Ch. 9: S. Ambrogio and Neighbourhood - Page 2

very much alike, and certainly they were very much in love with one another. After dinner I sketched the castle. While I was doing so, a gentleman told me that a large breach in the wall was made a few years ago, and a part of the wall found to be hollow, the bottom of the hollow part being unwittingly removed, there fell through a skeleton in a full suit of armour. Others, whom I asked, had heard nothing of this.

Talking of hawks, I saw a good many boys with tame young hawks in the villages round about. There was a tame hawk at the station of S. Ambrogio. The station-master said it used to go now and again to the church-steeple to catch sparrows, but would always return in an hour or two. Before my stay was over it got in the way of a passing train and was run over.

Young birds are much eaten in this neighbourhood. The houses and barns, not to say the steeples of the churches, are to be seen stuck about with what look like terra-cotta water-bottles with the necks outwards. Two or three may be seen in the illustration on p. 113 outside the window that comes out of the roof, on the left-hand side of the picture. I have seen some outside an Italian restaurant near Lewisham. They are artificial bird's-nests for the sparrows to build in: as soon as the young are old enough they are taken and made into a pie. The church-tower near the Hotel de la Poste at Lanzo is more stuck about with them than any other building that I have seen.

Swallows and hawks are about the only birds whose young are not eaten. One afternoon I met a boy with a jay on his finger: having imprudently made advances to this young gentleman in the hopes of getting acquainted with the bird, he said he thought I had better buy it and have it for my dinner; but I did not fancy it. Another day I saw the padrona at the inn-door talking to a lad, who pulled open his shirt-front and showed some twenty or thirty nestlings in the simple pocket formed by his shirt on the one side and his skin upon the other. The padrona wanted me to say I should like to eat them, in which case she would have bought them; but one cannot get all the nonsense one hears at home out of one's head in a moment, and I am afraid I preached a little. The padrona, who is one of the most fascinating women in the world, and at sixty is still handsome, looked a little vexed and puzzled: she admitted the truth of what I said, but pleaded that the boys found it very hard to gain a few soldi, and if people didn't kill and eat one thing, they would another. The result of it all was that I determined for the future to leave young birds to their fate; they and the boys must settle that matter between themselves. If the young bird was a boy, and the boy a young bird, it would have been the boy who was taken ruthlessly from his nest and eaten. An old bird has no right to have a homestead, and a young bird has no right to exist at all, unless they can keep both homestead and existence out of the way