LIFE IN SOUTHERN ITALY.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume V, Issue 46, 15 November 1890, Page 2

LIFE IN SOUTHERN ITALY.

There are no peasant-farmers in all Italy. No land is ever sold to the peasantry’ on any terms. There are not one thousand small holders of land tilled as farms, olive and orange grox es, and vineyards. All Southern Italy is extraordinarily pastoral in landscape and character of husbandry ; and outside a few of the coast cities the entire jxipulalion is practically peasant labourers, shepherds, vineyard labourers and workers in the fields. The olive, orange, grape ami date-palm are cultivated everywhere at the edges of villages and on sunny mountain slopes ; but the larger portion of the land is employed in the giowing of the small grains and corn. Nowhere save in the north where the landscape partakes of Alpine diversity and ruggedness are there those splendid and poetical combinations with which so many word-painting enthusiasts seem impressed. In detail it is nowhere so enjoyable as that of old England, New England, or any of a thousand localities we know inourown lovedland. Here and there, as in Spain, are little spots of surpassing loveliness ; but still, as in Spain, the general face of the country hints of sadness and dreariness ; impels a feeling that it is worn out; burned out, lived out ; forces a consciousness that the sun has eaten its heart away, and one is pursued by a brooding, ominous, indefinable conviction that, with the eternal fires beneath and the ever blazing sun above, the arid crust must shortly give out, and with it the vacuous life of the insensate humans who scratch and prod at it as primitively as was done 2,000 years ago. The rivers are far apart and are all turbid, ocherish wash of scoria- and mountain mud. There are no meadows; no shaded lanes ; no cooling covert and copse. The endless avenues of short-cropped vineyards are never beautiful, but are cropped and gasiied and clipped like a pugilist’s head. The formal rows of cypresses are damp, dank, funereal, sad. There are no forests ; few trees are larger than the squatty olive, and all trees look shrivelled, knotted, dusty, worn. Italy’s mountains are too bare. All her outlines are insufficient, acute, unsatisfying. All told, as one writer has aptly put it, all Italian landscape has *a certain hard taste in the mouth.’

The utter absence of homes, and especially of farm homes, in all Apulia, intensifies the sadness of the landscape. There is not a farmhouse, as we know it, in Italy. There are, miles apart, huge, low, prison-like stone structures called ‘ massara,’ where the land-owner’s superintendent, an ignorant, illy-paid, bestail fellow’ himself, cares for a number of the animals needed in the fields and where the ‘ massara ’ (literally, field house woman) cooks the little needed for the labourers. These ‘ inassarie ’ are the ugliest one-story stone buildings imaginable. They are invariably set on an elevation to escape as much as possible the universal malaria. Quadrilaterial stone walls, perhaps thirty feet square, rise seven or eight feet high. A portion of the front will be covered with an almost fiat metal or slate roof. Then from the rear wall vaulted arches extend toward the

front. These usually contain three compartments. JJne, the best of all, is provided with stone mangers extending all around it for oxen, horses or donkeys ; in another the ‘ massara ’ warms the slop given the labourers, and in the last are stone benches on which the labourers take their midday siesta and sleep at night. These swarm with vermin ; are filthier and more desolate than any prison known to man, and stand unrelieved by vine, shrub or tree, repulsive and forbidding silhouettes of stone against a blue Italian But where do these 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 peasants of Southern Italy live, if the country possesses no cabins on the hillsides, no nestling farm houses in the valleys ? They live in towns and cities. There are fifty cities in Italy, below Naples, with populations varying from 10,000 to 25,000, and, fully 150 towns and small cities containing each from 500 to 5,000 souls. There will not as many single persons live between these places as there will average thousands in each. In ancient times ail this country was subject to scourging depredations by the Saracens, to an extent requiring that people should herd together in walled towns for protection of life and property. The serfdom of these days is practically unchanged. The nobility and landed aristocracy still own every rood of land ; still possess every herd and Hock ; still command, under a slightly different vassalage, the apathetic peasants who till and tend. The latter exist within these walled cities in houses

insufferable to animals in America. This is why, startled from your sleep before the break of day by what you fancy must be an army marching beneath your window, on hastening to the balcony you will see in the streets of one town 1,000, in another 5,000, and in another, as at Taranto and Andria, even 10,000 men, women and children, with herds and flocks containing five times their number, wending their way to the mountain pastuies and fields. And again, in the gray of the soft Italian twilight, as the sad army of rewardless toil drags its weary way back into the walled and reeking city, your heart bleeds at the sodden hopelessness of it all, while you thank the God above for the American birthright you own, know and love.