Fort Worth daily gazette. (Fort Worth, Tex.) 1882-1891, 1890-05-17

ever-blazing sun above, that the arid
crust must shortly give out, and with it
the vacuous life of the iusensate 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 scori9 and mountain mud.
There are no meadows; no shaded lanes
no cooling covert and oopse. The end
less avenues of short-cropped vineyards
are never beautiful, but are cropped and
gashed and clipped like pugilist IS head
The formal rows of expresses are damp,
dank funeral sad there areno forests few
trees are larger than the squatty oliYe !;
and all trees look shriveled, 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 land
scape has ga certain hard taste in the
mouth. -
The utter absence of homes, and es-
pecially of farm houses, in all Apulia,
intensifles the sadness of the landscape.
There is not farm house, as we know
apart, huge, low, prison-like
stone structure called "masserles ("
where the landowners superintendent,
an ignorant, illy-paId, bestial fellow
himself, cares for a number of the ami
mails needed in the fields, and where the
"massara' Qiterally, field-house wo-
man) cooks the little needed for the H.
borers. These "masserie' are the
ugIiest one-story stone buildings imag-
Unable. They are invariably set on an
elevation to escape as much as possible
the universal malaria. Quadrilateral
stone walls perhaps thirty feet square
rise seven or eight 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 towards the front. These
usually contain three compartments.
One, the best of ell, is provided with
stone managers extending all around it for
oxen, horses or donkevs; in another, the
"massara warns the slop given the
laborers, and in the last are stone
benches on which the laborers take their
midday siesta and sleep at night. These
swarm with vermin, are flthler and
moro desolate than any prison known to
man, and stand unreIieved by vine or
shrub or tree, repulsive and forbidding
silhonettes of stone against
BLUE ITALIAN SKY.
Five other characteristic features of
Southern Italy pastoral scenery suggest,
as with the ''massarie, - human activi-
ties and eoutiguity to human habita-
tions, only TO emphasize the saddening
loneliness of Italian country scenes.
These are the ''aja, or raised earthen
or stone threshing floor, shaped like
hollow truncated cone, where the
grain is trod out by 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 beneath the surface, with eX-
posed walls as high as ones head, aver
aging so 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 divide fields like end
less barbados; the 'casselle, - mortar
less circular huts of stone, surmounted
by rude crosses, in which the deldguards
and watchers find shelter, recalling the
ghostly sentryhouses among the bleach
greens in the north of Ireland; and the
traturo, broad grass-grown highway,
which for 1000 years has served in differ
ent localities, like the vast stock trails
leading from grass to grass when
western herds are driven northward, for
the yearly exodus of Apulian herds to
mountain summer pastures.
But where do those one TO two million
peasants of Southern Italy live, if the
country possesses no cabins on the hill
sides. no nesting farm houses in the
valleys? Every one of them, in towns
and cities. L can show You fifty cities
in Italy, below Naples, with populations
varying from 10. 900 to %, coo, ana
think fully $50 towns and small oisies