The drive to Roccadoro from Sant' Alessina is a pleasant drive. The road
follows for the most part the windings of the Rampio, so that you are
seldom out of sight of its gleaming waters, and the brawl of it, now
louder, now less loud, is perpetually in your ears. To right and left
you have the tender pink of blossoming almonds, with sometimes the
scarlet flame of a pomegranate; and then the blue-grey hills, mantled in
a kind of transparent cloth-of-gold, a gauze of gold, woven of haze and
sunshine; and then, rosy white, with pale violet shadows, the
snow-peaks, cut like cameos upon the brilliant azure of the sky. And
sometimes, of course, you rattle through a village, with its crumbling,
stained, and faded yellow-stuccoed houses, its dazzling white canvas
awnings, its church and campanile, and its life that seems to pass
entirely in the street: men in their shirt sleeves, lounging, smoking,
spitting (else the land were not Italy!), or perhaps playing cards at a
table under the leafless bush of the wine-shop; women gossiping over
their needlework, or, gathered in sociable knots, combing and binding up
their sleek black hair; children sprawling in the kindly dirt; the
priest, biretta on head, nose in breviary, drifting slowly upon some
priestly errand, and "getting through his office;" and the immemorial
goatherd, bare-legged, in a tattered sugar-loaf hat, followed by his
flock, with their queer anxious faces, blowing upon his Pan's-pipes
(shrill strains, in minor mode and plagal scale, a music older than
Theocritus), or stopping, jealously watched by the customer's avid
Italian eyes, to milk "_per due centesimi_"--say, a farthing's
worth--into an outstretched, close-clutched jug. Sometimes the almond
orchards give place to vineyards, or to maize fields, or to dusky groves
of walnut, or to plantations of scrubby oak where lean black pigs forage
for the delectable acorn. Sometimes the valley narrows to a ravine, and
signs of cultivation disappear, and the voice of the Rampio swells to a