Ancient Rome and Modern Italy 23 



ated and suffering Savior which are so abundant in northern art. 

 Foreign observers comment upon the devotion of Italian parents 

 to their offspring and upon the general happiness of domestic life. 

 Holding the baby is still a preferred pleasure in an Italian family, 

 and, among the poor, the older children are more likely to be quar- 

 relling for the possession of it, with the privilege of smothering it 

 with insanitary kisses, than for their turn at playing with a mere 

 inanimate thing, such as a toy or doll. Yet every Italian girl 

 knows that, if she only loves her doll enough, she can make it 

 alive. It is needless to add that in the higher walks of life spoiled 

 children can be obtrusively noticeable. They are the inevitable 

 product of such doting parentage. 106 



When a child was born to a Roman family, it was customary for 

 father and mother to declare their joy by having the door of their 

 dwelling adorned with a wreath or with garlands of flowers. To 

 sentimental people of our time the custom might seem to be lovely 

 enough to adopt, were it not that a spray of flowers is already used 

 in connection with crepe to announce the arrival of that least wel- 

 come of visitors, Death. It is, indeed, a sad commentary upon the 

 poverty which prevails in parts of Sicily that the black of mourn- 

 ing has sometimes been displayed at the door of indigent parents 

 when they had to declare the addition to the family of a baby girl 

 — the unwanted girl. 



Italy is such a conservative land that the motives given for a 

 certain custom may change in the course of the ages and the origi- 

 nal reason for it may be lost to knowledge, and yet the custom itself 

 live on. Those superstitious parents in various parts of the king- 

 dom, as, for example, in Amalfi, the Abruzzi, and Sicily, who have 

 kept up the practice of placing a newborn child on a cloth spread 

 on the earth or floor, generation after generation, probably do not 

 even know that they had predecessors long before the commence- 

 ment of our era who were doing the same thing. 107 The Roman 

 belief seems to have been that through lying there the infant drew 

 strength from old Mother Earth as the parent of all living things. 108 

 We hear of the divine spirit Levana as being present, if she had 

 been properly invoked, to preside over the lifting of the child from 

 the ground — her only service during the entire lifetime of an indi- 

 vidual — a momentary god, indeed! 



Italians are to be found whose ways of thought are so primitive 



