We do not know the country where men will meet together and eat
without drinking also: at the al-fresco entertainments of this
kind which we have seen, the kegs of wine have ever been in goodly
proportion to the spitted lambs. And wherever a mob of men set to
drinking together, they will most assuredly take to fighting. The
rows at this fair used to be considerable; and, considering that
more wine is said to be consumed here on this one day than during
the whole of the rest of the year, we cannot be surprised that
fights should come off worthy of Donnybrook. At present, better
order is preserved than of old, because these rows have been so
excessive that they have enforced the attendance of the police.
At this fair is to be seen the picturesque _collo_ dance of the
Morlacchi, of which our author affords a capital pencil-sketch, as
well as the following description:--
"It sometimes begins before dinner, but is kept up with greater
spirit afterwards. They call it _collo_, from being, like most
of their national dances, in a circle. A man generally has
one partner, sometimes two, but always at his right side. In
dancing, he takes her right hand with his, while she supports
herself by holding his girdle with her left; and when he has two
partners, the one nearest him holds in her right hand that of
her companion, who, with her left, takes the right hand of the
man; and each set dances forward in a line round the circle. The
step is rude, as in most of the Slavonic dances, including the
polka and the _radovatschka_; and the music, which is primitive,
is confined to a three-stringed violin."
Dancing for dancing's sake, is what enters into no Englishman's
category of the enjoyable, nor into many an Englishwoman's either,
we should think, after the passage out of her teens; but that it is,
in sober earnest, an enjoyment to many people under the sun, there
is no doubt. Surely there is something wonderful in the faculty of
finding pleasure in the elephantine manœuvres of the _romaika_,
or in the still more clumsy gyrations of a _palicari's_ performance.
The _collo_ we readily believe to be a picturesque dance: but such
qualification is not the general condition on which the people
of a nation accept dances as national. Most of these exhibitions
in Greece and Eastern Europe must be condemned as graceless and
unmeaning: as an exhibition of earnest tomfoolery, they may be
accepted as wonderful; and, at all events, may safely be pronounced
co-excellent with the music that inspires them.
In passing from Salona to Traü, a distance of about thirteen miles
and a half to the westward, the traveller passes by several of the
villages called Castelli. The name has been given them from the
circumstance of their having been built near to, and under the
protection of, the castles which, in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, were constructed here by some of the nobles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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