From the Cathedral we proceeded to visit the quaint little church of Santa Maria del Gradillo, that with its oriental-looking towers and cupolas affords a pleasing example of the mixed Lombard and Saracenic style which was in vogue in the years when the house of Hohenstaufen were masters of Southern Italy. We found little that was worth seeing inside the building, except the pretty black-eyed daughter of the toothless tottering old sacristan, who slunk off grumbling on his child’s appearance, leaving her to do the honours of the place. Her merry face with its welcoming smile and her modest loquacity excited our interest, and in answer to our questions we gathered that she was twenty years old, and was still unmarried, not for lack of opportunity, she naïvely told us, but because she was unwilling to leave her old parents, who had no one in the world but herself to attend to them. Coming to the door of the church, Angela (for that was her name) pointed out her home, a little white-washed cottage with a heavily barred window over-hanging the grass-grown lane. We wished our pleasant companion a warm good-bye, or rather _a riverderla_, at the entrance of the dwelling, where through the open doorway we could espy a small sun-smitten courtyard tenanted by a wizened old woman sitting in the shade of an orange tree, by three cats, and by a large family of skinny hens. On a low wall we noted some shallow earthenware pans filled with carnation plants, whose red and yellow heads were clearly silhouetted against the blue sky over head. Perhaps Angela’s life, we thought, is after all happier thus spent in the tending of her parents, her poultry and her garden, than if joined to that of some swarthy rascal of the beach below or dull peasant of the hillside. Long may the old people survive to keep their guardian Angel from the mingled sorrows and joys of matrimony! “Tenete l’uocchie de miricula nere; Che ffa la vostra matre che n’n de’ marite? La vostra matre n’a de’ marito’ apposte Pe’ ne’ lleva’ son fior, a la fenestre.” (“Your eyes are marvellously black and bright! How is it that your mother does not wed you? She will not wed you, not to lose her light— Not to remove the flower that decks her window!”)