his hair is a golden fleece, his cheeks are red apples.

I notice that no man carries weights on his head; if by a rare chance he has a load to carry, he takes it on his back. We asked the doctor if the splendid port of the women came from the caryatid act. He said it was possible, but that the price was high. “So many of the poor creatures die of consumption. Only the strongest resist.” Here is the survival of the fittest with a vengeance!

We are good friends with the sindaco of Roccaraso, a social soul pleased with an opportunity of enlightening the stranger. His village has a population of seventeen hundred, mostly old men, women, and children. Four hundred of the young men are in “Pittsbourgo,” most of them, like Andrea, stone-masons. Others are stable-strappers at Rome or Naples. The only able-bodied men we have seen at work are the barber and the blacksmith. The women do practically all the work of the community; they dig, plough, sow, and reap. The free, proud bearing this gives them is wonderful; their beauty surpasses belief. Michael Angelo’s sibyls spin at every street corner, Raphael’s Madonnas suckle their children at every doorway. The old women are either strong and upright, like Elena’s grandmother, or, if they go to pieces and crouch into withered crones, it is with an admirable sombre dignity. We have only once been begged from: a very old woman,—she looked like Vedder’s CumÆan sibyl,—evidently ill and suffering, and distinctly not a professional beggar, after looking furtively about to see if any one were in sight, laid hold of the hem of my dress and asked for money. She touched her hand to her lips before and after receiving it, as they do in the orient. We fancy we come across other traces of Saracen influence (they overran this part in the Dark Ages) in three-year-old Tina’s tiny frock covering her down to the feet, and the way the women hide their mouths when a stranger passes. In a town to the southward the women wear veils, which they draw half over their faces when out of doors.

Roccaraso, September 25, 1898.

Still in this sublime place, keyed up and braced famously by the fine air. No, the name is not Roccarasa, though the mistake is perfectly natural. Roccaraso is an abbreviation of Rocca del Rasino, rock of the Rasino, the name of the stream running through the valley. The walled, fortified town was founded in the fifth century; it has changed very little since. Late this afternoon we stumbled up the badly paved street, passed out under the ancient gateway between the two ruined towers, down the steep, stony way to the sheepfolds at the foot of the hill. The girls were waiting to milk the flocks driven up from the valleys and down from the hills by the shepherds and their dogs. From the distance came the song of the “Little Swallow” played on a pipe by Francesco, who tends a composite flock of sheep and goats. In the early morning Francesco passes through the town calling his herd together. At the sound of his voice four brown sheep file down the steps from the house opposite, a black goat and five white sheep patter out from Mariuccia’s spare chamber—the very sheep whose wool is being spun and woven for my cream-colored flannel. This evening Francesco and his flock reached the folds before all the others. Mariuccia’s shaggy black goat made an odd grunting noise as it walked.

“Do all the goats here have such strange voices?” we asked Francesco.

“’Gnor, no, this animal was brought up with a litter of pigs; in this manner he learned their language.”

Elena’s grandfather, Giacomo, the chief of the shepherds, came in next, leading his blind cosset lamb and knitting as he walked: a tall, stern, gnarled old man, with white hair and keen eyes, over six feet tall, past seventy years old. His dress is handsome and substantial: dark blue homespun knee breeches, jacket and leggings, with silver buttons; a wide felt hat, and a long black cloak lined with green baize. He has two dogs, lean and fierce, with wiry white hair, pointed noses, and careworn faces. They have heavy collars studded with sharp iron spikes.

“Good-evening, Sor’ Giacomo, how goes it?”

“’Gnor, badly. Last night the wolves carried off the calf I was fattening for Christmas.”

“Where were the dogs?”

“They keep watch at the folds; the calf was at my cottage.” He counted the sheep as they filed through the wicket into the pen. “Vent’ uno, venti due; it is early for wolves, but—one understands it—yesterday I met the padre of Pesco Costanzi.”

“What has that to do with your calf or the wolves?”

Sor’ Giacomo shrugged his shoulders and went on counting his sheep. We understood: the priest of Pesco Costanzi has the “malocchio” (evil eye).

“How many are your sheep, Sor’ Giacomo?”

“Trenta (thirty), as you see.”

“It was not always so; formerly there were more?”

“’Gnor, si. When I was Francesco’s age my father had five thousand sheep in his care. In those days we of the Abruzzi raised wool for the whole kingdom, for the world, if you will. Now it is finished: these poor, miserable ones scarcely suffice to clothe Roccaraso.”

“Why is this thing so?”

“Why? because of an infamy. Understand, since that castello was built,—who knows how long ago?—since that time at the season when the white (snow) comes, when the earth sleeps, we of the Abruzzi have always had the right to drive our sheep down to the plains of Apulia, there to graze through the winter. In a moment the thing is changed, the old right is taken away, we are forbidden to drive down our sheep. But is the winter changed? are the wolves banished? does the grass grow all the year in these mountains? I tell you it is finished.”

Giacomo is right, it is finished; he is one of the last pastori Abruzzesi. It is a pity; fourteen centuries of herding sheep have produced a pur sang I have not often seen. The people hereabouts have that proud look of race that the Bishereen of Egypt and some of the American Indians have. “Moglie e buoi ai paese suoi (wives and cattle from your own country)” is a rule rarely broken. The old shepherd-kings of the Abruzzi married only hill women, scorning the effete race of the plain, the vitiated blood of the cities. Giacomo cannot understand a people particular about the breeding of horses and dogs careless about the breeding of men. He said to his granddaughter Elena:

“What! you wish to marry that poor, sickly fellow, Paolo? Do you think more of yourself than of your family? Lucky for you your parents were not so selfish and imprudent.”

Elena has given up Paolo. She wants to go to Rome with us, to earn a little money to add to her dote, so that she may have pretensions to make as good a marriage as Mariuccia! The mariage de convenances, you see, is as much the rule among the Italian peasants as among the aristocrats.

We walked to Pesco Costanzi yesterday through the green valley, where the hobbled donkeys were grazing, and over a golden pasture infested with talkative geese. All the able-bodied women were at work in the glorious fields, threshing oats, shelling corn, drying beans. In the village, humpbacked, crippled, invalid women sat at the doors of their dark cottages making lace. The Marchesa first discovered the survival of an ancient lace industry in this hamlet. In the days of the Medici, girls from Pesco Costanzi found their way to Florence, on some sort of scholarship, and brought back the art of lace-making, and the fine renaissance patterns of that time which the women make to this day. We like it better than any peasant lace we have seen, and have ordered several patterns of it, the doctor undertaking to remit the money and deliver the goods.

On the way back to Roccaraso we passed by the tiny hamlet of Pietro Anzieri, where we saw a man ploughing a desolate patch of land with the forked branch of a tree shod with a long iron point, a primitive kind of plough I remember to have seen represented in an Etruscan wall painting. We loitered by the way, watching the lone man at work, whereat he stopped, leaned on his plough, and hailed us with the best Bowery accent.

“Say, are youse from the Yernited States?”

“Oh, yes, we are North Americans.”

“Of course; I see that. I come from New York myself. How you like Pietro Anzieri? Too slow for me; I only come to see my old mother; go back next month; got a job at Pittsbourgo.”

He was a hearty fellow, twenty-two or-three years old, a good type of the Abruzzi peasant, plus the American expression.

“How long have you lived over there?”

“Since I was a leetle boy—eleven or twelve, I dunno.”

The doctor says that most of those who go out to America under the age of twenty take root in our country and stay there. Men of thirty only remain long enough to “make their pile,” coming back to Italy to grow old and spend it.

Roccaraso, September 28, 1898.

To Castel di Sangro this morning: a gay market-town set in a flowery meadow beside a small river widening below the bridge into a pond where the women were washing clothes. I thought I recognized a pink shirt being beaten between two stones as one of J.’s, which Elena ought to have herself washed. Her aunt lives here. Perhaps she is a washerwoman! We were puzzled by the name, Castel di Sangro,—the castelli are all hill towns,—till we learned that the inhabitants several hundred years ago deserted the original Castel di Sangro, perched on a hill even harder to climb than Roccaraso’s, and moved, bag and baggage, down to the plain and founded the present town. The fibre of the race had softened since the founders built that crumbling castello! We climbed to the top; the view was well worth the stiff walk. The old town is now a city of the dead. Long lines of black numbered crosses mark the graves. Where they stopped a wide, deep open trench began. An old fellow, a sort of rustic sacristan, who had come up to clean the church, was the only person in sight.

“What is that trench for?” we asked him.

“’Gnor, who can tell which of us it may serve as a bed? In summer we prepare for winter; when the earth is frozen hard we cannot break her crust to bury the dead.” He went back to the church and began to toll the bell.

Looking down, we saw a funeral procession like that in Siegfried climbing slowly up the narrow, steep mountain path. We went down by a steep track on the other side to avoid meeting it.

We lunched at the inn; J. ordered trout (the stream is alive with them), which were served pickled! Everything else was very good. It was a market day, and the town was full of people; one dealer wished to sell us a horse, another offered a cow with a crumpled horn. Everywhere the women were busy making conserva di pomodoro; outside the windows of nearly every house were wooden bowls full of mashed tomatoes evaporating in the sun. This conserve is the staple condiment of Italian cooking, as necessary as butter or Parmesan cheese. The tomatoes are reduced to a stiff red paste, which keeps indefinitely and is used to make tomato sauce, to dress risotto, spaghetti, carciofi, served in every conceivable way. Being so concentrated it makes a much richer sauce than you can get from canned tomatoes. When we got back to Roccaraso we found that Vittoria had begun to prepare our winter supply of conserva—it takes days to make it. This gives the house a pervasive fragrance of “golden apples” and produces a comfortable sense of household thrift.

There is a full moon to-night: a white mist marks the line of the Rasino; it is too late in the year for nightingales: from the valley comes a faint snatch of music, played on a shepherd’s pipe, “povera rondinella, O povera rondinella!”