VINTAGE AND VINTAGERS IN TUSCANY.
FAR afield from the walls of Florence or Pisa, in deep folds and windings of the long Tuscan bills, lies an immense city, ancient, and roughly elegant, broad-cast over a whole province. In no other way can the populousness of this fertile Tuscany be expressed ; here are no solitudes, except at the tip of the bills, where the soil is too thin for vines, and is left to brushwood, birds, and carpets of wild lavender. All below is cultivated inch by inch. A wave of corn, a row of mulberries with their vines, a square of maize, surround the massive house of the tiller of that little allotment, with its small pointed hay-ricks, its ample paved courtyard, and low archways, through which the vast, milk-white oxen come pushing, with bent heads. Dominating these peasants' houses, and generally within sight, is the owner's villa, "La Villa," par excelhnce,—strong as a fortress, with the deep brown roof, the corner towers, and the long architectural lines peculiar to the country ; broad, blank spaces, few windows, walls sloping outwards towards the ground, a chapel with its belfry, and a well on the terrace. Human life is never out of sight or out of hearing, nor could a greater contrast be found than that which exists between this mixture of poverty, labour, and antique elegance, and the elaborate, deliberate solitude forced upon a country by the boundaries of an English park. Solitude is beautiful where it is inevitable, but it loses that great element of beauty—sincerity—when it contradicts the natural balance of life outside, in the village and the field. We are con- tent to let the question be, in an article like the present, purely one of msthetics ; ethically, politically, and econo- mically, the Italian peasant, who holds his land on the system of mezzeria, called in France metayage, or a division of profits between capital and labour, compares well, as far as a careful in- quiry into his condition has shown us, with all the corresponding or quasi-corresponding classes elsewhere, except the happier peasant.proprietor of France. Necessarily such an inquiry is made, at the present time, under the most unfavourable of possible cir- cumstances. Taxation on the profits of agriculture has taken during the last years the proportions of a confiscation ; all enter- prise is paralysed ; the nobles continue the cultivation of their patrimonial lands, so that agricultural labour continues, but so languidly that many contadini have already left their vines for the towns, where misery grows daily.
No lighter-hearted people, in spite of the constant self-denials of thrifty poverty, can be found than the Tuscans of good peasant blood. They trace their lineage with the same precision as do their employers, and through the same number of centuries, and hold themselves aloof from mixture with the ruder villagers. The conscription, more than poverty, might have broken down these happy spirits, and has indeed done much to overcloud those Italian homes which hold the domestic affections dearer than peasant families do elsewhere ; duty and discipline among members of a family, or more properly, of a clan, being carried in Tuscany to curious lengths. Obedience from the young is rewarded by the old with this constant care,—the provision of portions for their sons and daughters ; this is the motive of labour, thrift, sacrifice. The peasant rises with the earliest light in summer, for the pro- cesses of the many varying harvests of his year, from the hay to the olive, require vigilant attention. He breaks his fast with bread, rather dark in colour, but fine and of excellent quality, and with mezzo-rino, which is a thin and rather acrid beverage, made by pouring water over the grapes after the pressing ; at mid-day he again takes bread and mezzo-rino, and after sunset comes his frugal dinner of maigre soup and white beans, flavoured with the aromatic herbs that grow high upon the hills ; oil and undiluted wine are reserved for Church festivals, meat for rarer occasions. With this, short sleep, and that hearty, unsparing labour into which honest self-interest enters, the peasant knows that he has half of the benefit from every effort of work and of self-denial which he makes ; his employer has the other half, and the bond between the two is close.
Except the silk- worm harvest, which necessitates night-work, the vintage is the season of sharpest and most constant labour ; but it is also a long festival, lees gay, at least in these hard times, than among the happy and prosperous hills of France, where eaill day
is finished with music and dances, but yet full of delight. In almost every case, the landowner spends the whole time of the gathering, pressing, and barrelling, among his people ; there is enough remaining in Tuscany of the discredited spirit of father- hood in the relation of a landlord to his peasants, to make the work in common sweet to the loyal Italian heart. There is all the difference, as Louis Blanc insists, between "go to work," and "come to work." Largesse is given freely ; the labourers are allowed to eat grapes from morning to night, which they do by holding up the amber-golden bunches, and crunching through them as the oxen would, but for their basket-muzzles. As each podere, or holding, is cleared, the poor from the villages come to glean the vines ; later, a lay brother from the Franciscan convent on the hill-top, or a couple of lay sisters, whose huge straw hats quaintly surmount their religious garb, bring round capacious baskets for alms ; the most parsimonious cannot find it in their hearts to refuse charity in the time of abundance, although that abundance is pitilessly taxed according to its fullness. On vintage days, too, the padrone gives a luncheon to all his tenants, and vegetarians who point triumphantly to the Tuscan labourer's health and muscular strength will learn with chagrin that the prospect of that flesh-pot at mid-day raises his spirits during all the morning hours of labour. That he would be the better for better food as a habit, we should be slow to pronounce. Life is long and healthy among these vineyards, children abound, and the standard of beauty is higher than elsewhere in Italy ; great is the contrast in this latter particular between the peasants who live scarcely a mile from the walls of Florence, and the Florentines themselves, who are, as a rule, ugly and ignoble. Short stature, owing to shortness of limb, is the rule among both the handsome and the homely. Now and then one meets with a face in which human loveliness seems to have reached its extreme. We have especially in our mind an exquisite girl of some twelve or thirteen years old, of the finest peasant blood and the most re- fined type of dark beauty. In the intervals of school, the little, large-eyed maiden was generally to be found thriftily plaiting straw, sitting in the cortile of her ancestral home, golden ears of maize hanging above her dusky head, behind her the grey olives and the long blue mountains beyond the Arno,—a line of hills as rhythmic as a line of Milton.
Wine-making in Tuscany, as in Italy at large, stands in need of the aid of science and of capital ; so it is with agriculture gener- ally. The plough of Virgil's day is the plough of ours, and in no instance has knowledge advanced to the point of manufacturing wine which will travel in its pure state. Without doubt, the best wine made in Italy is the Aleatico secco, a dry red wine which has none of the roughness of Montepukiano and other more celebrated kinds ; but this—perfect as it is—can never be tasted out of Tuscany. The vines continue to be grown on mulberry trees, whereas an incalculable improvement in the grape would be effected by the French mode of culture ; the processes of manufacture are unchanged from generation to generation, and a source of untold wealth lies unused in the vineyards of the most industrious people in the world. When will capital and science come to their aid? There is no hope of such assistance. Florence is on the eve of bankruptcy, the nobles are selling their family houses within the city, and living straitly on their lands and the labour of their peasants ; the silkworm disease is of almost annual recurrence, but science will not assist such complete poverty. In two industries only—the manufacture of oil and of vinegar—there is absolutely no improvement to be desired ; and to these, the unrivalled produce of the Tuscan soil, the markets of the world are not open, for the strange reason that public taste is not educated, in England or France, or elsewhere ; "best Lucca oil," made of superior hemp-seed near Leghorn, and vinegar concocted of corroding acids in London, satisfy at least the English palate.
Previous page
