The farmer announced himself as our friend and said he would guide us straight to the Squadrito house, for he had a cousin in America, close to New York,—in Cincinnati in fact,—and, with the blessing of the Holy Mother, if his wife ever got well enough, he was going there too, taking her and the family.
We might have been a traveling circus or an army with banners. Of every five people we met, two at least turned to escort us back to the town, while the news of our arrival was shouted to the inmates of every house we passed and to the hundreds of men, women and children who were toiling in the fields. We overtook a flock of sheep being driven two miles to water, and soon we formed the van of the most picturesque cavalcade imaginable—men, women, sheep, babies, donkeys and goats. At a distance the country looked sparsely settled. Close at hand we found that it veritably swarmed with life, for the average population is 2,500 souls to the square mile.
The hills shut out the sun; a cool breeze sprang up; the boys gathered fresh figs for us from the wayside trees, grapes from vineyards as we passed, blackberries from bush-grown stone-heaps, apples, pears, plums and _Ficus indicus_, the thorn-covered, mango-shaped golden-yellow fruit which grows on the edge of the thick leaves of the cactus hedges of Sicily, and forms a very important and staple article of food with the poor. There is a Sicilian proverb which says: “No matter how dire the misfortune, there are fico-d’indias.”
Finally, as we turned a sharp corner in the road, we beheld the town, lit by the last rays of the sun filtering through a defile in the hills; and, weary, hot and dusty as we were, something akin to relief and soothing satisfaction stole over us as we saw that it and the country about was typical of all we had seen in the other provinces of southern Italy.
Gualtieri-Sicamino is a mass of stone-built, plaster-covered houses with a uniformity of architecture which hardly allows one to distinguish public buildings, stores or churches from private houses, and the whole is piled up against the face of a lofty hill. Nearly all villages in southern Italy are on the hilltops or the hill slopes, so that, as a Roman wrote nearly two thousand years ago, “the land that can be cultivated with ease should not be cumbered with habitations.” The general plan was identical with that of dozens of other villages we had visited: a street or two circling the base of the hill, one or two tiny squares, bare as new-laid eggs, then a succession of zigzag ways towards the top of the hill: ways,—they are not streets, because in some places they are not more than three feet wide, and one third of the way the ascent is so sharp that stone steps are used. The village is much as it was eight hundred years ago. Below its edge is the 200–foot ribbon of sand and shale, strongly walled in along its whole length from the sea to the heart of the mountains, the then dry _torrente_, or river bed.