Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 152, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 July 1917 — Peasant Life In Northern Italy [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Peasant Life In Northern Italy

IT IS now nearly two years since Italy took her place beside the allies in the life and death struggle that Is holding the world in its grip, and yet the calm and quiet to be met with here in North Italy and close up to the firing line cannot fall to strike even the most casual observer, writes a correspondent of Country Life. You hear the roar of the cannon, some days almost continuously, just over the mountains that divide the “Veneto” from Austria; day by day the hospital train passes along the valley carrying its load of sick and wounded down froip the front; day by day motors and Tied Cross cars dash along the high road at breakneck speed, giving the impression that matters of life and death hang on the pace at which they can reach their destination ; and yet the peasants work on in steady adherence to their tasks barely looking up to notice all this unwonted movement, absorbed moretban usual at this moment in the land. This, however, is not from indifference as to the war; far from it, for the subject is one that all alike are keenly Interested in, and every family has sent one and often two or more members to fight for their king and country. But the Italian peasant also loves the soil on which he and his fathers before him have worked; his heart is in the land, and the success or failure of the crops Is to him a matter of well-being or starvation. Hard Life, but Healthful. In these times, too, the work requires an unwonted degree of attention and labor, for every acre must be fully cultivated. All the men from the age

of twenty-one to forty are, with few exceptions, away at the front, and those who remain must make good the deficiency. In this they have, however, willing helpmates in the women. At all times the women work in proportion as hard as their men-folk in the fields, and when to these duties are added those of mothers and housewives it is small wonder that they age before their time, and that a pretty fresh girl of eighteen is an old woman at forty. Their life, though hard in some ways, is on the other hand extremely healthful; their habits are simple and frugal, and they slide into old age with constitutions untouched by sharp vicissitudes of climate—the winters being excessively severe and the summers very ■ hot—interested and busy up to the last in all that relates to the land, the cattle, and their children. Family life is on patriarchlal lines; sons, daughters-in-law and their children (of which there is never any lack) all live with the parents under the same roof; all share the same food —composed chiefly of beans, Indian corn and cheese —and all share one purse, kept, often pretty tightly too, by the “head of the family” (U capo di famiglia), who receives any extraneous sums that any of bls children may earn on his or her own account, and doles out the money required for clothes, food, or any small expenses that the event of a wedding, a baptism or a funeral may call forth. The food question is, perhaps, the simplest of the lot. The peasant In this part of Italy shares with the owner of the land all that the land pro-

duces. He puts Into it his labor, he draws from it the half that that labor brings as his portion; and this arrangement of the "mezzadria,” or half-and-half system as we might call it, is, If honestly adhered to, fairer and more advantageous to all concerned than any other. By It the peasant has as keen, if not a keener interest than his landlord in the tilling of the soil, in keeping under the weeds, pruning and spraying the vines, hoeing the Indian corn, tending the cattle, and as from all these sources one-half goes to him, it concerns him closely to make the profits as abundant as possible. His day’s work is generally a long one, especially in the summer when he will be up and about at 4 a. m., but , as he can divide his hours entirely to suit his own convenience the hardship is not really a great one. In the hot months he will knock off work for a long spell in the middle of the day and after a good siesta he will begin again with a leisure that betokens much liberty of action and a total absence of any hint of being “driven.” If it be true that “it is the pace that kills,* your Italian peasant will certainly not be exposed to that kind of death! Women Doing Men’s Work. The war, though, has altered all this easy, calm-going state of things. The women, as in France, are acting in the place of the men, and are doing it, too, in a very thorough and admirable manner. Many of them handle the scythe in masterly fashion; others, when necessary, see to the management ot the farm; they pile up the high loads of hay on to the ox-drawn wagons with a will and energy, and when once the

difficulty (and it is a serious one just now in Italy) of obtaining wool can be got over they devote their spare moments to knitting socks for the men on the heights. The markets all through the country are the gainers by their industry, as well in picturesque effects as in useful and profitable supplies. Who that has ever been at Verona, in late summer, say, but will recall the scene in the “Piazza delle Erbe,” with its sea of wide white umbrellas pitched all down that lovely market place, with the baskets stacked with apples, white and black grapes, pears, peaches, medlars and quinces, while on every spare inch of ground .are piled vegetables, beans, Carrots, potatoes, cabbages, cardoons, with any number of pumpkins, huge in size, and in beautiful tones of color varying from dark green to bronze, orange and yellow? . The sites chosen for these fruit and vegetable markets are, when possible, beside some fountain, or occasionally at the of some great palaee, as for instance, at Florence at the Strozzi and Riccardi palaces, where the wide projecting roofs make a welcome shade, for the flowers which are arranged so tastefully upon their cool stones; more often, indeed, a small “piazza” or square is chosen that boasts a supply of water in its midst, around which “the neighbors come and laugh and gossip,’* relating the success or failure of their bargains, and more often than not indulging in language—often used quite unconsciously —for which their parish priest will reprimand-them one of these days from the altar.

A MARKET PLACE