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VILLAGE INDUSTRIES 289 



a good account to give of itself in France, more particularly that of 

 a rural type, with one or two lessons for us. 



Italy is really still all alive with more or less flourishing small 

 industries, for the most part of a decidedly rural character, intended 

 as a by-occupation to fill up off-time, and provide remunerative 

 work for the long winter months, most of it also of some peculiar, 

 racy kind, bearing a distinctly Italian stamp. This is to be accounted 

 for by local habits and tastes, and also by the presence of particularly 

 suitable material. Thus the manufacture of wooden spoons, ladles, 

 shovels, also of cooper's work, and again of knives, pruning hooks 

 and other primitive implements for the house, the dairy and the 

 farm, are easily explained by more or less backward conditions and 

 popular devotion to old-world customs. In any case these things 

 provide plenty of employment for idle hands in rural districts. 

 Straw plaiting holds its own — not only in the Tuscan villages, which 

 turn out superior goods of a type which the Ministry of Industry 

 declares its confidence that even Asiatic competition will not be able 

 to equal, but also plaiting of the coarser kind and the manufacture 

 of straw hampers and other peculiar receptacles, in which to convey 

 the great mass of fruit which Italy exports, and also to serve as 

 resting places for the cocoons when put into the stove for steaming. 

 The industry of plaiting has indeed recently received a fresh impetus, 

 and kept steadily growing in its new shape by the impressment of 

 strips of flexible wood, mostly taken from a peculiar kind of willow 

 which abounds in the neighbourhood of Cremona, but also of other 

 flexible wood. Either in combination with straw, or else with one 

 or other of the aquatic or lacustrine plants, rush plants and the like, 

 which are abundant in Italy, this material goes to manufacture hats, 

 netted coverings for such bottles as we know from their employment 

 to hold Chianti, but many much larger, and similar articles. There 

 is a considerable exportation of hats of this new make, some of 

 them finding their way to Luton. In the south plaiting work 

 is turned out, made of the leaves of the dwarf palm, which 

 abounds in these parts. A sister industry is wickerwork or 

 basket-making, for which the large variety of lacustrine plants and 

 other wild shrubs already referred to, growing freely in Italy, supply 

 the material. Mat-making is particularly to the fore. And besoms 

 and brushes of all kinds are also much made, of a variety of materials, 

 anything that is scrubby, so it seems, even buckwheat straw. Apart 

 from the making of rather rude domestic implements, there is also 

 much woodwork of a very much finer quality done, including 

 inlaid work and artistic carving, which is likewise executed in horn 



R.E- IT 



