What the Traveller Saw. Eric Newby
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up our spirits, which were really very low. Before the armistice it is believed that, in spite of innumerable attempts to do so, only two allied prisoners of war actually succeeded in escaping from Italy. This was because Italians of all sorts and conditions were, and are, extraordinarily observant, and all the ingenious subterfuges, disguises and false documents which might have satisfied a German or an English official were hardly ever sufficiently genuine-looking to satisfy even the most myopic Italian ticket collector. It was not only officials. The kind of inspection an allied escaper was subjected to by other travellers in an Italian train compartment would usually be enough to finish him off.
Now, all of a sudden, these same Italians were risking their lives for us, and as I was passed from one helper to the next I began to feel rather like a fragile parcel on its way to some distant delivery point.
It was in this fashion that I arrived at a lonely farmhouse high up in the Apennines, more or less midway between Parma and La Spezia, the Italian naval base on the Ligurian Sea.
There, almost 2500 feet up on what was soon to become, with the onset of winter, the cold, northern face of this 800-mile-long mountain range that forms the backbone of Italy, I found myself suddenly transported, as if by magic, to a way of life that I had never imagined existed in Western Europe, and one that had changed hardly at all for fifty years or more. And there I worked for a farming family who had little enough to eat themselves, in this the third year of the war for Italy, without me to feed, and who lived in the constant, very real, fear of being betrayed by informers for having sheltered me and of being either sent to Germany as forced labourers, or shot.
The people who lived in these remote mountain communities were fighting to survive in an inhospitable terrain. They had always been short-handed. Even before the war, to make ends meet, many of these mountain men had gone off to work in the industrial areas of northern Italy, France and Switzerland, and even further afield, leaving their wives and children and the aged to fend for themselves as best they could, returning home at rare intervals. Some worked as itinerant knife grinders, others as navvies employed on such superhuman tasks as excavating railway tunnels. Some, more fortunate, had found their way to London where, having found their feet in the catering business, they had been able to send for their wives and families and open little cafés. Some of these men were interned at the beginning of the war and were subsequently drowned when the Arandora Star, the ship that was taking them and other internees to Canada, was torpedoed in the Atlantic.
Now many of the young men of these Apennine families were away at the war, many of them with the Giulia division of the Alpini which was now on the Russian front. The only able-bodied men were deserters who had left their units after the armistice, like my friend with the mule at Fontanellato. Like me, they too were on the run, not only from the Germans but also the Fascists, who, after their initial reverse, were making an altogether too rapid recovery.
Up there in the mountains no one except prisoners of war and the deserters, who had to keep an ear open for what was going on, was really interested in the war. For them it was an inexplicable calamity that had deprived many of them of their sons. Few of them were even nominally Fascists, those few that were still practising were, unfortunately, hyperactive.
The villages were collections of grey stone farmhouses huddled together for mutual protection from the elements above a labyrinth of narrow passages which led to the stalle, the cowsheds, and barns. These houses were roofed with stone slabs split from the same limestone with which the houses were built.
Apart from the few principal routes, which wound their way up through the Apennines and across the main ridge at one or other of the few passes that could be crossed by motor vehicles, there were few proper roads. Communication between villages was by rough tracks which had probably existed since the beginning of recorded time. Those who used them computed distances by the number of hours it took to reach one’s destination, rather than the number of kilometres that had to be covered.
Whenever a road or a track crossed a ridge or reached some other high point there would invariably be a little wayside shrine, usually with the Virgin depicted on a small, Carrara marble slab, of a sort that often dated back to the mid-eighteenth century.
Up there in the mountains, no woman whatever her age thought anything of making a three-hour journey downhill on foot to deliver a consignment of cheese to a weekly market, often carrying it in a first-war Alpini rucksack, and then climbing, loaded with purchases, all the way up again. Pack mules were used to carry heavier loads. Hay and firewood were brought down from the upper meadows and the forests on wooden sledges drawn by cows or bullocks. The only wheeled vehicles were handcarts.
Families lived by growing crops, mostly grain, potatoes and other vegetables, and by milking their cows. They also gathered chestnuts – the flour was a staple food but more so on the warmer, south-facing flanks of the mountains – and also edible mushrooms, such as boletus edulis, otherwise porcini, a delicacy which commanded high prices and sometimes grew in very large quantities. There were no vines. Vines couldn’t exist on this side of the range much above 220 metres, and there were no olives. So olive oil had to be bought. When the snow came in November/December many of the higher farms were often cut off from the outside world for quite long periods, except for those with skis. In this pre-plastic age which endured up here until many years after the war, ploughs were of wood and iron, harrows were made from the trunks of trees, digging was done with a long-handled spade called a vanga, nothing like an English spade, which had a triangular blade and a metal projection at right angles to it so that the user could exert more pressure and dig deeper.
Clods were broken up with a two-pronged mattock, called a zappa. In a field of any size the work of zappatura was hard for a lone operator because up in the mountains the earth was mostly adhesive clay that used to stick on the prongs of the zappa. Crops were cut with scythes and sickles.
When working, most of the men wore battered felt hats and what had once been their best Sunday suits. Sometimes they were of corduroy which their wives had repaired so many times, using whatever materials came to hand, that they often resembled patchwork quilts. And under their shirts they wore thick vests, with the natural oil still in the wool, which the women had knitted using wool they had spun themselves.
It was commonplace to see women spinning in the fields while looking after the animals, carrying a wooden spindle tapered at either end and with a perforated stone at the middle of it, to the top of which the woollen yarn was attached, and with the rest of it rolled round a distaff, a piece of wood which they carried tucked under one arm. Until they became old, or widowed, or both, when they dressed in deepest black from head to toe, women and girls for everyday wore dark skirts about the length of a kilt and aprons to protect them when working, blouses, hand-knitted vests, except in hot weather, thick, hand-knitted socks to match, heavy, nailed mountain boots and coloured head scarves. In this society men didn’t go to church much. Religion was for women. Among their men it was reserved usually for feast days and for death.
For them, and for me, life in those days when not working outside revolved around the kitchen, the largest, most important room in the house. There was no equivalent to a British front parlour. The fireplace was a blackened cave in which heavy copper cooking pots hung suspended in the chimney by long chains. And there was a cast-iron wood-burning stove with a long silver stove pipe rising from it then executing a right-angled bend before disappearing into one of the walls.
At that time the staple food was homemade bread, baked in an outside oven, using flour which was kept in a piece of furniture known as a madia. This had a detachable board on top which was used to make pasta – a great standby was a thick vegetable soup made with beans and pasta – and there was polenta, made with chestnut flour or maize. There was cheese and very rough wine, and for breakfast bread and milk and acorn coffee. Sugar was a black-market commodity; worst of all was the shortage of salt.
After the evening meal they all enjoyed sitting round the fire telling and listening to stories. At that time there were still storytellers whose stories dated back to medieval times, when the Saracens infested the coasts of Italy, stories which had been passed down by word of mouth.
Parma in the winter of 1944, when I was recaptured, was a city