There was nothing doing; a black despondent remnant of the old crowd
of gondolas browsed dreamily among against the quay to stare at me the
better. The empty palaces seemed to be sleeping in the morning sunshine
because it was not worth while to wake up....
2
Except in the case of Venice, the war does not seem as yet to have made
nearly such a mark upon life in Italy as it has in England or provincial
France. People speak of Italy as a poor country, but that is from a
banker's point of view. In some respects she is the richest country on
earth, and in the matter of staying power I should think she is
better off than any other belligerent. She produces food in abundance
everywhere; her women are agricultural workers, so that the interruption
of food production by the war has been less serious in Italy than in any
other part of Europe. In peace time, she has constantly exported labour;
the Italian worker has been a seasonal emigrant to America, north and
south, to Switzerland, Germany and the south of France. The cessation of
this emigration has given her great reserves of man power, so that she
has carried on her admirable campaign with less interference with her
normal economic life than any other power. The first person I spoke to
upon the platform at Modane was a British officer engaged in forwarding
Italian potatoes to the British front in France.
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