Orange groves—The acorn and the pumpkin

Summary

Our writers of vaudevilles and comic operas never fail to include orange groves in every outdoor scene, if the action takes place in Italy.

A certain author had the idea of setting one near the main road from Naples to Castellamare. That particular grove intrigued me greatly. Where had it been hiding? I’d have been so relieved to find it and go to sleep in its perfumed shade in 1832 when I travelled on foot from Castellamare in a temperature of degrees, hidden, like one of Homer’s gods, in a cloud of burning dust. Phooey! There are no more orange groves there than in the Tauris Gardens at St. Petersburg or on the Roman plain.

But it’s an ineradicable belief in the heads of all Northerners who’ve ever read Goethe’s famous ballad “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?” that orange trees grow in Italy like potatoes in Ireland. It’s no use telling them Italy is a big country, stretching all the way from the Alps to the Isles of Lipari. Chambéry is in Savoy, Savoy is part of the kingdom of Sardinia, Sardinia is in Italy, yet the Savoyards aren’t at all Italian. Just because there really are vast and magnificent orange groves in the island of Sardinia, or even if there’s quite a pretty one in a park in Nice on the right bank of the Payon, that’s no reason to expect to find the garden of the Hesperides at Susa or St.-Jean-de-Maurienne.

Never mind! Perhaps today there are orange groves on the Castellamare road. Once they begin to grow somewhere, they grow fast. It’s just a matter of getting started.

In any case, there are certainly no lemon groves. That would be a heretical idea.

“Why so?”

“Why? Haven’t you read the fable of The Acorn and the Pumpkin? Don’t you know that lemons, instead of being round like oranges, are armed with a hard protuberance, which could put out the eye of a traveller sleeping under a lemon tree if it fell on his face? Providence knows what it’s doing. The author of the tale I’ve just cited demonstrates this clearly.