A well-worked vineyard is like a healthy body that lives and breathes and sweats.

and only when I told him about the bonfires in the stubble did he raise his head. "They're quite right to do it," he said. "They're awakening the earth."

"But Nuto," I said, "even Cinto doesn't believe that."

All the same, he said, he didn't know what it was, whether it was the heat or the blaze or something waking up inside the earth, anyhow in every field where they kindled a bonfire at the edge the crop grew quicker and heavier.

"This is something new," I said. "So you believe in the moon to?"

"The moon – we must believe in the moon," said Nuto. "Try to cut down a pine tree when the moon is full and you will be eaten up by worms. You should wash a grape vat when the moon is new. As for grfting, unless you do it when the moon is only a few days old, it doesn't take."

The obscene and anti-Christian press, he says — as if they could even read the almanac.

I like to know that the world is round, and to have one foot on the gangway.