That "law of the ever-beautiful" does not smack of the
old man, unless he was more disguised than usual, and having a little
fun with his pedantic countrymen....
Climb hence - it is not far - to the village of Civitella, now called
Bellegra, a prehistoric fastness with some traces of "cyclopean"
defences. Those ancients must have had cisterns; inconceivable that
springs should ever have issued from this limestone crag. You can see
the women of to-day fetching water from below, from a spot which I was
too lazy to investigate, where perhaps the soft tertiary rock leans upon
this impervious stuff and allows the liquid to escape into the open. An
unclean place is Bellegra, and loud, like all these Sabine villages,
with the confused crying of little children. That multiple wail of
misery will ring in your ear for days afterwards. They are more
neglected by their mothers than ever, since women now have all the men's
work in the fields to do. They are hungrier than ever, on account of the
war which has imposed real hardships on these agricultural folk;
hardships that seize them by the throat and make them sit down, with
folded hands, in dumb despair: so I have seen them. How many of these
unhappy babies will grow to maturity?
Death-rate must anyhow be high hereabouts, for nothing is done in the
way of hygiene. In the company of one who knows, I perambulated the
cemetery of Olevano and was astonished at the frequency of tombstones
erected to the young.
