The streets are paved, but Verbicaro is not Naples, not Salerno, not even Amalfi.

The pavement is of the roughest cobble stones, and the pigs are the scavengers.

Pigs everywhere, in the streets, in the houses, at the windows, on the steps of the church in the market-place, to right and left, before you and behind you--like the guns at Balaclava.

You never heard of the Six Hundred, though your father was boatswain of a Palermo grain bark and lay three months in the harbour of Sebastapol during the fighting.
Pigs everywhere, black, grunting and happy.

Red-skirted, scarlet-bodiced women everywhere, too, all moving and carrying something.