Below us lay Gualtieri, with its white walls and dark tiled roofs, a rose-haze over it from the sinking sun, embowered in the clustering hills dark green with vineyards, olive and lemon orchards, the white belt of the _torrente_ below and radiating ribbon footpaths along which came pannier-laden donkeys; little flocks of milk-goats; stoop-shouldered men bearing their long-bladed hoes and spear-shaped spades; erect women with brilliant-colored skirts, scarfs or kerchiefs, water-jars, baskets, panniers or bundles on their heads.
Our little procession wound down to the bridge, which looked almost Syracusan, it is so old, and across into the “square,” on one side of which is the principal church, and on the other the municipal offices. The description sounds well enough; but the church is a low, squat building with a small tower in which reposes a cracked bell and a noisy clock, while the “municipal offices” are two rooms on the second floor of a merchant’s combined store and home; the square is possibly sixty by one hundred feet, the largest open space in the community. In all the town there is not a street over twelve feet broad, and some would measure four or three. As we wound out of the square into one of these narrow ways and heard voices proclaiming on every hand that “Antonio’s Americans” had arrived, all fears that Gualtieri was too urban, and not a true type of the rural districts which send the emigrants, forever vanished from our minds.
[Illustration: The Messenger—The Guide—The House of the Squadritos—The Town (Gualtieri)]
Suddenly, in the narrowest part of the way in which we were, I saw over the door of a small hole-like room in the wall:
and, seeing two boys at work with a small anvil and hand-drill, knew that this was the blacksmith shop of Antonio’s younger brother. Two doors beyond, a kindly old face appeared at the door an instant, our procession set up a shout, and something told me this was Antonio’s mother. We were ushered into a large, cool, windowless room with a red-tiled floor and bare, white walls, along which were rows and rows of hand-made rush-bottomed chairs. There must have been forty of them, and it seemed to augur well for the size of the family; but we learned later that the chairs stood there ready for the throng of neighbors who came nightly to hear Antonio tell of the marvels of America and to laugh over his prodigious yarns of buildings twenty stories high. Nightly they would shake their heads and laugh, and then Antonio would say: “Just wait till my American friends come, and you can ask _them_.”