GALLENGA.'S COUNTRY LIFE IN PIEDMONT. * Tins may be a very
useful book to Italy, as " holding the mirror up to nature " ; but will scarcely be popular among Italians. In form it is a series of letters to a friend descriptive of an au- tumn and winter spent at Castellamonte and its vicinity, with occasional excursions to Turin and elsewhere. In reality it is a very free criticism on the intellectual and moral condition, the manners and customs of the Piedmontese particularly, and the Italians in general ; the author's own countrymen the Piedmont- ese taking the pas of the Italians except for language, and for skilled enterprise, in which the Lombards are in advance of them. As regards hospitality, kindheartedness, and the other virtues of mountaineers, the country people are beyond all praise ; the in- habitants of the towns have a geniality which is very pleasing ; but here panegyric stops. A residence of a quarter of a century in England and travel in three quarters of the globe, have opened Antonio Gallenga's eyes to the backwardness of the country, the sluggishness of the people, the plentifulness of words, the paucity of deeds, with other bad traits that ages of despotism have pro- duced, and some which are scarcely dependent " upon the Aus- trians and the Pope." The author takes a survey of the roads and the means of locomotion, and finds them detestable. The accommodation in the genuine Italian inns is about as bad as possible ; and though the landlord may be a civil, goodnatured, willing fellow enough, when treated familiarly, he has not even a notion of his business as carried on in more advanced countries. In all that regards industry, and especially agricultural industry, Piedmont is very backward. In the mountains and their vicinity there are legal or customary claims to common land which are a direct obstacle to anything approaching to good farming. They operate indirectly by infusing lax notions of meum and tnum into the agricultural mind; fences are plundered, fruit picked, and a general indifference to the rights of property in crops and vege= • cOuntry We Is Piedmont. By Antonio Gallensa, Author of .t History of Piedmont,' &c. Sic. Pdblished by Chapman and Hall.
table growths entertained, even by the owners themselves; so that it seems a certain hardness is necessary in the farmer to se- cure " high farming." Irrigation, for which the country is well adapted, is rarely practised : in the best district it is below Lom- bardy. The commerce and manufactures of the country are carried on by foreigners, who employ the lower class of Italians as workmen, and speak well of them ; but cannot engage natives in superintendence—a fact which has been stated before of the southern Italians, and ascribed to race.
"It is a no less melancholy, no less undeniable fact, that in every branch of finer craft, in every speculation of a more enlarged trade, you find in Piedmont, as well as all over Italy, the highest ranks occupied by foreign— especially Swiss and German—settlers. The wealthiest bankers, the great- est merchants, the most enterprising manufacturers, at Turin no less than at Milan, Florence, Rome, or Naplest are mostly adventurers, who seek and find their fortune in a country in which the natives complain of inability to get bread for themselves. It was once the boast of Genoa that no Jew had ever succeeded in settling in that town, because it took seven Jews to " do " a Genoese' ; yet now not merely Jews, but other people not remarkable for extreme sharpness or adroitness,—nay, those very Germans about whose obtuseness the supple Italian has so many tales at his fingers' end—not only take up their residence at Genoa, but command the greatest resources, enjoy the greatest credit, and constitute a kind of commercial aristocracy among themselves. Not the least unpleasant feature in the matter is, (as I„ who am hardly looked upon as an Italian amongst these foreign settlers, and before whom they consequently practise no concealment, have but too frequent opportunities to ascertain,) that these worthy people entertain the utmost scorn and disdain of the southern race amongst whom they have found a home ; they shrink from intercourse with them in all matters un- connected with business ; keep up their own language, faith, and manners, apart from their neighbours; remain for several generations unnaturalized, and resent as an insult (even when born and brought up in the country) any attempt to designate them as Italians. Row different from men of the same race and kindred in England, whole colonies of whom flourish in Manches- ter, Leeds, Liverpool, as well as in London, who show the greatest anxiety to merge as soon as possible into the vigorous and fortunate, all-absorbing Anglo-Saxon people, and feel as a grievance any allusion to their alien ex- traction or descent!
" Ichabod, Italy ! how has thy glory departed from thee ! And it is but poor consolation to ascribe the success of these strangers to the unbounded capital they dispose of ; for most of them come to Italy almost entirely des- titute of means, and it is the country itself which throws open in their fa- vour the source of its wealth.
"No, no ! the secret of these aliens' success lies not in that wealth which, according to the old Italian saying, ' maketh wealth' ; they owe their good- fortune to their superior moral no less than mental education, to their habits of steadiness, assiduity, and regularity in business, to their extensive know- ledge of men and things, their grasp of the general tendencies, fluctuations, and vicissitudes of trade ; their good courage and even audacity in launch- ing into vast and sometimes hazardous operations ; and, above all, to the fairness and frankness of their dealings; to their reputation, well or ill- grounded, for strict uprightness and punctuality in all their transactions ; to that straightforward honesty which, in commerce as well as in diplomacy, is invariably the best policy."
In loftier matters thou creature comforts, means of " cheap and expeditions travelling" (without the lines of railway) or even in industrial production and distribution—the Piedmontese are back- ward. " That which before us lies in daily life, is the prime wis- dom," by no means constitutes the political creed of the Piedmon- tese. They overlook matters at home while they are discussing remote questions, about the Danubian Principalities, " the secret intentions of the Czar of all the Russias, or of the great Khan of Tartary, or of Prester John of Abyssinia." Notwithstanding the risk patriotically run of jnarrelling with the Papacy on the abo- lition of holy-days, political festivals have been substituted for re- ligious, and sensible patriots deem it advisable if not necessary. And this opinion possibly may be the soundest, as being drawn from a practical knowledge of what is possible ; whereas our au- thor probably judges from a foreign point of view, and not only in this but other things.
With a touch of the " landator temporis acti," Antonio Gal- lenge laments over the decline of literature in Piedmont and generally throughout Italy.
"That Italian men and women read nothing, at least Italian, chiefly be- cause they have nothing to read, is a fact of which the unsatisfactory state of society above described ought to afford a convincing proof. Men cannot live even by Dante, Talmo, and Metastasio alone : the mind requires new and fresh nutriment, as it grows and moves onward ; and the national lite- rature in Italy has been at a dead standstill since Manzoni. Beyond the Trebbia, the Ticino, and the Magra, the frontier streams of the free Sar- dinian lands, this intellectual death is generally, and not quite unjustly, accounted for by referring it to a variety of obvious political causes. It un- doubtedly is hard for any man to write, where he is not allowed, at his own peril, and upon his personal responsibility, to think and express what comes uppermost into his mind; but Piedmont has achieved her freedom ; lan- guage and action are now only limited by the just bounds of the law, and her mental inactivity (unless indeed my native impatience makes me unjust to my countrymen) is something surprising, disappointing, disheartening.
"They [the Italians] have no other master of literature than that Pro- tens Dumas, that ranter Eugene Sue, that mystic George Sand. Even the least cultivated amongst this somewhat mongrel Subalpine population, have a sufficient smattering of the French language to enable them to peruse such works in their original garb. To the absolutely illiterate, bad originals are made accessible by infinitely worse translations, or by even more wretch- ed, basely servile imitations. "The whole produce of the German and English mind is terra incognita for even the most curious and enterprising Italian reader ; not so much, or at least not only on account of the national Italian prejudice revolting against everything Teutonic, and of the national French prejudice, which the Italian drinks in with every French word he reads, against everything
British. • • •
"I remember the time when Ferrari°ublished the whole of Schiller at Milan, and Barbieri all the Waverley Nopvels ; and those books, together with Tasso and Ariosto, contributed to a great extent to form my own mind and that of my contemporaries; but that day has long since gone by, and France now raises as effectual a barrier to cut us off from all the rest of Eu- rope, as she herself has raised against it by her narrow views of classical excellence, by her feelings of national jealousy and self-conceit." Even liberty he thinks by diverting men's attention to polities has rendered domestic ties looser than they were, and in a chapter entitled Hearts and Hearths, he draws a rather ;aid picture of the all but universal desertion of the home by both sexes, for the eaf€ and the tavern. His sketches of the fair sex are as gloomy. There is no education for women ; the few who set up for ladies often manage it by native tact and a knack of picking up know- ledge in conversation and veiling ignorance. The following looks a sad state of things, but we suspect that matters were similar in this country a century ago. "The love of society, the imperfect education, the mental tameness and plainness of the generality of Italian women, the lack of entertaining hooka, prevailing custom, and, above all things, the paltry, scanty fires, and the naked cheerless apartments, drive the Italian husband from the sanctuary of home, and turn him into a mere lounger, a frivolous talker, a pitiful idler at a cafe. The very best of men, the most affectionate of husbands and fathers, (and I know some who are paragons,) are no exceptions to the rule. They have the strongest attachment, the highest regard, the most implicit confidence in the partners of their homes ; but those homes with a few hours' tite-ci-ate in the evening, even for the short period of a honey-moon would be unendurable to the most exemplary Benedict of them all; and were a man ever so much inclined to sit by his own ingle-nook, with his wife and children, only for one evening in the week, he would hardly dare to face the world and incur the ridicule his domestic tastes would be sure to stir up against him among his friends. Beyond the necessary discussions of the household budget in general, and of the milliner's bill in particular, and perhaps an occasional curtain-lecture respecting the intolerable investment of the family funds in havannas for the gentleman, you would say there is ne common pursuit, no common topic of conversation to enable man and wife to get on together between dinner and bed-time. A woman, at least one's own woman, seems to be no helpmate in this country ; neither in working hours, nor during that time of relaxation and repose, which in better-regu- lated societies is her peculiar province and domain.
" The fire of Italian hearths is going out rapidly."
Many Englishmen and still more Scotchmen must remember when something very like this was true of British "homes." The father of a family always " spent his evenings mitt" that is at his club, or in other words the tavern; men yet living must re- collect that almost every kind of business was transacted there, even physicians could be consulted at a coffee-room. Towards the close of his book the author admits that some im- provement is taking place in Piedmont, as the consequence of her freedom. Besides judging her from an English comparative point of view, which is scarcely a just one, Gallenga has probably ex- pected more improvement than was possible in the time. It re- quires a generation at least to effect a general change in habits and opinions, and allow younger men to adapt themselves to new circumstances ; and Piedmont has hardly been for the third of a generation under the present constitutional system.
We have confined ourselves to the graver and more solid topics handled by the author. There are many things of a livelier kind —sketches of manners and character, descriptions of scenery, and country life, with touches of rhapsody on Alpine glories, always done with fluency and spirit, sometimes, where the subject re- quires it, with fiery vigour.
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