An ambiguous phrase!
"Too short for one man may be too long for another. Everything is
relative. Yes, gentlemen" (turning to myself and his shop-assistant),
"everything on this earth is relative."
With this sole exception, I have hitherto garnered no Hellenic traits in
Taranto.
Visible even from Giadrezze, on the other side of the inland sea and
beyond the arsenal, there stands a tall, solitary palm. It is the last,
the very last, or almost the very last, of a race of giants that adorned
the gardens which have now been converted into the "New Quarter." I
imagine it is the highest existing palm in Italy, and am glad to have
taken a likeness of it, ere it shall have been cut down like the rest of
its fellows. Taranto was once celebrated for these queenly growths,
which the Saracens brought over from their flaming Africa.
The same fate has overtaken the trees of the Villa Beaumont, which used
to be a shady retreat, but was bought by the municipality and forthwith
"pulizzato" - i.e. cleaned. This is in accordance with that
mutilomania of the south: that love of torturing trees which causes
them to prune pines till they look like paint-brushes that had been out
all night, and which explains their infatuation for the much-enduring
robinia that allows itself to be teased into any pattern suggested by
their unhealthy phantasy. It is really as if there were something
offensive to the Latin mind in the sight of a well-grown tree, as if man
alone had the right of expanding normally.
