Our Italy

Оглавление

Warner Charles Dudley. Our Italy

CHAPTER I. HOW OUR ITALY IS MADE

CHAPTER II. OUR CLIMATIC AND COMMERCIAL MEDITERRANEAN

CHAPTER III. EARLY VICISSITUDES.—PRODUCTIONS.—SANITARY CLIMATE

CHAPTER IV. THE WINTER OF OUR CONTENT

CHAPTER V. HEALTH AND LONGEVITY

CHAPTER VI. IS RESIDENCE HERE AGREEABLE?

CHAPTER VII. THE WINTER ON THE COAST

CHAPTER VIII. THE GENERAL OUTLOOK.—LAND AND PRICES

CHAPTER IX. THE ADVANTAGES OF IRRIGATION

CHAPTER X. THE CHANCE FOR LABORERS AND SMALL FARMERS

CHAPTER XI. SOME DETAILS OF THE WONDERFUL DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER XII. HOW THE FRUIT PERILS WERE MET.—FURTHER DETAILS OF LOCALITIES

CHAPTER XIII. THE ADVANCE OF CULTIVATION SOUTHWARD

CHAPTER XIV. A LAND OF AGREEABLE HOMES

CHAPTER XV. SOME WONDERS BY THE WAY.—YOSEMITE.—MARIPOSA TREES.—MONTEREY

CHAPTER XVI. FASCINATIONS OF THE DESERT.—THE LAGUNA PUEBLO

CHAPTER XVII. THE HEART OF THE DESERT

CHAPTER XVIII. ON THE BRINK OF THE GRAND CAÑON.—THE UNIQUE MARVEL OF NATURE

Отрывок из книги

Winter as we understand it east of the Rockies does not exist. I scarcely know how to divide the seasons. There are at most but three. Spring may be said to begin with December and end in April; summer, with May (whose days, however, are often cooler than those of January), and end with September; while October and November are a mild autumn, when nature takes a partial rest, and the leaves of the deciduous trees are gone. But how shall we classify a climate in which the strawberry (none yet in my experience equal to the Eastern berry) may be eaten in every month of the year, and ripe figs may be picked from July to March? What shall I say of a frost (an affair of only an hour just before sunrise) which is hardly anywhere severe enough to disturb the delicate heliotrope, and even in the deepest valleys where it may chill the orange, will respect the bloom of that fruit on contiguous ground fifty or a hundred feet higher? We boast about many things in the United States, about our blizzards and our cyclones, our inundations and our areas of low pressure, our hottest and our coldest places in the world, but what can we say for this little corner which is practically frostless, and yet never had a sunstroke, knows nothing of thunder-storms and lightning, never experienced a cyclone, which is so warm that the year round one is tempted to live out-of-doors, and so cold that woollen garments are never uncomfortable? Nature here, in this protected and petted area, has the knack of being genial without being enervating, of being stimulating without "bracing" a person into the tomb. I think it conducive to equanimity of spirit and to longevity to sit in an orange grove and eat the fruit and inhale the fragrance of it while gazing upon a snow-mountain.

This southward-facing portion of California is irrigated by many streams of pure water rapidly falling from the mountains to the sea. The more important are the Santa Clara, the Los Angeles and San Gabriel, the Santa Ana, the Santa Margarita, the San Luis Rey, the San Bernardo, the San Diego, and, on the Mexican border, the Tia Juana. Many of them go dry or flow underground in the summer months (or, as the Californians say, the bed of the river gets on top), but most of them can be used for artificial irrigation. In the lowlands water is sufficiently near the surface to moisten the soil, which is broken and cultivated; in most regions good wells are reached at a small depth, in others artesian-wells spout up abundance of water, and considerable portions of the regions best known for fruit are watered by irrigating ditches and pipes supplied by ample reservoirs in the mountains. From natural rainfall and the sea moisture the mesas and hills, which look arid before ploughing, produce large crops of grain when cultivated after the annual rains, without artificial watering.

.....

Here is our Mediterranean! Here is our Italy! It is a Mediterranean without marshes and without malaria, and it does not at all resemble the Mexican Gulf, which we have sometimes tried to fancy was like the classic sea that laves Africa and Europe. Nor is this region Italian in appearance, though now and then some bay with its purple hills running to the blue sea, its surrounding mesas and cañons blooming in semi-tropical luxuriance, some conjunction of shore and mountain, some golden color, some white light and sharply defined shadows, some refinement of lines, some poetic tints in violet and ashy ranges, some ultramarine in the sea, or delicate blue in the sky, will remind the traveller of more than one place of beauty in Southern Italy and Sicily. It is a Mediterranean with a more equable climate, warmer winters and cooler summers, than the North Mediterranean shore can offer; it is an Italy whose mountains and valleys give almost every variety of elevation and temperature.

But it is our commercial Mediterranean. The time is not distant when this corner of the United States will produce in abundance, and year after year without failure, all the fruits and nuts which for a thousand years the civilized world of Europe has looked to the Mediterranean to supply. We shall not need any more to send over the Atlantic for raisins, English walnuts, almonds, figs, olives, prunes, oranges, lemons, limes, and a variety of other things which we know commercially as Mediterranean products. We have all this luxury and wealth at our doors, within our limits. The orange and the lemon we shall still bring from many places; the date and the pineapple and the banana will never grow here except as illustrations of the climate, but it is difficult to name any fruit of the temperate and semi-tropic zones that Southern California cannot be relied on to produce, from the guava to the peach.

.....