IL MARE ADRIATICO

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2534, 7 August 1915, Page 3

IL MARE ADRIATICO

QUAINT OLD ITALY. ' When one reaches the. Adriatic coast of Italy* olio seems to have receded a century. It is possible that one's house may be lit by, electricity, the intermediate stage of gas having been skipped by progressive Italy; but one may hear the greetings "Ave" aad "Salve"; one may see about the farmsteads wooden implements bound by thongs of hide, which survive, like tho salutations, from the days of Virgil; and, walking 011 tho hills one day, I came upon a peasant digging about his vines who had neverheard of England. . Thero is something even a little Eastem about the appearance of.the coun- : try. Canes grow luxuriantly about the wells. Gourds ripen like misshapen eggs on the low stono roofs. Maize spread! on sheets in the sunshine turns from.' yellow to amber. Children are not olive* , coloured, but swarthy. The sails of the fishing-boats are of orange and even; scarlet, and as they dia.w to the shore; at sunset appear like enormous moths flying towards the flaming lamp of the sun. Every kind •of occupation is. brought to tho shore, and the sea is the. universal lavabo. Women carry the big copper houses hold vessels to the shore to scour them , with sand, or kneel and beat their washing in the streams which run down from' the hills. Fishermen, beaching their, boats, broil fish on fires of driftwood, : looking like groups of the Apostles in ani early, picture. And at the timo of the vintage, when the acrid odour of trodden and fermented . grapes issues from every dark shed and doorway in' the village, the white oxen drag the immense wine-casks from the village to the sea, and a procession of bare-legged' girls dip at the sea's brink all day, and! raising their dripping waier-jars above their heads empty them into the casks, to swell the wood. 011 the seashore, too, with its unvarying tide is gathered the day's harvest. Tho fish leap in the net. The women and children dance backward with bare feet, dragging to the chant of "Tira, tira" (Pull away, pull away). An old woman stands immovable save for the twist of her foot with which she coils tho rope as it slackens* The haul is counted, the boat beached* II Mare has been friendly./ ■ ■ - Southwards along tho coast from r An« cona one sees signs of old menace from the sea; of old defences in the situation' of the-towns, 1 perched high on rocky, prominences as 'a protection from the raids of Dalmatian pirates. Below is the sterile coast lino, reclaimed in the years secure from raids, for as mucli as ten miles in places, by the process o£ damming up mountain streams, digging deep wells, and growing crops on the deposit brought down from the hills. The outlook of the people is not towards Europe, but eastward, as their own coast lies. In these unvisited towns are still celebrated ancient victories over the Turks, and on the morning of the anniversary of tho Battle of Lepanto the church, bells ring and the piazza are full of women buying eggs for the colebration of a festa and for home-made macaroni. And now, as in tho Tripoli War, tho littlo towns will be emptied of men. Flags will be waved, and the trains tako off the cheering conscripts. Once more the littlo towns will look anxiously across tho sea, and tho women and old men wait for what will come. Once more, as in centuries gone, 11 Maro holds terror for those on its shoresnot, as then, in the skimming Levantino sail, but in destruction hurled from afar, in mutilation from unseen sources.—Gertrude Bone, in tho ".Manchester Guardian."