Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/144



VER four hundred years ago in San Gimignano, a hill town of Tuscan Italy, the powerful families of two political factions, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, erected towers above their palaces with the gentle hope of outdoing their rivals in number and in height. Now and then they fought from them with projectiles and great stones and molten lead. The towers, after centuries of gentle decay, are to-day serving their best purpose. The eccentricities of architecture have placed the town in the path of the tourists' search-light, and the villagers whose ancestors bore the burden of taxation for these skyward vanities are reaping the long-delayed benefit of their labors.

"In the path of the tourists' search-light" does not necessarily mean within three minutes' walk from the station. The traveller is so much of an epicure in these days that inaccessibility but renders more palatable the feast of the unusual, and to him the nine-mile drive through the countryside increases the value of his discovery. Since Queen Victoria was driven over these hills to see what a mediæval town really should be, many have followed in her august wheel-tracks. We did not travel with the pomp of royalty, for Pogni was our single escort through this region. He was fat and sunshiny, and should have walked up the steep grades to save his horses, but did not. We had liked him from the moment he was discovered hissing at us from over the railroad fence. The cabbies, in certain Italian localities, are not allowed to shriek at possible "fares," but are permitted to attract attention by a polite "hiss!" And if there is anything funnier than twenty of these unfeathered geese emitting their war-cry from their perches, it deserves to be dramatized. Pogni, having two horses, hissed twice as loud as those having single cabs, and he sat in the shade of the only tree to do it, proving that he was a lucky man from birth, or a strong one. He was a good whip-cracker as well, and evidently a kind man, for his horses were impervious to the sound, and chose their own gait during the upward climb.

In this manner we drove through the lovely sloping farm-lands, the heart of the Chianti country and the home of comfort and contentment. It seemed that all the men and women of the farmhouses were in the open, garnering the wheat with sickle and twine, and young arms and old. It may have been warm work, but the fields, with their many rows of mulberry-trees festooned with grape-vines, do not suggest the heat of our broad undotted acres. It was the resting-hour for most of them; the huge dun oxen were unyoked and gleaning where they could, and the simple luncheon of bread and cheese, washed down with the red wine of the straw-covered flasks, was as gratefully munched by the circle of peasants in the pleasant shade of the trees.

It was a menu as unalterable as the everlasting hills, for whatever difficulty the Italian housewife may have in procuring the fare, she is not harassed with the necessitous struggle for variety. The harvesters were lending themselves wholly to the leisure of the moment, and it is from this happy abandonment that the lazy sightseer in Italy judges the countrymen to be as indolent as himself. We who thumb our time-tables for the late trains, and from our car-window watch the peasantry stretched out for the noon siesta, were sleeping in the gray hours of the early morning while these contadini were out in the fields, or walking to market at the head of the slow-going ox-team, or setting the house to rights for the long day's work at the wearisome hand-loom. If there are complaints, it is not from the burden of work, but rather from the lack of it; though they are a cheerful people, in sunshine or in storm, and as we returned their bright