road. It was broad and new, and it ran very often beside the railway. It
ran also by quarries and by occasional factories, also through villages.
And the quality of its sordidness is something that does not bear
thinking of, a quality that has entered Italian life now, if it was not
there before.
Here and there, where there were quarries or industries, great
lodging-houses stood naked by the road, great, grey, desolate places;
and squalid children were playing round the steps, and dirty men
slouched in. Everything seemed under a weight.
Down the road of the Ticino valley I felt again my terror of this new
world which is coming into being on top of us. One always feels it in a
suburb, on the edge of a town, where the land is being broken under the
advance of houses. But this is nothing, in England, to the terror one
feels on the new Italian roads, where these great blind cubes of
dwellings rise stark from the destroyed earth, swarming with a sort of
verminous life, really verminous, purely destructive.
It seems to happen when the peasant suddenly leaves his home and becomes
a workman. Then an entire change comes over everywhere. Life is now a
matter of selling oneself to slave-work, building roads or labouring in
quarries or mines or on the railways, purposeless, meaningless, really
slave-work, each integer doing his mere labour, and all for no purpose,
except to have money, and to get away from the old system.
These Italian navvies work all day long, their whole life is engaged in
the mere brute labour. And they are the navvies of the world. And whilst
they are navvying, they are almost shockingly indifferent to their
circumstances, merely callous to the dirt and foulness.
It is as if the whole social form were breaking down, and the human
element swarmed within the disintegration, like maggots in cheese. The
roads, the railways are built, the mines and quarries are excavated, but
the whole organism of life, the social organism, is slowly crumbling and
caving in, in a kind of process of dry rot, most terrifying to see. So
that it seems as though we should be left at last with a great system of
roads and railways and industries, and a world of utter chaos seething
upon these fabrications: as if we had created a steel framework, and the
whole body of society were crumbling and rotting in between. It is most
terrifying to realize; and I have always felt this terror upon a new
Italian high-road--more there than anywhere.
The remembrance of the Ticino valley is a sort of nightmare to me. But
it was better when at last, in the darkness of night, I got into
Bellinzona. In the midst of the town one felt the old organism still
living. It is only at its extremities that it is falling to pieces, as
in dry rot.
In the morning, leaving Bellinzona, again I went in terror of the new,
evil high-road, with its skirting of huge cubical houses and its
seething navvy population. Only the peasants driving in with fruit were
consoling. But I was afraid of them: the same spirit had set in in them.
I was no longer happy in Switzerland, not even when I was eating great
blackberries and looking down at the Lago Maggiore, at Locarno, lying by
the lake; the terror of the callous, disintegrating process was too
strong in me.
At a little inn a man was very good to me. He went into his garden and
fetched me the first grapes and apples and peaches, bringing them in
amongst leaves, and heaping them before me. He was Italian-Swiss; he had
been in a bank in Bern; now he had retired, had bought his paternal
home, and was a free man. He was about fifty years old; he spent all his
time in his garden; his daughter attended to the inn.
He talked to me, as long as I stayed, about Italy and Switzerland and
work and life. He was retired, he was free. But he was only nominally
free. He had only achieved freedom from labour. He knew that the system
he had escaped at last, persisted, and would consume his sons and his
grandchildren. He himself had more or less escaped back to the old form;
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