File:Byways in southern Tuscany (1919) (14803432113).jpg

Identifier: bywaysinsouthern00hook (find matches)
Title: Byways in southern Tuscany
Year: 1919 (1910s)
Authors: Hooker, Katharine, 1849-1934
Subjects: Tuscany (Italy) -- Description and travel
Publisher: London : T.F. Unwin
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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s, but they capered away beyond reach andmocked them; evidently discipline is lax in San Salvatore.The buildings of smoked and weather-worn stone have asombre picturesqueness and overlook narrow, sunlessstreets where an air of poverty clings. It is hard to saysuch a thing of any Tuscan town, but San Salvatore isshamefully dirty and this in the face of comparative pros-perity and an abundant supply of water at frequent inter-vals in the streets. There are too many women idling intheir grimy doorways which evidently lead to uncleanli-ness within; the streets run with liquid mud and garbagelies rotting in heaps while foul pools obstruct even theentrance to the church. For this state of things one seeksan explanation and finds it in the history of the place. When the power of the great abbey declined, the peoplesuffered more than usual distress, for the local resourceswere few, the soil of their perpendicular fields yielded ascant return, and solely upon the chestnuts of their forests 142
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BYWAYS IN SOUTHERN TUSCANY they could not live; therefore a large proportion of themen were constrained to emigrate for part of the year tothe Maremma to graze their flocks and work at harvesting,and from it they returned with slender gains and too oftenweakened by malarial infection. They were poorly nour-ished, their food for the most part consisting of chestnutpolenta and sheeps milk cheese; and years of combinedmalnutrition and malaria produced an effect almost racial.In this impoverished condition they were more than oncevisited by a plague of typhus, and to aggravate mattersthere was unhappily a great amount of drunkenness; sothat when, some seventeen years ago, the quicksilvermines on the upper slope of the mountain were openedand employment oflFered for all, a population existedphysically depleted, languid, and inert, little calculatedto raise its standard of Uving with the added ease of goodwages. Moreover, the industry in itself being a poisonousone, added its depressing eff

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