Italian Snakes

 First, A Few Words About Patrick Fermor
    I am a fan of the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor who died in 2011.  I have most of what he has written and recently picked the book pictured from the shelf. It is an anthology and I thought I had read everything in it, but had not. It contains a piece about snakes.

Serpents of the Abruzzi
    That is the title of the snake essay and it originally appeared in The Spectator, on June 5, 1953. During that year, Fermor was walking through Tuscany and Umbria when he came upon a religious festival honouring San Domenico who is credited with removing the snakes from the Abruzzo region. Large numbers of snakes are gathered and they are draped over the statue of San Domenico as it is paraded through the village of Cocullo. 
   Curious about whether the Rito dei Serpari or the "Rite of the Snake Charmers" written about by Fermor seventy years ago, still happens, I went searching and found that the snakes still slither around Cocullo on May 1. For more, and some very good pictures see this BBC piece, "Italy's Annual Snake Festival in the Village of Cocullo."  After viewing them you may prefer Coachella or even Pamplona and the "Running of the Bulls." 
   Here are some of the snake bits from the Fermor piece:

   LEAVING the gentle, Italian, primitive landscape of Umbria for the blank sierras of the Abruzzi was as complete a change as a journey to a different planet. Indeed, these wild grey peaks have an almost lunar remoteness, and the little village of Corullo, a grey honeycomb of houses at the end of a blind alley of the mountains a dozen miles from Ovid's birthplace at Sulmona, must usually seem a desolate habitation. The sun beats down from a blazing sky, but in the labyrinthine shadows of the lanes there is a chill bite in the air from the towering snows of the Gran Sasso.

    But once a year, in the first week of May, this planetary silence is broken, and the village population, normally only a few hundred souls—shepherds and small cultivators to a man—swells to several thousands.. Pilgrims, last month, swarmed from all the neighbouring villages, and, as this is one of the few parts of Italy where regional costumes survive, the streets were a kaleidoscope of different colours and fashions, A bearded shepherd, playing an ear-splitting pibroch on a bagpipe made of .a patched inner tube, wore raw-hid/ mocassins, and his legs were cross-gartered, Iike those of a Saxon thane, with thick leather thongs. The religious occasion was also the pretext for a rustic fair, and the market was full of trussed poultry and squealing pigs. Pedlars carried trays of rosaries, medals, little tin motor-cars, celluloid thumbs-ups and dried acorn-cups. There were " lucky" hunch-backs, crippled beggars, hucksters with fortune- telling canaries and a wandering hypnotist. Less usual was the presence, wherever one turned, of snakes, slung over brown forearms or twisting like bracelets, lying in loose tangles among the funnel-topped bottles in the wine-shops, or held in clusters of four with their unwinking heads all gathered in the palm between the laden fingers of both hands, their long forked tongues sliding in and out of their jaws. Some were nearly two yards in length, and all of them looked alarmingly dangerous. Most of the serpari, or snake catchers, are under twenty. For weeks past they had been hunting them in the mountains, where they abound. Capturing them while they are still dazed with their winter-sleep, they disarm the poisonous ones by giving them the hem of a garment to bite, which, when snatched away, breaks off their teeth and drains their poison. Then, stored in jars or sewn into goatskins, they are put by until the great day conies round. There were now several hundred of them in the streets of Corullo—black, grey, greenish, speckled and striped, all hissing and knotting together and impotently darting and biting with their harmless jaws. The floor of the church—baroque, and surprisingly large— was deep in crumbs and bundles and debris, for hundreds of visiting peasants, finding the village overflowing, had slept there all night. Queues waited their turn at the confessional, and, under a pink and blue baldachin, relays of priests 

administered the sacrament....

 Then the devotees moved on to the effigy of St. Dominic himself, a lifesize, wooden figure in black Benedictine habit with a horseshoe in one hand and in the other a crosier. Embracing him with a hungry and possessive veneration, they rubbed little bundles of coloured wool— sovereign thenceforward, when applied to the spot, against toothache and snakebite and hydrophobia—down the grooves of his skirt, or lifted their children to kissing distance of the worn and numinous flanks. Silver ex-votos hung round his neck, and pink ribbons, on which were pinned sheaves of offered banknotes, fluttered from his shoulders. St. Dominic of Sora, or " the Abbot "—he has nothing to do with the great founder of the " Preachers' " Order—was a Benedictine of Umbrian origin, born in 951. He was eremetical and peripatetic by turns, and his countless miracles during his lifetime, and, the Abruzzesi relate, even since through the agency of his relic, were nearly all connected with the foiling of the bears and wolves, and, especially, of the snakes. 

  By the time High Mass began, there was no room to move in the crowded church. Yet a passage was cleared and two young women advanced with large baskets balancing unsupported on their heads, each of them containing great hoop- like loaves; both baskets were draped in pink and white silk and decked with carnations and wild cyclamen. The girls stood, like caryatids, on either side of the high altar until, at the end of the service, the image of the saint was hoisted shoulder-high and borne swaying into the sunlight before the church door. There, while the compact multitude clapped and cheered and the bells broke into a jubilant peal, the serpari clustered round the lowered float. Snakes began flying over the tonsured head like lassos. Parish elders arranged them feather-boa-like, about his shoulders, twisted them round his crosier and wound them over his arms and through the horseshoe and at random all over his body until the image and its pedestal were an all squirming tangle. Many fell off or wriggled free, and one over-active reptile was given a sharp crack over the head. It was raised shoulder high once more like a drowned figurehead salvaged from the Sargasso Sea. .A small pink banner, pinned all over with notes, and a large green one, were unwieldily hoisted. Village girls intoned a hymn in Abruzzi dialect in St. Dominic's honour; then the clergy, one of them bearing the cylinder with its swinging tooth, formed a procession

Then came the two girls with their peculiar baskets. A brass band struck up the triumphal march from Aida, and the saint, twisting and coiling with the activity of the bewildered snakes and bristling with hissing and tongue- darting heads, rocked insecurely forward and across the square. The innumerable peasants, the conjurors and pedlars and quacks, fell into step; the wine-shops emptied; pigs and poultry were abandoned in their pens, and the whole immense con- course, now itself forming a gigantic many-coloured serpent, wound slowly along the rising and falling streets. Every few steps the effigy came to a halt while fallen snakes were replaced or yet more banknotes, which floated down from the upper windows, were pinned to the fluttering ribbons. Boys on all sides brandished tangled armfuls of redundant snakes, and, looking up at the bright mid-day sky, I saw girls on the roof- tops waving the now familiar reptiles in either hand.

Sources: 

   "Strange Italy: The Festival of Snakes in Abruzzo." 

   "The Ancient Snake Festival of Cocullo." 

"A Statue Draped With Snakes? In Italy, It Happens Every Year: Held in a Small Mountain Village, This Festival Has It All: Snakes, Charmers, Religion, Science. See For Yourself -- and Try Not to Squirm," Francesco Martinelli, New York Times, Sept. 29, 2023.
  Fermor has many fans. Have a look at the Wikipedia biography first and if interested see this website devoted to him: "Patrick Leigh Fermor; He Drank From a Different Fountain." You could start with A Time of Gifts which is about an earlier walk across Europe just before the start of World War II. 

If you are close by and want to borrow any of his books, just let me know. 

The Bonus:

  For more about religion and snakes see, the "Snake Handlers."

On Ophiology

The Sounds of Snakes

   
   While I have not felt like writing much lately, I have continued to read and that allows me to present you with items more interesting than I could otherwise provide. This piece is about snakes and it is from the same book from which I copied, about a month ago, a description of hail storms. In this instance, W. H. Hudson recalls the snake sounds he heard as a child. They were coming from under the floor beneath his bed. 

   I grew up in an area where there were a lot of snakes, but I can't say I ever heard any, and apart from the ones that rattle, I didn't think snakes made much noise. You will learn from the piece below that they do make sounds and I learned from it what 'ophiology' is. If you are not a fan of snakes, you are warned that the symphony of snakes described here, may give you the shivers.

   "Snakes were common enough about us; snakes of seven or eight different kinds, green in the green grass, and yellow and dusky-mottled in dry and barren places and in withered herbage, so that it was difficult to detect them. Sometimes they intruded into the dwelling-rooms, and at all seasons a nest or colony of snakes existed in the thick old foundations of the house, and under the flooring. In winter they hibernated there, tangled together in a cluster no doubt; and in summer nights when they were at home, coiled at their ease or gliding ghost-like about their subterranean apartments, I would lie awake and listen to them by the hour. For although it may be news to some closet ophiologists, serpents are not all so mute as we think them. At all events this kind, the Philodryas aestivus--a beautiful and harmless colubrine snake, two and a half to three feet long, marked all over with inky black on a vivid green ground--not only emitted a sound when lying undisturbed in his den, but several individuals would hold a conversation together which seemed endless, for I generally fell asleep before it finished. A hissing conversation it is true, but not unmodulated or without considerable variety in it; a long sibilation would be followed by distinctly-heard ticking sounds, as of a husky-ticking clock, and after ten or twenty or thirty ticks another hiss, like a long expiring sigh, sometimes with a tremble in it as of a dry leaf swiftly vibrating in the wind. No sooner would one cease than another would begin; and so it would go on, demand and response, strophe and antistrope; and at intervals several voices would unite in a kind of low mysterious chorus, death-watch and flutter and hiss; while I, lying awake in my bed, listened and trembled. It was dark in the room, and to my excited imagination the serpents were no longer under the floor, but out, gliding hither and thither over it, with uplifted heads in a kind of mystic dance; and I often shivered to think what my bare feet might touch if I were to thrust a leg out and let it hang down over the bedside."

Source:
  Far Away and Long Ago: A Childhood in Argentina, W. H. Hudson. Eland Books, 1982, pp.207-208.

The Bonus:
   It gets worse. I also happen to be reading Hudson's, Idle Days in Patagonia. Early on in the book Hudson describes an incident when he accidentally shoots himself in the leg and has to wait in a windowless cabin while his friend goes for help. He learns that he is not alone:

 "At length, about midnight, I was startled by a slight curious sound in the intense silence and darkness. It was in the cabin and close to me. I thought at first it was like the sound made by a rope drawn slowly over the clay floor. I lighted a wax match, but the sound had ceased, and I saw nothing. After awhile I heard it again, but it now seemed to be out of doors and going round the hut, and I paid little attention to it. It soon ceased, and I heard it no more. So silent and dark was it thereafter that The hut I reposed in might have been a roomy coffin in which I had been buried a hundred feet beneath the surface of the earth. Yet I was no longer alone, if I had only known it, but had now a messmate and bedfellow who had subtly crept in to share the warmth of the cloak and of my person—one with a broad arrow-shaped head, set with round lidless eyes like polished yellow pebbles, and a long smooth limbless body, strangely segmented and vaguely written all over with mystic characters in some dusky tint on an indeterminate grayish-tawny ground...."

[When his friend returns, Hudson learns he has been sleeping with the snake.]

"Not until the sun was an hour up did my friend return to me to find me hopeful still, and with all my faculties about me, but unable to move without assistance. Putting his arms around me he helped me up, and just as I had got erect on my sound leg, leaning heavily on him, out from beneath the poncho lying at my feet glided a large serpent of a venomous kind, the Craspedocephalus alternactus, called in the vernacular the 'serpent with cross.' Had my friend's arms not been occupied with sustaining me he, no doubt, would have attacked it with the first weapon that offered, and in all probability killed it, with the result that I should have suffered from a kind of vicarious remorse ever after. Fortunately it was not long in drawing its coils out of sight and danger into a hole in the wall."

Sources: 

   'Ophiology' is a sub-field of Herpetology and the Wikipedia entry for that is here.

   You will learn from this very interesting article that cobras growl: "6 Sssecrets of a Snake-Sound Scientissst," Kate Horowitz, Mental Floss, Sept. 21, 2015. 

CANCON

   Snakes, lots of them, can be found at the Narcisse Snake Dens which are located about an hour from Winnipeg. "Snakes On A Plain: A Visit to Manitoba's Narcisse Snake Dens: A Bucket List Experience Observing the World's Largest Concentration of Snakes," Robin Esrock, Canadian Geographic, Mar. 2, 2023.

The Animal Trade Again

 

   Perhaps it was because I have written about the "Plight of the Pangolins" that I noticed this startling headline, which is startling even in our age of startling headlines: "More Than 100 Animals Found in Luggage at Thai Airport: 2 Women Arrested," Andrew Jeong, Washington Post, June 29, 2022.  The nerves of these ladies are undoubtedly much stronger than those of people like me who break into a sweat when we think we might have mistakenly packed some liquid toiletries. 

   The animals were, at least, not large ones.  Lots of lizards were found, along with 35 turtles and a Peter's Banded Skink. There were also two porcupines. Chennai (Madras for us oldsters) was the destination and it appears that it is not unusual to find animals among the passengers in Indian airports since over 70,000 were seized between 2011 and 2020.  The smugglers face up to 10 years in prison and large fines. 

The Bonus:
   It is through such trading that the Burmese python made its way to Florida where there are now many of them. Last week, the largest one ever found there was captured. She was 18 feet long and weighed 215 pounds. "Conservancy of SWFL Documents Largest Burmese Python in Florida," Naples Florida Weekly, June 30, 2022.