cannot but revere their scholarly and almost ascetic spirit that
survives like a green oasis amid the desert of "politics," roguery and
municipal corruption.

The City Fathers of Venosa are reputed rich beyond the dreams of
avarice. Yet their town is by no means a clean place--it is twice as
dirty as Lucera: a reposeful dirtiness, not vulgar or chaotic, but
testifying to time-honoured neglect, to a feudal contempt of
cleanliness. You crawl through narrow, ill-paved streets, looking down
into subterranean family bedrooms that must be insufferably damp in
winter, and filled, during the hot months, with an odour hard to
conceive. There is electric lighting, of course--a paternal government
having made the price of petroleum so prohibitive that the use of
electricity for street-lighting became quite common in the lowliest
places; but the crude glare only serves to show up the general squalor.
One reason for this state of affairs is that there are no quarries for
decent paving-stones in the neighbourhood. And another, that Venosa
possesses no large citizen class, properly so called. The inhabitants
are mostly peasant proprietors and field labourers, who leave the town
in the morning and return home at night with their beasts, having
learned by bitter experience to take up their domiciles in the towns
rather than in the country-side, which was infested with brigandage and
in an unsettled state up to a short time ago. The Cincinnatus note
dominates here, and with an agricultural population no city can be kept
clean.

But Venosa has one inestimable advantage over Lucera and most Italian
towns: there is no octroi.

Would it be believed that Naples is surrounded by a towering Chinese