The old _pedona_ had been right when she told me it was worth while to climb the hill for the sake of the view at its top. I sat a while on the wall of the little _piazza_ watching the evening vapours creep down from the mountains, and feeling their breath on my cheek. Women with children clinging to their skirts, and small, swaddled babies in their arms, came to make their evening prayer in the sanctuary—to have their evening gossip in its porch. They greeted me with courteous grace, and one of them talked long with me, telling me of the neighbourhood and of its people—rambling on with stories of her own and of many other villages. They have the true grace of perfect unconsciousness, the dwellers in these little Apennine homes, and have no conventionalities, since each acts upon the moment’s impulse that he may enjoy life to the full. I call them all to mind, those simple friends of a time long past, and, as I think of them, I think of summer days when breezes moved silently amid leaves, and the air was white with heat as it lay clear above the tender green of chestnut trees.
I think of little rough and quaint villages that are the homes of these my friends, and, best of all, I remember one village that stands beneath the crest of a hill, with shady woods and orchards to girdle it about. Another hill lies over against it, whose graceful form I seem to see as I write—soft shapes, yet varied that rest upon the sky, subtle waves and indentations of earth, with which play the lights and shades of the daylight. It is that village of _La Valle Calda_, towards which I turned my steps again after I had looked on the fair scene from _La Vittoria’s_ hill. A church stands for centre to the parish—that church with tall _campanile_ and blue-painted belfry—and, beside the church, an oratory, where the memory of some special saint is sacred; but the parish itself is scattered far and wide through copse and over meadow, in hamlets that stand beside streams or on hill-tops.
The steeple is nevertheless, here as elsewhere, the beacon that can gather all neighbours together, and beneath it is a piazza with stone benches around, where at Ave Maria my memory confidently returns to recall each one of those faces seen long ago. I know I shall find them there, for I know they must have a goodly portion of gossip and loitering, and am fain indeed to confess that if foreign sayings about Italian impetuosity, and easily moved Italian feelings, have been often exaggerated, these Apennine country people are, on the other hand, no taciturn race. They are cunning to mould to their use the lithe tongue of their land, to adorn it with expletives, and to point it with gesticulation; and it is even this habit of noisy vociferation which has perhaps won them abroad the character—so little deserved—for curbless passions and vindictively cruel propensities. For they are a kindly people in their mutual relations, and formed by their very nature for warm, social life, since they need a free neighbourly intercourse, such as quiet and colder temperaments can scarcely understand.