At the Chestnut Harvest.
As October days draw nigh to their end there is festival in the cottages of North Italy. Walking at evening among her mountains and passing through her homely villages, a red light of wood fire comes streaming upon you from open cabin doors and from between the chinks of clumsy window-shutters, and noisy sounds of revelry fall around. For this is the season when the chestnuts are ripe, and the peasants are making merry by dark, for the work they have had during the hours of day, and they are glad for that harvest which is to them the most bounteous of the year.
In autumn, thunder-storms lower in the Apennine valleys. Torrents grow turbulent, hurling themselves in foam from the hills around, and rivers that, in the long drought, have grown meagre, swell rapidly to great size, fed by rains amid the mountains and by the hundred little streamlets and torrents that cast themselves noisily down ravines. The river-beds are wide—so wide that in summer their barren expanse of shingle looks illamid the green land—yet now there is often no room within them for the mass of moving water. It overflows the banks and swamps the near-lying cultivation, till the maize plantations lie dashed and the meadows are soft, like bogs. It carries away the little temporary bridges which, spring after spring, are newly set across the streams; scarcely can it flow, sometimes, beneath the arches of more stable bridges that, here and there, are built for greater security; it damages the weirs, and brooks no obstacle in its way, flowing swiftly—a great muddy, turbid stream, that bears upon its breast the trunks or the branches of trees and many other spoils from off the banks. And year after year the people know that this may all happen, yet year after year they take no precautions to shield themselves from evil; they build up no embankments, turn aside the course of no injurious waters, only, laughing they say, or sighing, ‘It is time that the great waters descend.’
And during the present month they are almost sure to descend, once, at least, with all their power of devastation, for the best of the sunshine has taken its leave of the land by the end of October. Down in the more level parts of the valleys, where the meadows lie, little cottages look out ruefully from amid the dripping walnuts, their thatched roofs damp and glistening in the wet; and higher up, among the chestnut woods, sadleaves lie damp upon the ground, where the mossy turf is so moist, that mushrooms are spoiled ere they be grown. The country looks tenderly forlorn, that was so gay with its vintage in September. Trees shed their foliage early in chestnut-wooded districts, and already tints have little left that is freshly green, but leaves are yellow upon boughs, and scattered day by day more thickly to earth. There is no hot sunshine, no blue light that is misty with heat; yet the valleys can still smile in their soberer mood when chance and glorious sunbeams strike across the land, or when the rain ceases and bright days come back, here and there, with warmer breezes. Swollen rivers abate if the deluge cease only for a day, and as you walk upon their banks the waters are limpid again, yet green from their depth with an intenser colour.
And wandering beneath the chestnuts, no sense of damp or dreariness oppresses now that sunshine is abroad once more, for yellow-tinted leaves wave brightly overhead, and yellower leaves, that are scattered, rustle pleasantly beneath your feet, while now and again a quick sound breaks the stillness, and that is the fall of the fruit. Since the middle of October you might have heard it when you were in the woods, for the chestnuts began to ripen at that time and the brown-burnished fruit to peep from out its prickly shell.But scarcely before the end of the month does the chestnut harvest begin in earnest in the Apennines. There are divers kinds of chestnuts, and the gathering of each dates properly from a different day: the so-called ‘timely chestnuts,’ that ripen before the commoner sorts—but this variety is rarer and the fruit finer than that of others—the late chestnuts, such as, of their own accord, do not fall sometimes till November—though these trees are often thrashed during the general harvest for the greater convenience of the gatherers.
Companies of women and girls greet you now upon your walks. They have little bags of sackcloth slung around their waists, and rough wooden tweezers in their hands, with which they open the spiked husks, where the fruit lies yet in its green case. They are merry; they laugh and talk, their shrill Italian voices sounding shriller to English ears in the harsh Genoese dialect. It is a season of festivity. The festa of the ‘Santi’ has but lately passed, and there is much interchange of colloquial news and much surmising on parish matters, with a little gossip and neighbourly scandal mixed therewith.
The ‘Santi’ is the last great feast of the year until Christmas be come, and it is treated with much solemnity throughout the whole of Italy. The ‘Giorno dei Morti’ is likewise a great day among the people, butthen the pageant is one of mourning and of woe. Black garments are donned by those who have lost friends during the year, and little charms and candles are sold throughout the streets of the towns, with black and yellow garlands of everlastings, with which people are wont to adorn the graves. Yet there always seems to be as much excitement around this day as any other. Southern feelings love so dearly to be moved, that apparently it matters little whether it be to joy or to grief.
However, this great homage to the day of the dead seems to be confined more to the cities, and beneath the chestnuts, where our people are gathering up the harvest, there is little talk of sadness. Here a man has come to the aid of the girls, and has climbed to the top of a huge tree, that he may the better thrash down the fruit. It falls in prickly showers upon the crackling dead leaves below, but the women seem little to fear any hurt from thorns, for they tread boldly amid the heap, often with bare feet, and take the harsh shells within their hands to open them. All day the people are at work. They are almost all women at this task, for the men are labouring in the fields. Some few of them return home at midday to cook and to carry the dinner for brothers and husbands without, but most of them remain in the woods till dusk, and eat their cold ‘polenta’ at midday, restingupon the banks. Towards dark the great baskets are piled up that have been filled all day from each woman’s sack, and then the girls lift them upon their heads or their shoulders, and pick their way deftly along the stony paths with the burthens. Sometimes the loads are too heavy and must be left for the men, but this does not often happen, for these peasant women are strong, with a beautiful ease of strength, and proud of their power.
GATHERING THE CHESTNUTS.
GATHERING THE CHESTNUTS.
So, whether the day has been dark and cheerless, or whether the kind autumn sunshine has been there to brighten up all anew into a beauty more beautiful than summer-time, the women have been at work in the woods, and now the recreation hour has come. Within cottages great fires are lit upon hearths that are in the chamber’s midst, and the pot is put on to boil; rough wooden benches are drawn around, and men and women meet after their labour to commemorate, with fun and jollity, the first of the chestnuts. Upon each successive evening they meet in different cottages according to the help they have lent to one another during the day; land is not rented in the Apennines, neither do the people labour for pay, but each has his small homestead according to his wealth, and cultivates the ground himself, men and women helping their neighbours during every pressing season, as they themselves expect to be helped in turn.
When the ‘minestra’ has been eaten, or the ‘polenta’ then the pot is taken off, with the great chain from whence it hung, and the ‘padella’ is brought forth, upon which chestnuts are to be roasted. The red wood fire flares and flickers upon the hearth amid its heap of embers, throwing fitful dashes of light upon faces around—copper vessels and platters make sudden gleam upon dingy walls. Again the bold flames die away,and there is only a lurid mass of cinders, and then the women toss chestnuts in the pan and the men slit the brown hide of other chestnuts that are yet unroasted, and they all chatter and gesticulate the while in a fashion so quick and eager and with voices so high and thrilling, that foreign ears, to whom the shrill dialect is unknown, might fairly hear therein the words of an angry quarrel.
And sometimes there are quarrels even at these scenes of merriment. Italian natures are hot, and Italian women are jealous, besides being coquettes too, in their way, with often prudent or mercenary considerations, so that wrangles come and altercations; but they make it up again most times, and do not seem to break their hearts.
The women are not, as a rule, beautiful hereabouts. They are superbly built and powerful, with graceful movements, but their faces belong to a heavy-featured type that lacks much in delicacy of form, even though the ruddy pallor of colouring might atone for many deficiencies. The splendour of dark eyes can sometimes scarcely kindle them into real brilliancy, nevertheless these women have their lives to live and their wars to wage, and they bear the tokens, in themselves beautiful, of toil and the labour of living.
The chestnut harvest lasts some three weeks ormore, and, when the fruit is all gathered in, it is spread above the open rafters that form the roof of every kitchen in these Italian cottages—there to be dried during winter by the fire’s heat from below. And when the chestnuts are dried, and the outer skin has been cracked off by the heat, then they are ground in a mill, so that the flour goes to make bread and cakes and porridge during the barren season, when there is little fresh food to be got by the poor. The dried chestnuts are boiled whole likewise, and in one form or another the common production of the woods provides nourishment, during this time, for all the peasants throughout the land.