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Count Rodolfo in Bellini's La Sonnambula returns to the village he knew as a boy.

"Il mulino…il fonte…il bosco…
Cari luoghi, io vi trovai"

Under his benign and condescending city eye ( "son cortesi, son galanti, Gli abitanti di citta" intones the chorus) the doings of the little people unfold, most touchingly.

The innate goodness of the country! most wearisome of cliches. But I speak as someone for whom it would be absolutely nightmarish to live in a close-knit rural community (having to say good morning to everyone you pass, everyday? No thankyou!)

The shrewd country-dweller knows perfectly well what the towny wants. In country towns craft shops provide once more the pot-pourri, the corn dollies that weren't made locally one hundred years before. The ironies implicit in the towny love of the country is so familiar to us all. It is hardly clever any more to point it out, let alone make fun of it. But sometimes the irony is dramatic, eloquent. I am walking along a dusty track between vineyards high in the Sorrentine peninsular. The Mediterranean glitters far below and the rugged profile of Capri looms out to sea. A sinewy peasant approaches and we pause and chat. Simply for something to say I comment on the beauty of the place, aware, all too aware of the answer it deserved to elicit; but I was hardly ready for an answer of quite such poignancy: for (truly) he held his work-weary hands out to me and said that the beauty was as nothing to him, he who must work this land.

He was doing his job and I was doing mine; codifying the country aesthetically, morally has always been the business of the urban intellectual.

Picturesque was the key concept. Indeed two hundred years ago it was an entire aesthetic. Ruins were built; whole parks were designed to look like landscape paintings, old men were employed to dress up as hermits and live in grottoes for the delectation of the landowner. Picturesque means pretty much the same today: rural, quaint, overgrown; but it was not just a pictorial fad. It had a moral (or at least sentimental) view of rural life too; the inhabitants are either figures of Wordsworthian solitude or groups clustering in decorative groupings. Basically people sitting around not doing too much. The figures in picturesque landscapes tend to be resting from it, going to it, going home.

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