Pittsburg dispatch. [volume] (Pittsburg [Pa.]) 1880-1923, 1890-05-17

, age so soldi, or 16 CENTS per day! Out OF
this 16 cents per day, which is not securable
for more than half the days of the year, the
Italian rustico pays the rent of his capanna
or hovel, feeds and clothes his family, pays
all manner of outrageous petty imposizione
or taxation. and. aggregatively, muni6cently
supports his church with an unsurpassed de-
votion and loyalty. The difference between
the peasantry of Ireland and ofItaly is this:
The Irish are superior race despoiled of
glorious originally-possessed hereditaments,
writhiDg under sodden, implacable, unre-
dressed wrong. italian peasantry were
never else than serfs and, whatever excep-
tional individual heart-burnings may be, as
class are incapable of resenting the loss of
conditions and heritage OF which they have
never been deprived. A Masaniello or a
Garibaldi, fired by gleamings of the outer
worlds refexive intelligence, may every
two or three centuries, rise from among fish
ermen, sailors or city lazzaroni, and cavort
about for time as 'liberator;" but these
poor cattle upon two legs have come to
know, have ever stood ano will ever stand
still in their italian fields and howell
managers, and with radiant, grateful eyes
lick the hands which dole them husks-the
only fruit OF their labors they were ever al
lowed to know.
| BEAUTY MARRIED BY SADNESS.
All Southern Italy is extraordinarily pas
toral in landscape and character of husband
~; and outside few of the coast cities the
entire population are practically peasant
laborers, shepherds vineyard laborers and
workers in the fields. The olive, orange,
grape and date palm are cultivated every
where at the edges of villages, and on sunny
mountain slopes; but the larger portion Of the
land is employed in the growing of small
| grains and corn. have vet to discover, save
in the north where the landscape partakes of
Alpine diversity and ruggedness. 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 En-
gland, or any of thousand localities we
know in our own loved land. Here and
there, as in Spain, are little spots of surpass-
ing loneliness; but STILL as in Spain, the
general face of the country hints of sadness
and dreariness; impels the feeling that it is
worn out, burned out, lived out; forces con-
sciousness that the sun has eaten its heart
away; and one is pursued by a brooding,
ominous, indeinable conviction that, with
the eternal fires beneath and the ever-blazing
sun above, the acrid 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 1000 years ago.
The rivers are far apart, and are all turbid,
ocherish wash OF scorie and mountain mud.
There are no meadows; no shaded lanes; no
cooling covert and copse. The endless ave-
nues of short-cropped vineyards are never
beautiful, but are cropped snd gashed and
clipped like pugilist's head. The fsrmal
rows of expresses are damp, dank, funereal,
sad. There are no forests; few trees are
larger than the squatty olive; and all trees
look shriveled, knotted dusty, worn. Italy's
M N Mt a ra hare All har 0ntlipao
are insufficient, acute, unsatisfying. All
told, as one writer has aptly put it, all Ital-
ian landscape has "a certain hard taste in
the mouth"
HOUSED WORSE THAN CRIMINALS.
The utter absence of homes, and especially
of farmhouses, in all Apulia, intensifes the
sadness of the landscape. There is not
farmhouse, as we know it, in Italy. There
are, miles apart. huge, low, prison-like
stone structures called ''masserie," where the
landowners superintendent, an ignorant,
ill-paid, bestial fellow himself, cares for a
number of the animals needed in the fields
and where the :'massara" Qiterally field
house womaD) cooks the little needed for
the laborers. These "masserie' are the
ugliest one-story stone buildings imagin-
able. They are invariably set on an eleva-
tion to escape as much as possible the uni
perhaps 80 feet square rise or s feet high.
A portion of the front will be covered with
an almost fat metal or slate roof.
Then from the rear wall vaulted arches
extend toward the 'front.' These usually con-
tain three compartments. One, the best
of all, is provided with stone managers ex-
tending all around it for oxen, horses or
donkeys; in another, the "massara" warns
the slop given the laborers; and in the last,
honn h ht.,h h. lnh L..
their midday siesta and sleep OF night.
These swarm with vermin; are flthier and
more desolate than any prison known to
man; and stand unrelieved by vine, shrub
or tree. repulsive and forbidding silhouettes
of stone against blue italian sky.
Five other characteristic features of South
ern Italian pastoral scenery suggest, as with
the "masserie, human activities and con-
tiguity to human habitations, only to en-
phasize the saddening loneliness of italian
country scenes. These are the "aja," or
shaped like followed truncated
cone, where the grain is trod
out bv blindfolded oxen; the cisterna,
or cistern, for collecting rain water for the
hocks. for use in time of summer drought
huge structures sunken fully ten feet be-
meath the surface, with exposed walls as
high as ones head, averaging 30 feet in
width and 200 in length, with an ancient
windlass in the peak of one end of the low
roof; the rough, white stone walls which di-
vide fields like endless harricades; the 'cas-
selle," mortarless circular huts of stone, sur
mounted by rude crosses, in which the field
guards and watchers find shelter, recalling
the ghostlv sentry houses among the bleach
greens in the north OF Ireland: and the
"traturo, broad grass-grown highway,
which for 1000 years mas served in different
localities, like tine vast stock trails leading
from grass to grass when Western herds
are driven northwar1, for the yearly exodus
OF Apulian herds to mountain summer pas
lures.
ITALY'S HOMELESS ARMY.
But where do these /, 900, 900 to 1000, 900
peasants Of Southern Italy live, If the country
possesses no cabins on the hillsides, no nest
ling farm houses in the valleys? Everyone
of them, in towns and Cities I can show
you 80 cities IN Italy, below Naples, with
populations varying from 10,000 to %, 900,
and think fully $50 towns and small cities
containing each from 500 to 5000 souls.
There will not as many single persons live |
between these places as there will average |
thousands in each. In ancient times all |
this country was subject to scourging depre- |
dations by the Saracens, to an extent reouir- |
ing that people should herd together in |
walled towns Tor protection of life and prop |
erty. The ser dom of those days is practic- |
ally unchanged. The nobility and landed |
aristocracy still own every rood of land;
still possess every herd and flock; still COM
mand, under slightly different vassal- |
age, 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 |