I mentioned the idea to an overseer.
"We are painting as fast as we can," he replied. "An expensive matter,
however. The Villagio Elena alone has cost us, in this respect, twenty
thousand francs - with the greatest economy."
This will give some notion of the scale on which things have to be done.
The settlement in question contains some two hundred sheds - two hundred
out of over ten thousand.
But I was alluding not to these groups of hygienic bungalows erected by
public munificence and supplied with schools, laboratories, orphanages,
hospitals, and all that can make life endurable, but to the
others - those which the refugees built for themselves - ill-contrived
hovels, patched together with ropes, potato-sacks, petroleum cans and
miscellaneous odds and ends. A coat of whitewash, at least, inside and
out. ... I was thinking, too, of those still stranger dwellings, the
disused railway trucks which the government has placed at the disposal
of homeless families. At many Stations along the line may be seen
strings of these picturesque wigwams crowded with poor folk who have
installed themselves within, apparently for ever. They are cultivating
their favourite flowers and herbs in gaudy rows along the wooden
platforms of the carriages; the little children, all dressed in black,
play about in the shade underneath. The people will suffer in these
narrow tenements under the fierce southern sun, after their cool
courtyards and high-vaulted chambers! There will be diseases, too;
typhoids from the disturbed drainage and insufficient water-supply; eye
troubles, caused by the swarms of flies and tons of accumulated dust.
The ruins are also overrun with hordes of mangy cats and dogs which
ought to be exterminated without delay.
If, as seems likely, those rudely improvised sheds are to be inhabited
indefinitely, we may look forward to an interesting phenomenon, a
reversion to a corresponding type of man. The lack of the most ordinary
appliances of civilization, such as linen, washing-basins and cooking
utensils, will reduce them to the condition of savages who view these
things with indifference or simple curiosity; they will forget that they
ever had any use for them. And life in these huts where human beings are
herded together after the manner of beasts - one might almost say fitted
in, like the fragments of a mosaic pavement - cannot but be harmful to
the development of growing children.
The Calabrians, I was told, distinguished themselves by unearthly
ferocity; Reggio was given over to a legion of fiends that descended
from the heights during the week of confusion. "They tore the rings and
brooches off the dead," said a young officiai to me. "They strangled the
wounded and dying, in order to despoil them more comfortably.
