Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 3.djvu/464

 458 Roba di Roma. [April,

consecutive days, first, for nine days previous to the Festa of the Madonna, which occurs on the 8th of December, and afterwards for the nine days preceding Christmas. The same words and music serve, however, for both celebrations. The pifferari always go in couples, one playing on the zampogna, or bagpipe, the bass and treble accompaniment, and the other on the piffero, or pastoral pipe, which carries the air; and for the month before Christmas the sound of their instruments resounds through the streets of Rome, wherever there is a shrine, whether at the corners of the streets, in the depths of the shops, down little lanes, in the centre of the Corso, in the interior courts of the palaces, or on the stairways of private houses.

Their costume is extremely picturesque. On their heads they wear conical felt hats adorned with a frayed peacock's feather, or a faded band of red cords and tassels, their bodies are clad in red waistcoats, blue jackets, and small-clothes of skin or yellowish homespun cloth, skin sandals are bound to their feet with cords that interlace each other up the leg as far as the knee, and over all is worn a long brown or blue cloak with a short cape, buckled closely round the neck. Sometimes, but rarely, this cloak is of a deep red with a scalloped cape. As they stand before the pictures of the Madonna, their hats placed on the ground before them, and their thick, black, dishevelled hair covering their sunburnt brows, blowing away on their instruments or pausing to sing their novena, they form a picture which every artist desires to paint. Their dress is common to nearly all the peasantry of the Abruzzi, and, worn and tattered as it often is, it has a richness and harmony of tint which no new clothes could ever have, and for which the costumes of the shops and regular models offer a poor substitute. It is the old story again. The new and clean is not so paintable, not so picturesque, as the tarnished and soiled. The worn blue of the cloak is " softened by the dull gray of the threads beneath, patches of various colors are often let into the jacket or breeches, the hat is lustreless from age, and rusty as an old wall, and the first vivid red of the waistcoat is toned by constant use to a purely pictorial hue. Besides, the true pifferaro wears his costume as if it belonged to him and had always been worn by him, so that it has none of that got-up look which spoils everything. From the sandals and corded leggings, which, in the Neapolitan dialect, are termed cioce, the pifferari are often called ciociari.

Their Christmas pilgrimages are by no means prompted by purely religious motives, though, undoubtedly, such considerations have some weight with them, the common peasantry being a religiously inclined people, and often making pilgrimages simply from a sense of duty and propriety. But in these wanderings to Rome, their principal object is to earn a little money to support them during the winter months, when their "occupation is gone." As they are hired in Rome by the owners of the various houses adorned with a Madonna-shrine (of which there are over fifteen hundred in the city) to play before them at the rate of a paul or so for each full novena, and as they can easily play before thirty or forty a day, they often return, if their luck is good, with a tolerable little sum in their pockets. Besides this, they often stand as models, if they are good-looking fellows, and thus add to their store ; and then again, the forestieri (for, as the ancient Romans called strangers barbari, so their descendants call them foresters, wood-men, wild-men) occasionally drop baiocchi and pauls into their hats, still further to increase it.

Sometimes it is a father and son who play together, but oftener two old friends who make the pilgrimage in pairs. This morning, as I was going out for a walk round the walls, two admirable specimens of the pifferari were performing the novena before a shrine at the corner of the street. The player of the zampogna was an old man, with a sad, but very