This Little Island Of Stern Mental Culture Contains, Besides Twenty-Five
Teachers And As Many Servants, Some Three Hundred Scholars Preparing For
A Variety Of Secular Professions.
About fifty of them are
Italo-Albanians, ten or thereabouts are genuine Albanians from over the
water, the rest Italians, among them two dozen of those unhappy orphans
from.
Reggio and Messina who flooded the country after the earthquake,
and were "dumped down" in colleges and private houses all over Italy.
Some of the boys come of wealthy families in distant parts, their
parents surmising that San Demetrio offers no temptations to youthful
folly and extravagance. In this, so far as I can judge, they are
perfectly correct.
The heat of summer and the fact that the boys were in the throes of
their examinations may have helped to make the majority of them seem
pale and thin; they certainly complained of their food, and the cook was
the only prosperous-looking person whom I could discover in the
establishment - his percentages, one suspects, being considerable. The
average yearly payment of each scholar for board and tuition is only
twenty pounds (it used to be twenty ducats); how shall superfluities be
included in the bill of fare for such a sum?
The class-rooms are modernized; the dormitories neither clean nor very
dirty; there is a rather scanty gymnasium as well as a physical
laboratory and museum of natural history. Among the recent acquisitions
of the latter is a vulture (Gyps fulvus) which was shot here in the
spring of this year.
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