All this tends, as may be supposed, to civilize the buttero to a degree that he would not attain without it.  He is, as has been intimated, generally eminently self-conscious of his own advantages and proud of his position.  To the other elements which go to produce this feeling may be added the pride of caste.  Our buttero is probably the son and the father of a race which follows the same occupation.  The knowledge and skill which are absolutely necessary to his profession, and which are acquired no otherwise than traditionally, have a tendency to produce this result.  He grew up to be a buttero, with a consummate knowledge of horses and horned cattle, and a sure eye for the condition of the pastures from one to another district of which the animals are constantly moving, under the eye of his father, who put him on a half-broken colt almost as soon as he could walk.  And he is giving his son the same education.  For a young buttero to marry with a daughter of the despised shepherd class would be a mesalliance not to be thought of.  Nor would a marriage with the daughter of a small artisan of the towns be deemed a very acceptable one.  The chances are that the young centaur marries a girl of his own centaur breed, and all the prejudice and barriers of caste are thus propagated and intensified.  It must not be supposed that the buttero or his family lives on the malaria-stricken plains which his occupation requires him to be constantly riding over.  The wretched shepherd is constrained to do so, and sleeps in the vicinity of his flock, finding, if he can, the shelter of a ruined tomb or of the broken arch of an aqueduct, or even of a cave from which pozzolana has been dug, and strives to exorcise the malaria fiend by kindling a big fire and sleeping with his head in the thick smoke of it.  But the buttero, well mounted, to whom it is a small matter to ride eight or ten miles to his home every night, lives with his family either in Rome or in one of the small towns on the slopes of the hills which enclose the Campagna.  And it is thus that these strikingly picturesque figures may often be seen traversing the streets and piazze of Rome, and especially of those parts of it which lie on the far side of the Tiber or to the southward of the Quirinal Hill and the Piazza di Venezia.  They are almost always handsome fellows, well grown, and striking specimens of robust and manly vigor, probably by virtue of the lives they lead, and of the similar lives the race from which they spring have led before them; partly also, no doubt, from the fact that should any son be born to a buttero who should not be thus happily endowed, he could not think of following the ancestral occupation, but would have to be weeded out from the race and seek his place in the towns, where he would not become the father of degenerate butteri.

My friend Nanni Silvani was all that I have described the buttero to be.  He was indeed a very perfect specimen of his class; and if the reader will allow me to tell him how I first came to be acquainted with Nanni, the relation of the circumstances will at the same time show him one of the most remarkable phases of the buttero’s life, and one of the most curiously characteristic scenes of Italian—­and especially Roman—­life which it falls to the lot of foreign visitors to witness.