Part 6

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