It was at the close of a day in January that I first knew the Villa Nardi,--a warm, lovely day, at the hour when the sun was just going behind the Capo di Sorrento, in order to disrobe a little, I fancy, before plunging into the Mediterranean off the end of Capri, as is his wont about this time of year. When we turned out of the little piazza, our driver was obliged to take off one of our team of three horses driven abreast, so that we could pa.s.s through the narrow and crooked streets, or rather lanes of blank walls. With cracking whip, rattling wheels, and shouting to clear the way, we drove into the Strada di San Francisca, and to an arched gateway. This led down a straight path, between olives and orange and lemon-trees, gleaming with shining leaves and fruit of gold, with hedges of rose-trees in full bloom, to another leafy arch, through which I saw tropical trees, and a terrace with a low wall and battered busts guarding it, and beyond, the blue sea, a white sail or two slanting across the opening, and the whiteness of Naples some twenty miles away on the sh.o.r.e.
The n.o.ble family of the Villa did not descend into the garden to welcome us, as we should have liked; in fact, they have been absent now for a long time, so long that even their ghosts, if they ever pace the terrace-walk towards the convent, would appear strange to one who should meet them; and yet our hostess, the Tramontano, did what the ancient occupants scarcely could have done, gave us the choice of rooms in the entire house. The stranger who finds himself in this secluded paradise, at this season, is always at a loss whether to take a room on the sea, with all its changeable loveliness, but no sun, or one overlooking the garden, where the sun all day pours itself into the orange boughs, and where the birds are just beginning to get up a spring twitteration. My friend, whose capacity for taking in the luxurious repose of this region is something extraordinary, has tried, I believe, nearly every room in the house, and has at length gone up to a solitary room on the top, where, like a bird on a tree he looks all ways, and, so to say, swings in the entrancing air. But, wherever you are, you will grow into content with your situation.
At the Villa Nardi we have no sound of wheels, no noise of work or traffic, no suggestion of conflict. I am under the impression that everything that was to have been done has been done. I am, it is true, a little afraid that the Saracens will come here again, and carry off more of the nut-brown girls, who lean over the walls, and look down on us from under the boughs. I am not quite sure that a French Admiral of the Republic will not some morning anchor his three-decker in front, and open fire on us; but nothing else can happen. Naples is a thousand miles away. The boom of the saluting guns of Castel Nuovo is to us scarcely an echo of modern life. Rome does not exist. And as for London and New York, they send their people and their newspapers here, but no pulse of unrest from them disturbs our tranquillity. Hemmed in on the land side by high walls, groves, and gardens, perched upon a rock two hundred feet above the water, how much more secure from invasion is this than any fabled island of the southern sea, or any remote stream where the boats of the lotus-eaters float!
There is a little terrace and flower-plat, where we sometimes sit, and over the wall of which we like to lean, and look down the cliff to the sea. This terrace is the common ground of many exotics as well as native trees and shrubs. Here are the magnolia, the laurel, the j.a.panese medlar, the oleander, the pepper, the bay, the date-palm, a tree called the plumbago, another from the Cape of Good Hope, the pomegranate, the elder in full leaf, the olive, salvia, heliotrope; close by is a banana-tree.
I find a good deal of companionship in the rows of plaster busts that stand on the wall, in all att.i.tudes of listlessness, and all stages of decay. I thought at first they were penates of the premises; but better acquaintance has convinced me that they never were G.o.ds, but the clayey representations of great men and n.o.ble dames. The stains of time are on them; some have lost a nose or an ear; and one has parted with a still more important member--his head,--an accident that might profitably have befallen his neighbor, whose curly locks and villainously low forehead proclaim him a Roman emperor. Cut in the face of the rock is a walled and winding way down to the water.
I see below the archway where it issues from the underground recesses of our establishment; and there stands a bust, in serious expectation that some one will walk out and saunter down among the rocks; but no one ever does. Just at the right is a little beach, with a few old houses, and a mimic stir of life, a little curve in the cliff, the mouth of the gorge, where the waves come in with a lazy swash. Some fishing-boats ride there; and the shallow water, as I look down this sunny morning, is thickly strewn with floating peels of oranges and lemons, as if some one was brewing a gigantic bowl of punch. And there is an uncommon stir of life; for a schooner is shipping a cargo of oranges, and the entire population is in a clamor. Donkeys are coming down the winding way, with a heavy basket on either flank; stout girls are stepping lightly down with loads on their heads; the drivers shout, the donkeys bray, the people jabber and order each other about; and the oranges, in a continual stream, are poured into the long, narrow vessel, rolling in with a thud, until there is a yellow ma.s.s of them. Shouting, scolding, singing, and braying, all come up to me a little mellowed. The disorder is not so great as on the opera stage of San Carlo in Naples; and the effect is much more pleasing.
This settlement, the marina, under the cliff, used to extend along the sh.o.r.e; and a good road ran down there close by the water. The rock has split off, and covered it; and perhaps the sh.o.r.e has sunk.
They tell me that those who dig down in the edge of the shallow water find sunken walls, and the remains of old foundations of Roman workmanship. People who wander there pick up bits of marble, serpentine, and malachite,--remains of the palaces that long ago fell into the sea, and have not left even the names of their owners and builders,-the ancient loafers who idled away their days as everybody must in this seductive spot. Not far from here, they point out the veritable caves of the Sirens, who have now shut up house, and gone away, like the rest of the n.o.bility. If I had been a mariner in their day, I should have made no effort to sail by and away from their soothing sh.o.r.e.
I went, one day, through a long, sloping arch, near the sailors"
Chapel of St. Antonino, past a pretty shrine of the Virgin, down the zigzag path to this little marina; but it is better to be content with looking at it from above, and imagining how delightful it would be to push off in one of the little tubs of boats. Sometimes, at night, I hear the fishermen coming home, singing in their l.u.s.ty fashion; and I think it is a good haven to arrive at. I never go down to search for stones on the beach: I like to believe that there are great treasures there, which I might find; and I know that the green and brown and spotty appearance of the water is caused by the showing through of the pavements of courts, and marble floors of palaces, which might vanish if I went nearer, such a place of illusion is this.
The Villa Nardi stands in pleasant relations to Vesuvius, which is just across the bay, and is not so useless as it has been represented; it is our weather-sign and prophet. When the white plume on his top floats inland, that is one sort of weather; when it streams out to sea, that is another. But I can never tell which is which: nor in my experience does it much matter; for it seems impossible for Sorrento to do anything but woo us with gentle weather. But the use of Vesuvius, after all, is to furnish us a background for the violet light at sundown, when the villages at its foot gleam like a silver fringe. I have become convinced of one thing: it is always best when you build a house to have it front toward a volcano, if you can. There is just that lazy activity about a volcano, ordinarily, that satisfies your demand for something that is not exactly dead, and yet does not disturb you.
Sometimes when I wake in the night,--though I don"t know why one ever wakes in the night, or the daytime either here,--I hear the bell of the convent, which is in our demesne,--a convent which is suppressed, and where I hear, when I pa.s.s in the morning, the humming of a school. At first I tried to count the hour; but when the bell went on to strike seventeen, and even twenty-one o"clock, the absurdity of the thing came over me, and I wondered whether it was some frequent call to prayer for a feeble band of sisters remaining, some reminder of midnight penance and vigil, or whether it was not something more ghostly than that, and was not responded to by shades of nuns, who were wont to look out from their narrow latticed windows upon these same gardens, as long ago as when the beautiful Queen Joanna used to come down here to repent--if she ever did repent--of her wanton ways in Naples.
On one side of the garden is a suppressed monastery. The narrow front towards the sea has a secluded little balcony, where I like to fancy the poor orphaned souls used to steal out at night for a breath of fresh air, and perhaps to see, as I did one dark evening, Naples with its lights like a conflagration on the horizon. Upon the tiles of the parapet are cheerful devices, the crossbones tied with a cord, and the like. How many heavy-hearted recluses have stood in that secluded nook, and been tempted by the sweet, lulling sound of the waves below; how many have paced along this narrow terrace, and felt like prisoners who wore paths in the stone floor where they trod; and how many stupid louts have walked there, insensible to all the charm of it!
If I pa.s.s into the Tramontano garden, it is not to escape the presence of history, or to get into the modern world, where travelers are arriving, and where there is the bustle and proverbial discontent of those who travel to enjoy themselves. In the pretty garden, which is a constant surprise of odd nooks and sunny hiding-places, with ruins, and most luxuriant ivy, is a little cottage where, I am told in confidence, the young king of Bavaria slept three nights not very long ago. I hope he slept well. But more important than the sleep, or even death, of a king, is the birth of a poet, I take it; and within this inclosure, on the eleventh day of March, 1541, Torquato Ta.s.so, most melancholy of men, first saw the light; and here was born his n.o.ble sister Cornelia, the descendants of whose union with the cavalier Spasiano still live here, and in a manner keep the memory of the poet green with the present generation. I am indebted to a gentleman who is of this lineage for many favors, and for precise information as to the position in the house that stood here of the very room in which Ta.s.so was born. It is also minutely given in a memoir of Ta.s.so and his family, by Bartolommeo Capa.s.so, whose careful researches have disproved the slipshod statements of the guidebooks, that the poet was born in a house which is still standing, farther to the west, and that the room has fallen into the sea. The descendant of the sister pointed out to me the spot on the terrace of the Tramontano where the room itself was, when the house still stood; and, of course, seeing is believing. The sun shone full upon it, as we stood there; and the air was full of the scent of tropical fruit and just-coming blossoms. One could not desire a more tranquil scene of advent into life; and the wandering, broken-hearted author of "Jerusalem Delivered" never found at court or palace any retreat so soothing as that offered him here by his steadfast sister.
If I were an antiquarian, I think I should have had Ta.s.so born at the Villa Nardi, where I like best to stay, and where I find traces of many pilgrims from other countries. Here, in a little corner room on the terrace, Mrs. Stowe dreamed and wrote; and I expect, every morning, as I take my morning sun here by the gate, Agnes of Sorrento will come down the sweet-scented path with a basket of oranges on her head.
SEA AND Sh.o.r.e
It is not always easy, when one stands upon the highlands which encircle the Piano di Sorrento, in some conditions of the atmosphere, to tell where the sea ends and the sky begins. It seems.
practicable, at such times, for one to take ship and sail up into heaven. I have often, indeed, seen white sails climbing up there, and fishing-boats, at secure anchor I suppose, riding apparently like balloons in the hazy air. Sea and air and land here are all kin, I suspect, and have certain immaterial qualities in common. The contours of the sh.o.r.es and the outlines of the hills are as graceful as the mobile waves; and if there is anywhere ruggedness and sharpness, the atmosphere throws a friendly veil over it, and tones all that is inharmonious into the repose of beauty.
The atmosphere is really something more than a medium: it is a drapery, woven, one could affirm, with colors, or dipped in oriental dyes. One might account thus for the prismatic colors I have often seen on the horizon at noon, when the sun was pouring down floods of clear golden light. The simple light here, if one could ever represent it by pen, pencil, or brush, would draw the world hither to bathe in it. It is not thin sunshine, but a royal profusion, a golden substance, a transforming quality, a vesture of splendor for all these Mediterranean sh.o.r.es.
The most comprehensive idea of Sorrento and the great plain on which it stands, imbedded almost out of sight in foliage, we obtained one day from our boat, as we put out round the Capo di Sorrento, and stood away for Capri. There was not wind enough for sails, but there were chopping waves, and swell enough to toss us about, and to produce bright flashes of light far out at sea. The red-shirted rowers silently bent to their long sweeps; and I lay in the tossing bow, and studied the high, receding sh.o.r.e. The picture is simple, a precipice of rock or earth, faced with masonry in spots, almost of uniform height from point to point of the little bay, except where a deep gorge has split the rock, and comes to the sea, forming a cove, where a cl.u.s.ter of rude buildings is likely to gather. Along the precipice, which now juts and now recedes a little, are villas, hotels, old convents, gardens, and groves. I can see steps and galleries cut in the face of the cliff, and caves and caverns, natural and artificial: for one can cut this tufa with a knife; and it would hardly seem preposterous to attempt to dig out a cool, roomy mansion in this rocky front with a spade.
As we pull away, I begin to see the depth of the plain of Sorrento, with its villages, walled roads, its groves of oranges, olives, lemons, its figs, pomegranates, almonds, mulberries, and acacias; and soon the terraces above, where the vineyards are planted, and the olives also. These terraces must be a brave sight in the spring, when the ma.s.ses of olives are white as snow with blossoms, which fill all the plain with their sweet perfume. Above the terraces, the eye reaches the fine outline of the hill; and, to the east, the bare precipice of rock, softened by the purple light; and turning still to the left, as the boat lazily swings, I have Vesuvius, the graceful dip into the plain, and the rise to the heights of Naples, Nisida, the shining houses of Pozzuoli, Cape Misenum, Procida, and rough Ischia. Rounding the headland, Capri is before us, so sharp and clear that we seem close to it; but it is a weary pull before we get under its rocky side.
Returning from Capri late in the afternoon, we had one of those effects which are the despair of artists. I had been told that twilights are short here, and that, when the sun disappeared, color vanished from the sky. There was a wonderful light on all the inner bay, as we put off from sh.o.r.e. Ischia was one ma.s.s of violet color, As we got from under the island, there was the sun, a red ball of fire, just dipping into the sea. At once the whole horizon line of water became a bright crimson, which deepened as evening advanced, glowing with more intense fire, and holding a broad band of what seemed solid color for more than three quarters of an hour. The colors, meantime, on the level water, never were on painter"s palette, and never were counterfeited by the changeable silks of eastern looms; and this gorgeous spectacle continued till the stars came out, crowding the sky with silver points.
Our boatmen, who had been reinforced at Capri, and were inspired either by the wine of the island or the beauty of the night, pulled with new vigor, and broke out again and again into the wild songs of this coast. A favorite was the Garibaldi song, which invariably ended in a cheer and a tiger, and threw the singers into such a spurt of excitement that the oars forgot to keep time, and there was more splash than speed. The singers all sang one part in minor: there was no harmony, the voices were not rich, and the melody was not remarkable; but there was, after all, a wild pathos in it. Music is very much here what it is in Naples. I have to keep saying to myself that Italy is a land of song; else I should think that people mistake noise for music.
The boatmen are an honest set of fellows, as Italians go; and, let us hope, not unworthy followers of their patron, St. Antonino, whose chapel is on the edge of the gorge near the Villa Nardi. A silver image of the saint, half life-size, stands upon the rich marble altar. This valuable statue has been, if tradition is correct, five times captured and carried away by marauders, who have at different times sacked Sorrento of its marbles, bronzes, and precious things, and each time, by some mysterious providence, has found its way back again,--an instance of constancy in a solid silver image which is worthy of commendation. The little chapel is hung all about with votive offerings in wax of arms, legs, heads, hands, effigies, and with coa.r.s.e lithographs, in frames, of storms at sea and perils of ships, hung up by sailors who, having escaped the dangers of the deep, offer these tributes to their dear saint. The skirts of the image are worn quite smooth with kissing. Underneath it, at the back of the altar, an oil light is always burning; and below repose the bones of the holy man.
The whole sh.o.r.e is fascinating to one in an idle mood, and is good mousing-ground for the antiquarian. For myself, I am content with one generalization, which I find saves a world of bother and perplexity: it is quite safe to style every excavation, cavern, circular wall, or arch by the sea, a Roman bath. It is the final resort of the antiquarians. This theory has kept me from entering the discussion, whether the substructions in the cliff under the Poggio Syracuse, a royal villa, are temples of the Sirens, or caves of Ulysses. I only know that I descend to the sea there by broad interior flights of steps, which lead through galleries and corridors, and high, vaulted pa.s.sages, whence extend apartments and caves far reaching into the solid rock. At intervals are landings, where arched windows are cut out to the sea, with stone seats and protecting walls. At the base of the cliff I find a hewn pa.s.sage, as if there had once been here a way of embarkation; and enormous fragments of rocks, with steps cut in them, which have fallen from above.
Were these anything more than royal pleasure galleries, where one could sit in coolness in the heat of summer and look on the bay and its shipping, in the days when the great Roman fleet used to lie opposite, above the point of Misenum? How many brave and gay retinues have swept down these broad interior stairways, let us say in the picturesque Middle Ages, to embark on voyages of pleasure or warlike forays! The steps are well worn, and must have been trodden for ages, by n.o.bles and robbers, peasants and sailors, priests of more than one religion, and traders of many seas, who have gone, and left no record. The sun was slanting his last rays into the corridors as I musingly looked down from one of the arched openings, quite spellbound by the strangeness and dead silence of the place, broken only by the plash of waves on the sandy beach below. I had found my way down through a wooden door half ajar; and I thought of the possibility of some one"s shutting it for the night, and leaving me a prisoner to await the spectres which I have no doubt throng here when it grows dark. Hastening up out of these chambers of the past, I escaped into the upper air, and walked rapidly home through the narrow orange lanes.
ON TOP OF THE HOUSE
The tiptop of the Villa Nardi is a flat roof, with a wall about it three feet high, and some little turreted affairs, that look very much like chimneys. Joseph, the gray-haired servitor, has brought my chair and table up here to-day, and here I am, established to write.
I am here above most earthly annoyances, and on a level with the heavenly influences. It has always seemed to me that the higher one gets, the easier it must be to write; and that, especially at a great elevation, one could strike into lofty themes, and launch out, without fear of shipwreck on any of the earthly headlands, in his aerial voyages. Yet, after all, he would be likely to arrive nowhere, I suspect; or, to change the figure, to find that, in parting with the taste of the earth, he had produced a flavorless composition. If it were not for the haze in the horizon to-day, I could distinguish the very house in Naples--that of Manso, Marquis of Villa,--where Ta.s.so found a home, and where John Milton was entertained at a later day by that hospitable n.o.bleman. I wonder, if he had come to the Villa Nardi and written on the roof, if the theological features of his epic would have been softened, and if he would not have received new suggestions for the adornment of the garden. Of course, it is well that his immortal production was not composed on this roof, and in sight of these seductive sh.o.r.es, or it would have been more strongly flavored with cla.s.sic mythology than it is. But, letting Milton go, it may be necessary to say that my writing to-day has nothing to do with my theory of composition in an elevated position; for this is the laziest place that I have yet found.
I am above the highest olive-trees, and, if I turned that way, should look over the tops of what seems a vast grove of them, out of which a white roof, and an old time-eaten tower here and there, appears; and the sun is flooding them with waves of light, which I think a person delicately enough organized could hear beat. Beyond the brown roofs of the town, the terraced hills arise, in semicircular embrace of the plain; and the fine veil over them is partly the natural shimmer of the heat, and partly the silver duskiness of the olive-leaves. I sit with my back to all this, taking the entire force of this winter sun, which is full of life and genial heat, and does not scorch one, as I remember such a full flood of it would at home. It is putting sweetness, too, into the oranges, which, I observe, are getting redder and softer day by day. We have here, by the way, such a habit of taking up an orange, weighing it in the hand, and guessing if it is ripe, that the test is extending to other things. I saw a gentleman this morning, at breakfast, weighing an egg in the same manner; and some one asked him if it was ripe.
It seems to me that the Mediterranean was never bluer than it is to-day. It has a shade or two the advantage of the sky: though I like the sky best, after all; for it is less opaque, and offers an illimitable opportunity of exploration. Perhaps this is because I am nearer to it. There are some little ruffles of air on the sea, which I do not feel here, making broad spots of shadow, and here and there flecks and sparkles. But the schooners sail idly, and the fishing-boats that have put out from the marina float in the most dreamy manner. I fear that the fishermen who have made a show of industry, and got away from their wives, who are busily weaving nets on sh.o.r.e, are yielding to the seductions of the occasion, and making a day of it. And, as I look at them, I find myself debating which I would rather be, a fisherman there in the boat, rocked by the swell, and warmed by the sun, or a friar, on the terrace of the garden on the summit of Deserto, lying perfectly tranquil, and also soaked in the sun. There is one other person, now that I think of it, who may be having a good time to-day, though I do not know that I envy him.
His business is a new one to me, and is an occupation that one would not care to recommend to a friend until he had tried it: it is being carried about in a basket. As I went up the new Ma.s.sa road the other day, I met a ragged, stout, and rather dirty woman, with a large shallow basket on her head. In it lay her husband, a large man, though I think a little abbreviated as to his legs. The woman asked alms. Talk of Diogenes in his tub! How must the world look to a man in a basket, riding about on his wife"s head? When I returned, she had put him down beside the road in the sun, and almost in danger of the pa.s.sing vehicles. I suppose that the affectionate creature thought that, if he got a new injury in this way, his value in the beggar market would be increased. I do not mean to do this exemplary wife any injustice; and I only suggest the idea in this land, where every beggar who is born with a deformity has something to thank the Virgin for. This custom of carrying your husband on your head in a basket has something to recommend it, and is an exhibition of faith on the one hand, and of devotion on the other, that is seldom met with. Its consideration is commended to my countrywomen at home. It is, at least, a new commentary on the apostolic remark, that the man is the head of the woman. It is, in some respects, a happy division of labor in the walk of life: she furnishes the locomotive power, and he the directing brains, as he lies in the sun and looks abroad; which reminds me that the sun is getting hot on my back. The little bunch of bells in the convent tower is jangling out a suggestion of worship, or of the departure of the hours. It is time to eat an orange.
Vesuvius appears to be about on a level with my eyes and I never knew him to do himself more credit than to-day. The whole coast of the bay is in a sort of obscuration, thicker than an Indian summer haze; and the veil extends almost to the top of Vesuvius. But his summit is still distinct, and out of it rises a gigantic billowy column of white smoke, greater in quant.i.ty than on any previous day of our sojourn; and the sun turns it to silver. Above a long line of ordinary looking clouds, float great white ma.s.ses, formed of the sulphurous vapor. This manufacture of clouds in a clear, sunny day has an odd appearance; but it is easy enough, if one has such a laboratory as Vesuvius. How it tumbles up the white smoke! It is piled up now, I should say, a thousand feet above the crater, straight into the blue sky,--a pillar of cloud by day. One might sit here all day watching it, listening the while to the melodious spring singing of the hundreds of birds which have come to take possession of the garden, receiving southern reinforcements from Sicily and Tunis every morning, and think he was happy. But the morning has gone; and I have written nothing.
THE PRICE OF ORANGES
If ever a northern wanderer could be suddenly transported to look down upon the Piano di Sorrento, he would not doubt that he saw the Garden of the Hesperides. The orange-trees cannot well be fuller: their branches bend with the weight of fruit. With the almond-trees in full flower, and with the silver sheen of the olive leaves, the oranges are apples of gold in pictures of silver. As I walk in these sunken roads, and between these high walls, the orange boughs everywhere hang over; and through the open gates of villas I look down alleys of golden glimmer, roses and geraniums by the walk, and the fruit above,--gardens of enchantment, with never a dragon, that I can see, to guard them.
All the highways and the byways, the streets and lanes, wherever I go, from the sea to the tops of the hills, are strewn with orange-peel; so that one, looking above and below, comes back from a walk with a golden dazzle in his eyes,--a sense that yellow is the prevailing color. Perhaps the kerchiefs of the dark-skinned girls and women, which take that tone, help the impression. The inhabitants are all orange-eaters. The high walls show that the gardens are protected with great care; yet the fruit seems to be as free as apples are in a remote New England town about cider-time.
I have been trying, ever since I have been here, to ascertain the price of oranges; not for purposes of exportation, nor yet for the personal importation that I daily practice, but in order to give an American basis of fact to these idle chapters. In all the paths I meet, daily, girls and boys bearing on their heads large baskets of the fruit, and little children with bags and bundles of the same, as large as they can stagger under; and I understand they are carrying them to the packers, who ship them to New York, or to the depots, where I see them lying in yellow heaps, and where men and women are cutting them up, and removing the peel, which goes to England for preserves. I am told that these oranges are sold for a couple of francs a hundred. That seems to me so dear that I am not tempted into any speculation, but stroll back to the Tramontano, in the gardens of which I find better terms.
The only trouble is to find a sweet tree; for the Sorrento oranges are usually sour in February; and one needs to be a good judge of the fruit, and know the male orange from the female, though which it is that is the sweeter I can never remember (and should not dare to say, if I did, in the present state of feeling on the woman question),--or he might as well eat a lemon. The mercenary aspect of my query does not enter in here. I climb into a tree, and reach out to the end of the branch for an orange that has got reddish in the sun, that comes off easily and is heavy; or I tickle a large one on the top bough with a cane pole; and if it drops readily, and has a fine grain, I call it a cheap one. I can usually tell whether they are good by splitting them open and eating a quarter. The Italians pare their oranges as we do apples; but I like best to open them first, and see the yellow meat in the white casket. After you have eaten a few from one tree, you can usually tell whether it is a good tree; but there is nothing certain about it,--one bough that gets the sun will be better than another that does not, and one half of an orange will fill your mouth with more delicious juices than the other half.
The oranges that you knock off with your stick, as you walk along the lanes, don"t cost anything; but they are always sour, as I think the girls know who lean over the wall, and look on with a smile: and, in that, they are more sensible than the lively dogs which bark at you from the top, and wake all the neighborhood with their clamor. I have no doubt the oranges have a market price; but I have been seeking the value the gardeners set on them themselves. As I walked towards the heights, the other morning, and pa.s.sed an orchard, the gardener, who saw my ineffectual efforts, with a very long cane, to reach the boughs of a tree, came down to me with a basketful he had been picking. As an experiment on the price, I offered him a two-centime piece, which is a sort of satire on the very name of money,--when he desired me to help myself to as many oranges as I liked. He was a fine-looking fellow, with a spick-span new red Phrygian cap; and I had n"t the heart to take advantage of his generosity, especially as his oranges were not of the sweetest. One ought never to abuse generosity.
Another experience was of a different sort, and ill.u.s.trates the Italian love of bargaining, and their notion of a sliding scale of prices. One of our expeditions to the hills was one day making its long, straggling way through the narrow street of a little village of the Piano, when I lingered behind my companions, attracted by a handcart with several large baskets of oranges. The cart stood untended in the street; and selecting a large orange, which would measure twelve inches in circ.u.mference, I turned to look for the owner. After some time a fellow got from the open front of the neighboring cobbler"s shop, where he sat with his lazy cronies, listening to the honest gossip of the follower of St. Crispin, and sauntered towards me.
"How much for this?" I ask.
"One franc, signor," says the proprietor, with a polite bow, holding up one finger.
I shake my head, and intimate that that is altogether too much, in fact, preposterous.
The proprietor is very indifferent, and shrugs his shoulders in an amiable manner. He picks up a fair, handsome orange, weighs it in his hand, and holds it up temptingly. That also is one, franc.
I suggest one sou as a fair price, a suggestion which he only receives with a smile of slight pity, and, I fancy, a little disdain.
A woman joins him, and also holds up this and that gold-skinned one for my admiration.
As I stand, sorting over the fruit, trying to please myself with size, color, and texture, a little crowd has gathered round; and I see, by a glance, that all the occupations in that neighborhood, including loafing, are temporarily suspended to witness the trade.
The interest of the circle visibly increases; and others take such a part in the transaction that I begin to doubt if the first man is, after all, the proprietor.
At length I select two oranges, and again demand the price. There is a little consultation and jabber, when I am told that I can have both for a franc. I, in turn, sigh, shrug my shoulders, and put down the oranges, amid a chorus of exclamations over my graspingness. My offer of two sous is met with ridicule, but not with indifference. I can see that it has made a sensation. These simple, idle children of the sun begin to show a little excitement. I at length determine upon a bold stroke, and resolve to show myself the Napoleon of oranges, or to meet my Waterloo. I pick out four of the largest oranges in the basket, while all eyes are fixed on me intently, and, for the first time, pull out a piece of money. It is a two-sous piece. I offer it for the four oranges.