The Serpents of the - Abruzzi
By PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR LEAVING the gentle, Italian, primitive landscape of Umbria for the blank sierras of the Abruzzi was as complete a .change as a journey to a different planet. Indeed, these wild grey peaks have an almost lunar remoteness, and the little village of Corullo, a grey honeycomb of houses at the end of a blind alley of the mountains a dozen miles from Ovid's birthplace at Sulmona, must usually seem a desolate habitation. The sun beats down from a blazing sky, but in the labyrinthine shadows of the lanes there is a chill bite in the air from the towering snows of the Gran Sasso.
But once a year, in the first week of May, this planetary silence is broken, and the village population, normally only a few hundred souls—shepherds and small cultivators to. a man—swells to several thousands.. Pilgrims, last month, swarmed from all the neighbouring villages, and, as this is one of the few parts of Italy where regional costumes survive, the streets were a kaleidoscope of different colours and fashions, A bearded shepherd, playitg an ear-splitting pibroch on a bagpipe made of .a patched inner tube, wore raw-hid/ mocassins, and his legs were cross-gartered, Iike those of a Saxon thane, with thick leather thongs. The religious occasion was also the pretext for a rustic f(ur, and the market was full of trussed poultry and squealin*, pigs. Pedlars carried trays of rosaries, medals, little tin motor-cars, celluloid thumbs-ups and dried acorn-cups. There were " lucky" hunch-backs, crippled beggars, hucksters with fortune- telling canaries and a wandering hypnotist. Less usual was the presence, wherever one turned, of snakes, slung over brown forearms or twisting like bracelets, lying in loose tangles among the funnel-topped bottles in the wine-shops, or held in clusters of four with their unwinking heads all gathered in the palm between the laden fingers of both hands, their long forked tongues sliding in and out of their jaws. Some were nearly two yards in length, and all of them looked alarmingly dangerous. Most of the serpari, or snake catchers, are under twenty. For weeks past they had been hunting them in the mountains, where they abound. Capturing them while they are still dazed with their winter-sleep, they disarm the poisonous ones by giving them the hem of a garment to bite, which, when snatched away, breaks off their teeth and drains their poison. Then, stored in jars or sewn into goatskins, they are put by until the great day conies round. There were now several hundred of them in the streets of Corullo—black, grey, greenish, speckled and striped, all hissing and knotting together and impotently darting and biting with their harmless jaws. The floor of the church—baroque, and surprisingly large— was deep in crumbs and bundles and debris, for hundreds of visiting peasants, finding the village overflowing, had slept there all night. Queues waited their turn at the confessional, and, under a pink and blue baldachin, relays of priests administered the sacrament. In the north transept a bell clanked almost unceasingly as peasant after peasant, taking a metal ring between his teeth, tugged at a chain that rang the clapper of a bell that had once belonged to St. Dominic, to draw his notice to their petition. On waiting trays the crumpled fifty lire mounted up. From behind the altar precious lumps of rubble—from the ruins, it is said, of one of St. Dominic's foundations—were carried off to be sprinkled over the fields and ensure a good harvest, and rid the fields of rats.
A young priest applied a battered silver reliquary to the arms and shoulders of an interminable succession of kneeling pilgrims, or to the upheld crusts of bread they would later feed to their livestock to ward off rabies. Inside the cylindrical casket swung and rattled a wonder-working tooth of St. Dominic; now, after a thousand years, a chipped and discoloured fang. Then the devotees moved on to the effigy of St. Dominic himself, a lifesize, wooden figure in black Benedictine habit with a horseshoe in one hand and in the other a crosier. Embracing him with a hungry and possessive veneration, they rubbed little bundles of coloured wool— sovereign thenceforward, when applied to the spot, against toothache and snakebite and hydrophobia—down the grooves of his skirt, or lifted their children to kissing distance of the worn and numinous flanks. Silver ex-votos hung round his neck, and pink ribbons, on which were pinned sheaves of offered banknotes, fluttered from his shoulders. St. Dominic of Sora, or " the Abbot "—he has nothing to do with the great founder of the " Preachers' " Order—was a Benedictine of Umbrian origin, born in 951. He was eremetical and peripatetic by turns, and his countless miracles during his lifetime, and, the Abruzzesi relate, even since through the agency of his relic, were nearly all connected with the foiling of the bears and wolves, and, especially, of the snakes. By the time High Mass began, there was no room to move in the crowded church. Yet a passage was cleared and two young women advanced with large baskets balancing unsup- ported on their heads, each of them containing great hoop- like loaves; both baskets were draped in pink and white silk and decked with carnations and wild cyclamen. The girls stood, like caryatids, on either side of the high altar until, at the end of the service, the image of the saint was hoisted shoulder-high and borne swaying into the sunlight before the church door. There, while the compact multitude clapped and cheered and the bells broke into a jubilant peal, the serpari clustered round the lowered, float. Snakes began flying over the tonsured head like lassos. Parish elders arranged them feather-boa-like, about his shoulders, twisted them round his crosier and wound them over his arms and through the horseshoe and at random all over his body until the image and its pedestal were an all squirming tangle. Many fell off or wriggled free, and one over-active reptile was given a sharp crack over the head. It was raised shoulder high once more like a drowned figurehead salvaged from the Sargasso Sea. .A small pink banner, pinned all over with notes, and a large green one, were unwieldily hoisted. Village girls intoned a hymn in Abruzzi dialect in St. Dominic's honour; then the clergy, one of them bearing the cylinder with its swinging tooth, formed-a phalanx.
Then came the two girls with their peculiar baskets. A brass band struck up the triumphal march from Aida, and the saint, twisting and coiling with the activity of the bewildered snakes and bristling with hissing and tongue- darting heads, rocked insecurely forward and across the square. The innumerable peasants, the conjurors and pedlars and quacks, fell into step; the wine-shops emptied; pigs and poultry were abandoned in their pens, and the whole immense con- course, now itself forming a gigantic many-coloured serpent, wound slowly along the rising and falling streets. Every few steps the effigy came to a halt while fallen snakes were replaced or yet more banknotes, which floated down from the upper windows, were pinned to the fluttering ribbons. Boys on all sides brandished tangled armfuls of redundant snakes, and, looking up at the bright mid-day sky, I saw girls on the roof- tops waving the now familiar reptiles in either hand.
At last the saint was back at the church door, and there, like a disentangling of cold macaroni, the de-snaking began. It was as if they had frozen to their perch. When Saint Dominic was in his chapel once again, a strange haggling and chattering began over the carcasses of his denizens. For snakes are eagerly sought by pedlars, who display them as a reinforce- ment to their patter, attracting a crowd, and then slily opening their suitcases of combs or medals or celluloid toys. There was even a patent-medicine manufacturer all the way from Bologna, who boils them down to make an ointment against rheumatism. The back of his little car was soon aswarm.
It is tempting to seek a link between these strange doings and some possible pre-Christian worship of Aesculapius. But there was no Aesculapian temple in the area, though Apollo and Jupiter were worshipped at Sulmona. It is known, how- ever, that the warlike Marsi from whom these Abruzzesi descend were snake-worshippers and snake-charmers, and there is no reason why these things should have died out by St. Dominic's day. Antiquarians also find certain affinities between the Corullan customs and the fertility rites of the Agathos Daimon. Be that as it may, the strange cult in honour of St. Dominic the Abbot shows no signs of dying out. If anything, it grows more popular and more deeply felt as time goes on. With every mile of the return journey next day, through the twisting Sabine gorges and down into Campagna with the dome of St. Peter's growing larger on the skyline, the pro- ceedings at Corullo seemed odder and more remote. It was only when I touched my coat-pocket and felt a responsive uneasy wriggle through the tweed, that it seemed real at all. For, by paying a few hundred lire, I had become a snake- owner. It was a fine grey animal over a yard long with clever little black eyes; very active, letting slip no chance of nipping my hand with its unarmed (I hope) gums. But, when I reached my destination in Rome, it had vanished. It must have slid gently away to freedom in the train between the city-Walls and the Piazza di Spagna. Perhaps, after a panic in the train, it was put out of the way. But perhaps it is still rattling its way unobserved round the Seven Hills; or it may be curled up among the pillars of the Forum, or, last of all, basking sleepily on a warm and grassy ledge of the Colosseum, beyond the reach of all harm.
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