To see these women at their best one must choose a Sunday or a
feast-day; one must go, morever, to the favourite fountain of Santa
Lucia, which lies on the hill-side and irrigates some patches of corn
and vegetables. Their natural charms are enhanced by elaborate and
tasteful golden ornaments, and by a pretty mode of dressing the hair,
two curls of which are worn hanging down before their ears with an
irresistibly seductive air. Their features are regular; eyes black or
deep gentian blue; complexion pale; movements and attitudes impressed
with a stamp of rare distinction. Even the great-grandmothers have a
certain austere dignity--sinewy, indestructible old witches, with tawny
hide and eyes that glow like lamps.

And yet San Giovanni is as dirty as can well be; it has the accumulated
filth of an Eastern town, while lacking all its glowing tints or
harmonious outlines. We are disposed to associate squalor with certain
artistic effects, but it may be said of this and many other Calabrian
places that they have solved the problem how to be ineffably squalid
without becoming in the least picturesque. Much of this sordid look is
due to the smoke which issues out of all the windows and blackens the
house walls, inside and out--the Calabrians persisting in a prehistoric
fashion of cooking on the floor. The buildings themselves look crude and
gaunt from their lack of plaster and their eyeless windows; black pigs
wallowing at every doorstep contribute to this slovenly _ensemble._ The
City Fathers have turned their backs upon civilization; I dare say the
magnitude of the task before them has paralysed their initiative.

Nothing is done in the way of public hygiene, and one sees women washing
linen in water which is nothing more or less than an open drain. There
is no street-lighting whatever; a proposal on the part of a North