The broad Italian landscape spreads below me—the lands of the upper Po and Bormida;

I see the wave-like congregated hills terraced with vines to their very tops, the pink or yellow painted homesteads dotted here and there, the arched stone barns, and villages clustered on the hill tops with belfries high against the sky.

The old woman, my mother, with walnut brown skin haunts the lonely farmhouse all day while the others are in the field;

She wanders from chamber to chamber, hardly knowing what she is doing. Her memory carries her back to the far past—she lives not in the present.

Sometimes into the great attic overhead she climbs, with its huge roof-beams and brick floor, and spreads the grapes to dry or leisurely picks them over.

The haymakers work barefoot in the clover patch, turning the clover and loading the low-wheeled waggon in the fragrant transparent evening;

The peasant plows with his one-stilted plow, or creaks along the road with his cart and yoke of cream-colored oxen;

The girls and women with red or yellow kerchiefs stand among the branches of the mulberry trees by the roadside, picking leaves for the silkworms;

The country folk congregate on the steps of the village church, looking out over the hills—the women passing in by ones and twos;

The men play _mora_ over their wine in the little hostelry; the boys play at ball down the narrow by-streets, using the roofs and buttresses to baffle their opponents’ strokes;

The old play of daily life goes on—the centuries-long play;

The ruins of the Roman aqueduct still cross the bed of the river, the ruins of Roman words and customs still lie embedded in the life of to-day;

The old blood still runs in the veins, the water runs in the rivers, the crops grow in the fields—the light of youth, of love, of old age, of death, shines in the eyes.

* * * * *

From the accident of here and now,

From this hill whence for a moment I overlook the fair garden of human life, from this few feet of human flesh which I inhabit,

From these fierce desires which hem me in, these defects, these limitations, these mortal sufferings,

This little creature-dom, this brief emprisonment of life,

I descend, I pass, I flow down,

[O words so vain to tell—O strange incredible transformation!]

I pass, I flow down, into the freedom of all times, into the latitude of all places.

* * * * *

I work on the hills once more with the slave and the freedman among the vines, I mix the mortar for them that build the aqueduct;

The lover and his girl lean against my breast in the moonlight long ages back as now;

The face of the mother understands my face a thousand and ten thousand years ago, as it does to-day;

I am the cream-colored ox with mild eyes, and I am the driver who curses and goads it;

I am the lover and the loved—I have lost and found my identity.