The Prospect Is Closed, At Last, By The
Lofty Groups Of Sirino And Alburno, Many Long Leagues Away.
On all other
sides are forests, interspersed with rock.
But near at hand lies a
spacious green meadow, at the foot of a precipice. This is now covered
with encampments in anticipation of to-morrow's festival, and the
bacchanal is already in full swing.
Very few foreigners, they say, have attended this annual feast, which
takes place on the first Saturday and Sunday of July, and is worth
coming a long way to see. Here the old types, uncon-taminated by
modernism and emigration, are still gathered together. The whole
country-side is represented; the peasants have climbed up with their
entire households from thirty or forty villages of this thinly populated
land, some of them marching a two days' journey; the greater the
distance, the greater the "divozione" to the Mother of God. Piety
conquers rough tracks, as old Bishop Paulinus sang, nearly fifteen
hundred years ago.
It is a vast picnic in honour of the Virgin. Two thousand persons are
encamped about the chapel, amid a formidable army of donkeys and mules
whose braying mingles with the pastoral music of reeds and
bagpipes - bagpipes of two kinds, the common Calabrian variety and that
of Basilicata, much larger and with a resounding base key, which will
soon cease to exist. A heaving ebb and flow of humanity fills the eye;
fires are flickering before extempore shelters, and an ungodly amount of
food is being consumed, as traditionally prescribed for such
occasions - "si mangia per divozione." On all sides picturesque groups of
dancers indulge in the old peasants' measure, the percorara, to the
droning of bagpipes - a demure kind of tarantella, the male capering
about with faun-like attitudes of invitation and snappings of fingers,
his partner evading the advances with downcast eyes.
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