"Pare come fosse un colore morto" (a sort of dead colour).

Green is a little better known, but still chiefly connected with things
not out of doors, as a green handkerchief. The reason may be that this
tint is too common in nature to be taken note of. Or perhaps because
their chain of association between green and grass is periodically
broken up--our fields are always verdant, but theirs turn brown in
summer. Trees they sometimes call yellow, as do some ancient writers;
but more generally "half-black" or "tree-colour." A beech in full leaf
has been described to me as black. _"Rosso"_ does not mean red, but
rather dun or dingy; earth is _rosso._ When our red is to be signified,
they will use the word "turco," which came in with the well-known
dye-stuff of which the Turks once monopolized the secret. Thus there are
"Turkish" apples and "Turkish" potatoes. But "turco" may also mean
black--in accordance with the tradition that the Turks, the Saracens,
were a black race. Snakes, generally greyish-brown in these parts, are
described as either white or black; an eagle-owl is half-black; a
kestrel _un quasi bianco._ The mixed colours of cloths or silks are
either beautiful or ugly, and there's an end of it. It is curious to
compare this state of affairs with that existing in the days of Homer,
who was, as it were, feeling his way in a new region, and the propriety
of whose colour epithets is better understood when one sees things on
the spot. Of course I am only speaking of the humble peasant whose
blindness, for the rest, is not incurable.

One might enlarge the argument and deduce his odd insensibility to
delicate scents from the fact that he thrives in an atmosphere saturated
with violent odours of all kinds; his dullness in regard to finer shades
of sound--from the shrieks of squalling babies and other domestic