More than once it was my good fortune to watch this almost sacred process in the villa where I happened to be spending the summer, and, though I am jealous for the glories of Romagna, I must admit that it is far more picturesque and attractive in Tuscany. The whole atmosphere there is imbued with a purity and calm unknown to the perfervid rollicking South; the hills are the hills of Umbria—of Perugino’s and Francia’s backgrounds, pale and clear, rounding into little knolls that are more silvery than golden when the sun kisses side or summit; the mulberry and the acacia and the olive throw fans of timid tracery against the elusive sky; where the olive rustles to silver in the breeze a thousand shades of grey delight the eye, and on every ridge the sparse spires of the Tuscan cypresses, so feathery slender that the tapering points are fragile as a fern’s fronds, delimit the view in lines of dark delicacy most restfully symmetrical and definite. All is ascetic, yet tender, save where, far off on the plain, the low red wall of a city lies like a sword across the land. In the distance Umbria, with its clean, pale landscapes, so significant and lucent under the quivering dome of white, seems less of earth than Heaven, almost breathlessly impersonal, a country more for angels than for men; but nearer at hand she smiles at you, like some saint turning from the ravishments of contemplation to encourage a fellow-being whose vision is not clarified to behold what she has seen.
If you stand where I used to stand, on the terraced eminence of a Tuscan “podere,” you find yourself at the apex of a net of deep and wide grassways, diverging from you in every direction till the lines are lost in a froth of greenery, trained along avenues of mulberry trees that humbly support the airy garlands twenty and thirty feet from the ground. The trees are set with perfect regularity, but wide apart, and the grapevines fling themselves from one to another in sweeping curves that are a joy to see. In Romagna the vineyard has little beauty of its own, for the modern cultivator keeps his grapes within a few feet of the ground; often he pulls them up every year, stores them carefully, and replaces them in the spring. But further north the stocky stem is encouraged to grow and harden for all time; time bestows upon it the proportions and ruggedness of a tree; and the fruit, gloriously confident of its parent, throws out bunches sometimes two feet long; of incomparable fulness and flavour. Around Chiusi, in the heart of Etruria, the grapes are all muscatels, big globes of pale green jade, freckled with agate, and the perfume they distill is that of the white Roman rose—a fragrance indescribably exquisite, and individual to that fruit and that flower alone. In my girlhood there were times when I was not very strong; life was almost too full, and I had to rest from it sometimes. Then my angel mother would make me lie down in her favourite room, the one where the walls were rose and old-gold, and the ceiling a vault of mother-of-pearl seen through Tuscan grapevines, and she would set a bunch of those white roses and a tiny Venetian goblet of amber-coloured “Est-Est” beside me, and leave me alone for hours, while the fountain played in the courtyard and the Roman dusk came down and made shadows in the room. Then I used to close my eyes and play a little game, trying to find out which was rose and which was wine—and fall asleep before the point was decided—to dream that I was angel or butterfly—all wings, anyway, free in a world where language was scent and music. Spoiling? Surely. But it was training, in a way. Why not develop all the senses that can help us in the long, long march of life?