Classic Italy, however, still cultivates her vines as she did when the
Georgics were written; "marries" them most becomingly and picturesquely to
elms or mulberries, &c, and makes of them lovely festoons and very acrid
wine. Again, it must be admitted that a yoke of huge dove-colored oxen,
with their heavy unwieldy tumbril, is a more picturesque object than an
English wagon and a team of horses. Occasionally, too, may be seen bearing
not ungracefully a blushing burden of huge bunches, a figure, male or
female, who might have sat for a model to Leopold Robert. But despite all
this, the process of gathering the vintage is any thing but a pleasing
sight. In one of the heavy tumbrils I have mentioned, are placed some
twelve or fifteen large pails, some three feet deep, and a foot or so in
diameter. Into these are thrown pell-mell the bunches of fruit, ripe and
unripe, clean and dirty, stalks and all, white and red indiscriminately.
The cart thus laden, the fifteen pails of unsightly, dirty-looking slush,
are driven to the "fattoria," there to be emptied into vats, which appear,
both to nose and eye, never to have been cleansed since they were made. In
performing this operation much is of course spilt over the men employed,
over the cart, over the ground; and nothing can look less agreeable than
the effect thus produced. Sometimes one large tub occupies the whole
tumbril, the contents of which, on reaching the "fattoria," have to be
ladled out with buckets. Often the contents of the vat, trodden in one
place--a most unsightly process--have to be transported in huge barrels,
like water-carts, to another place to undergo fermentation. And then the
thick muddy stream, laden with filth and impurities of all sorts, which is
seen when these barrels discharge their cargo, is as little calculated to
give one a pleasing idea of the "ruby wine" which is to be the result of
all this filthy squash, as can well be imagined. Add to this an
exceedingly unpleasant smell in and about all the buildings in which any
part of the wine-making process takes place, and the constant recurrence
of rotting heaps of the refuse matter of the pressed grape under every
wall and hedge in the neighborhood of each "fattoria"--and the notions
connected with the so be-poetized vintage, will be easily understood to be
none of the pleasantest in the minds of those acquainted with its sights
and smells.--_Trollope's Impressions of a Wanderer._

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