"The Signore smokes, and smokes, and smokes. Why not take the tram and
listen to the municipal music in the gardens?"
"Music? Gardens? An excellent suggestion, Gennarino."
Even as a small Italian town would be incomplete without its piazza
where streets converge and commercial pulses beat their liveliest
measure, so every larger one contrives to possess a public garden for
the evening disport of its citizens; night-life being the true life of
the south. Charming they are, most of them; none more delectable than
that of old Messina - a spacious pleasaunce, decked out with trim palms
and flower-beds and labyrinthine walks freshly watered, and cooled, that
evening, by stealthy breezes from the sea. The grounds were festively
illuminated, and as I sat down near the bandstand and watched the folk
meandering to and fro, I calculated that no fewer than thirty thousand
persons were abroad, taking their pleasure under the trees, in the bland
air of evening. An orderly, well-dressed crowd. We may smile when they
tell us that these people will stint themselves of the necessities of
life in order to wear fine clothes, but the effect, for an outsider, is
all that it should be. For the rest, the very urchins, gambolling about,
had an air of happy prosperity, different from the squalor of the north
with its pinched white faces, its over-breeding and under-feeding.
And how well the sensuous Italian strains accord with such an hour and
scene! They were playing, if I remember rightly, the ever-popular Aida;
other items followed later - more ambitious ones; a Hungarian rhapsody,
Berlioz, a selection from Wagner.
"Musica filosofica" said my neighbour, alluding to the German
composer. He was a spare man of about sixty; a sunburnt, military
countenance, seamed by lines of suffering. "Non va in Sicilia - it
won't do in this country. Not that we fail to appreciate your great
thinkers," he added. "We read and admire your Schopenhauer, your
Spencer. They give passable representations of Wagner in Naples. But - - "
"The climate?"
"Precisely. I have travelled, sir; and knowing your Berlin, and London,
and Boston, have been able to observe how ill our Italian architecture
looks under your grey skies, how ill our music sounds among the complex
appliances of your artificial life. It has made you earnest, this
climate of yours, and prone to take earnestly your very pastimes.
Music, for us, has remained what it was in the Golden Age - an
unburdening of the soul on a summer's night. They play well, these
fellows. Palermo, too, has a respectable band - Oh! a little too fast,
that recitativo!"
"The Signore is a musician?"
"A proprietario. But I delight in music, and I beguiled myself with
the fiddle as a youngster. Nowadays - look here!" And he extended his
hand; it was crippled. "Rheumatism. I have it here, and here" - pointing
to various regions of his body - "and here!
