It Was Exhilarating To Traverse These Middle Heights With Their Aerial
Views Over The Ionian And Down Olive-Covered Hill-Sides Towards The Wide
Valley Of The Crati And The Lofty Pollino Range, Now Swimming In
Midsummer Haze.
The road winds in and out of gullies where rivulets
descend from the mountains; they are clothed in cork-oak, ilex, and
other trees; golden orioles, jays, hoopoes and rollers flash among the
foliage.
In winter these hills are swept by boreal blasts from the
Apennines, but at this season it is a delightful tract of land.
XXIII
ALBANIANS AND THEIR COLLEGE
San Demetrio, famous for its Italo-Albanian College, lies on a fertile
incline sprinkled with olives and mulberries and chestnuts, fifteen
hundred feet above sea-level. They tell me that within the memory of
living man no Englishman has ever entered the town. This is quite
possible; I have not yet encountered a single English traveller, during
my frequent wanderings over South Italy. Gone are the days of Keppel
Craven and Swinburne, of Eustace and Brydone and Hoare! You will come
across sporadic Germans immersed in Hohenstaufen records, or searching
after Roman antiquities, butterflies, minerals, or landscapes to
paint - you will meet them in the most unexpected places; but never an
Englishman. The adventurous type of Anglo-Saxon probably thinks the
country too tame; scholars, too trite; ordinary tourists, too dirty. The
accommodation and food in San Demetrio leave much to be desired; its
streets are irregular lanes, ill-paved with cobbles of gneiss and
smothered under dust and refuse. None the less, what noble names have
been given to these alleys - names calculated to fire the ardent
imagination of young Albanian students, and prompt them to valorous and
patriotic deeds! Here are the streets of "Odysseus," of "Salamis" and
"Marathon" and "Thermopylae," telling of the glory that was Greece; "Via
Skanderbeg" and "Hypsilanti" awaken memories of more immediate renown;
"Corso Dante Alighieri" reminds them that their Italian hosts, too, have
done something in their day; the "Piazza Francesco Ferrer" causes their
ultra-liberal breasts to swell with mingled pride and indignation; while
the "Via dell' Industria" hints, not obscurely, at the great truth that
genius, without a capacity for taking pains, is an idle phrase. Such
appellations, without a doubt, are stimulating and glamorous. But if the
streets themselves have seen a scavenger's broom within the last
half-century, I am much mistaken. The goddess "Hygeia" dost not figure
among their names, nor yet that Byzantine Monarch whose infantile
exploit might be re-enacted in ripest maturity without attracting any
attention in San Demetrio. To the pure all things are pure.
The town is exclusively Albanian; the Roman Catholic church has fallen
into disrepair, and is now used as a shed for timber. But at the door of
the Albanian sanctuary I was fortunate enough to intercept a native
wedding, just as the procession was about to enter the portal. Despite
the fact that the bride was considered the ugliest girl in the place,
she had been duly "robbed" by her bold or possibly blind lover - her
features were providentially veiled beneath her nuptial flammeum, and
of her squat figure little could be discerned under the gorgeous
accoutrements of the occasion. She was ablaze with ornaments and
embroidery of gold, on neck and shoulders and wrist; a wide lace collar
fell over a bodice of purple silk; silken too, and of brightest green,
was her pleated skirt. The priest seemed ineffably bored with his task,
and mumbled through one or two pages of holy books in record time; there
were holdings of candles, interchange of rings, sacraments of bread and
wine and other solemn ceremonies - the most quaint being the
stephanoma, or crowning, of the happy pair, and the moving of their
respective crowns from the head of one to that of the other. It ended
with a chanting perlustration of the church, led by the priest: this is
the so-called "pesatura."
I endeavoured to attune my mind to the gravity of this marriage, to the
deep historico-ethnologico-poetical significance of its smallest detail.
Such rites, I said to myself, must be understood to be appreciated, and
had I not been reading certain native commentators on the subject that
very morning? Nevertheless, my attention was diverted from the main
issue - the bridegroom's face had fascinated me. The self-conscious male
is always at a disadvantage during grotesquely splendid buffooneries of
this kind; and never, in all my life, have I seen a man looking such a
sorry fool as this individual, never; especially during the
perambulation, when his absurd crown was supported on his head, from
behind, by the hand of his best man.
Meanwhile a handful of boys, who seemed to share my private feelings in
regard to the performance, had entered the sacred precincts, their
pockets stuffed with living cicadas. These Albanian youngsters, like all
true connaisseurs, are aware of the idiosyncrasy of the classical insect
which, when pinched or tickled on a certain spot, emits its
characteristic and ear-piercing note - the "lily-soft voice" of the Greek
bard. The cicadas, therefore, were duly pinched and then let loose; like
squibs and rockets they careered among the congregation, dashing in our
faces and clinging to our garments; the church resounded like an
olive-copse at noon. A hot little hand conveyed one of these tremulously
throbbing creatures into my own, and obeying a whispered injunction of
"Let it fly, sir!" I had the joy of seeing the beast alight with a
violent buzz on the head of the bride - doubtless the happiest of
auguries. Such conduct, on the part of English boys, would be deemed
very naughty and almost irreverent; but here, one hopes, it may have its
origin in some obscure but pious credence such as that which prompts the
populace to liberate birds in churches, at Easter time. These escaping
cicadas, it may be, are symbolical of matrimony - the individual man and
woman freed, at last, from the dungeon-like horrors of celibate
existence; or, if that parallel be far-fetched, we may conjecture that
their liberation represents the afflatus of the human soul, aspiring
upwards to merge its essence into the Divine All.
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