He was a peasant of fifty-three, very
grey and wrinkled and worn-looking, but at the same time robust, with
full strong limbs and a powerful chest. His face was old, but his body
was solid and powerful. His eyes were blue like upper ice, beautiful. He
had been a fair-haired man, now he was almost white.
He, was strangely like the pictures of peasants in the northern Italian
pictures, with the same curious nobility, the same aristocratic, eternal
look of motionlessness, something statuesque. His head was hard and
fine, the bone finely constructed, though the skin of his face was loose
and furrowed with work. His temples had that fine, hard clarity which is
seen in Mantegna, an almost jewel-like quality.
We all loved Paolo, he was so finished in his being, detached, with an
almost classic simplicity and gentleness, an eternal kind of sureness.
There was also something concluded and unalterable about him, something
inaccessible.
Maria Fiori was different. She was from the plain, like Enrico
Persevalli and the Bersaglier from the Venetian district. She reminded
me again of oxen, broad-boned and massive in physique, dark-skinned,
slow in her soul.
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