My many years of exile, of wanderings in northern countries, have made
me a little bit into a northern man: I cannot quite get on with my own
fellow-countrymen, except with the good peasants and fishermen all
round. Besides--forgive the vanity of an old man, who has learned to
make triple acrostic sonnets to cheat the days and months at
Theresienstadt and Spielberg--I have suffered too much for Italy to
endure patiently the sight of little parliamentary cabals and municipal
wranglings, although they also are necessary in this day as
conspiracies and battles were in mine. I am not fit for your roomful of
ministers and learned men and pretty women: the former would think me
an ignoramus, and the latter--what would afflict me much more--a
pedant.... Rather, if your Excellency really wants to show yourself and
your children to your father's old _protege_ of Mazzinian times,
find a few days to come here next spring. You shall have some very bare
rooms with brick floors and white curtains opening out on my terrace;
and a dinner of all manner of fish and milk (the white garlic flowers
shall be mown away from under the olives lest my cow should eat it) and
eggs cooked in herbs plucked in the hedges. Your boys can go and see
the big ironclads at Spezia; and you shall come with me up our lanes
fringed with delicate ferns and overhung by big olives, and into the
fields where the cherry-trees shed their blossoms on to the budding
vines, the fig-trees stretching out their little green gloves, where
the goats nibble perched on their hind legs, and the cows low in the
huts of reeds; and there rise from the ravines, with the gurgle of the
brooks, from the cliffs with the boom of the surf, the voices of unseen
boys and girls, singing about love and flowers and death, just as in
the days of Theocritus, whom your learned Excellency does well to read.
Has your Excellency ever read Longus, a Greek pastoral novelist? He is
a trifle free, a trifle nude for us readers of Zola; but the old French
of Amyot has a wonderful charm, and he gives one an idea, as no one