That excursion must have been made for the Feast of Sant’ Antonio, our Blessed Saint Anthony of Padua, for, as it falls on the 13th of June, it is the occasion of the sale of the first piglings of the season, and everybody makes it a point of honour to eat roast sucking pig on that day, unless he buys the little pinky white thing to fatten for the winter. This is why, in some of the representations of St. Anthony, there is a little pig lying at his feet. I saw a funny sight in Sorrento once on the day of his feast. There were baby pigs for sale everywhere, all along the deep lanes that intersect the Penisola, and a young seminarist, in ecclesiastical hat and soutane, had made up his mind to take one home as a present to his family. Anxiously he looked at and felt of a dozen or so before he made his choice; then came the bargaining for the price—half the fun to both buyer and seller. The boy was of the country and knew just what he ought to pay; the owner, seeing his costume, had taken him for a greenhorn and tried to impose upon him; the duel was long and vivacious. At last the matter was settled, the right sum paid, and then the seminarist undertook to carry his fairing home. But the pig refused to go, and a much more amusing duel than the first one took place before my eyes, the little pig slipping away from its would-be captor’s hands and scuttling off in a cloud of dust down the lane, the seminarist in pursuit, his soutane flying, his three-cornered hat pushed back, his round young face crimson with excitement, while the man who had sold him the animal looked on in roars of laughter. Finally the pig was conquered, and the last I saw of him was his wriggling hindquarters and curled-up tail protruding from the folds of the cassock in which the boy had rolled him up and tucked him under his arm, while he raced for home, triumphant, yet fearful that the obstinate little beast would get the best of him on the road.
One interest that generally came with the spring and early summer was that of making the round of the studios, where the artists let their friends look at the result of the year’s work before leaving town on their vacation wanderings. Sometimes the studio and its surroundings were more attractive than the productions it contained and then it required some self-control to keep one’s eye, under the jealous observation of the artist, on the canvases or the statues, instead of on the view from the windows or the beautiful draperies and curios which the wealthiest ones were even then beginning to collect around them. This has always seemed to me to be a mistake. The old idea was that the artist’s workshop should contain nothing unconnected with his work or at any rate contributive to it. On entering the studio of a modern successful artist one has to pinch oneself to make sure one is not in a bric-à-brac establishment where spoils from all the curiosity shops in Europe have been tumbled together in view of a quick sale. There is none of the impressive space and concentration of purpose that one felt in the old ascetic studio with its hard north light, its aged painting table, its few seriously thought-out pictures, and its shoals of preparatory drawings and sketches. There were no “studio teas” in those days; the artist opened the door himself and told one frankly whether the visit were well-timed or not; if he were prosperous his one familiar, some humble “Giuseppe” or “Antonio,” came in at the end of the day to wash the brushes and perhaps sweep the floor; most of the time there were no chairs except one for the model and one for the painter. But the atmosphere of work was there, and the respect for it struck every one who crossed the threshold, so that voices were lowered and even the most enthusiastic admiration very soberly expressed.