He calls it healthy, and says that
the only complaint from which the inhabitants suffered was "ponture"
(pleurisy). It is now within the infected zone. I dare say the
deforestation of the country, which prevented the downflow of the
rivers - choking up their beds with detritus and producing stagnant pools
favourable to the breeding of the mosquito - has helped to spread the
plague in many parts of Italy. In Horace's days Venosa was immune,
although Rome and certain rural districts were already malarious.
Ancient votive tablets to the fever-goddess Mephitis (malaria) have been
found not far from here, in the plain below the present city of Potenza.
A good deal of old Roman blood and spirit seems to survive here. After
the noise of the Neapolitan provinces, where chattering takes the place
of thinking, it is a relief to find oneself in the company of these
grave self-respecting folks, who really converse, like the Scotch, in
disinterested and impersonal fashion. Their attitude towards religious
matters strikes me as peculiarly Horatian; it is not active scepticism,
but rather a bland tolerance or what one of them described as
"indifferentismo" - submission to acts of worship and all other usages
(whatever they may be) consecrated by time: the pietas - the
conservative, law-abiding Roman spirit. And if you walk towards sunset
along any of the roads leading into the country, you will meet the
peasants riding home from their field labours accompanied by their dogs,
pigs and goats; and among them you will recognize many types of Roman
physiognomies - faces of orators and statesmen - familiar from old coins.
About a third of the population are of the dark-fair complexion, with
blue or green eyes. But the women are not handsome, although the town
derives its name from Benoth (Venus). Some genuine Roman families have
continued to exist to this day, such as that of Cenna (Cinna). One of
them was the author of the chronicle above referred to; and there is an
antique bas-relief worked into the walls of the Trinita abbey, depicting
some earlier members of this local family.
One is astonished how large a literature has grown up around this small
place - but indeed, the number of monographs dealing with every one of
these little Italian towns is a ceaseless source of surprise. Look below
the surface and you will find, in all of them, an undercurrent of keen
spirituality - a nucleus of half a dozen widely read and thoughtful men,
who foster the best traditions of the mind. You will not find them in
the town council or at the cafe. No newspapers commend their labours, no
millionaires or learned societies come to their assistance, and though
typography is cheap in this country, they often stint themselves of the
necessities of life in order to produce these treatises of calm
research. There is a deep gulf, here, between the mundane and the
intellectual life. These men are retiring in their habits; and one
cannot but revere their scholarly and almost ascetic spirit that
survives like a green oasis amid the desert of "politics," roguery and
municipal corruption.
The City Fathers of Venosa are reputed rich beyond the dreams of
avarice. Yet their town is by no means a clean place - it is twice as
dirty as Lucera: a reposeful dirtiness, not vulgar or chaotic, but
testifying to time-honoured neglect, to a feudal contempt of
cleanliness. You crawl through narrow, ill-paved streets, looking down
into subterranean family bedrooms that must be insufferably damp in
winter, and filled, during the hot months, with an odour hard to
conceive. There is electric lighting, of course - a paternal government
having made the price of petroleum so prohibitive that the use of
electricity for street-lighting became quite common in the lowliest
places; but the crude glare only serves to show up the general squalor.
One reason for this state of affairs is that there are no quarries for
decent paving-stones in the neighbourhood. And another, that Venosa
possesses no large citizen class, properly so called. The inhabitants
are mostly peasant proprietors and field labourers, who leave the town
in the morning and return home at night with their beasts, having
learned by bitter experience to take up their domiciles in the towns
rather than in the country-side, which was infested with brigandage and
in an unsettled state up to a short time ago. The Cincinnatus note
dominates here, and with an agricultural population no city can be kept
clean.
But Venosa has one inestimable advantage over Lucera and most Italian
towns: there is no octroi.
Would it be believed that Naples is surrounded by a towering Chinese
wall, miles upon miles of it, crowned with a complicated apparatus of
alarm-bells and patrolled night and day by a horde of doganieri armed
to the teeth - lest some peasant should throw a bundle of onions into the
sacred precincts of the town without paying the duty of half a farthing?
No nation with any sense of humour would endure this sort of thing.
Every one resents the airs of this army of official loafers who infest
the land, and would be far better employed themselves in planting onions
upon the many miles of Italy which now lie fallow; the results of the
system have been shown to be inadequate, "but," as my friend the Roman
deputy once asked me, "if we dismiss these fellows from their job, how
are we to employ them?"
"Nothing is simpler," I replied. "Enrol them into the Town Council of
Naples. It already contains more employes than all the government
offices of London put together; a few more will surely make no difference?"
"By Bacchus," he cried, "you foreigners have ideas! We could dispose of
ten or fifteen thousand of them, at least, in the way you suggest. I'll
make a note of that, for our next session."
And so he did.
