Italics. Brief notes on politics, people, and places in Italy, in 1864

Front matter

ITALICS. BRIEF NOTES ON POLITICS, PEOPLE, AND PLACES IN ITALY, IN 1864. B\ FRANCES POWER COBBE. LONDON: TRUBNER AND CO., PATERNOSTER ROW. 1864. [The right of translation is reserved.^ T. RICH Anns, PRINTER, 37. GREAT QUEEN STUKET. PO HER EXCELLENCY THE COUNTESS USEDOM, &(ns gook, partly written under her roof, IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED. NOTE. Since the earlier sheets of this work have passed through the press, au important change has taken place in Italian atfairs. The engagement of Napoleon III to recall his troops firom Rome in two years' time will, if fulfilled, lead to a position of Pope and King in the highest degree favourable to the great hope of Italy — the annexation of Rome. It remains, however, to be seen, how far such an engagement will be found binding on the Imperial con tracting party at the end of a period amply sufficient for the intervention of complications annulling the stipula tions of twenty modern State-Treaties.

The old project of an Italian Confederation under French influence can hardly be deemed abandoned nor the game played out, so long as a single French regiment remains at Civita Vecchia. The transference of the capital of Italy from Turin to Florence is, in any case, a material result of the new combination. Whether such a change be worth its cost just now, is a point on which opinions may reasonably vary. Perhaps, after all, it would be fortunate for Italy if her seat of government remained fixed, — not for a few years only, but for ever, within the storied walls of the beautiful old city which four years ago so nobly set the example of self-abnegation to aid the great cause of na tional unity — a city whose atmosphere, physical and moral, is untainted by the Malaria of Rome. Sept. 1864. CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAQE I. ITALIA RINASCENTE ... ... 1 II. ITALY MENDS HER WAYS ... ... ... 13 III. ITALY SENT TO SCHOOL ... ... ... 43 IV. ITALY GOES TO DRILL ... ... ... 73 V. ITALY TRIED BY JURY ... ... ... 86 VI. ITALY READS HER NEWSPAPER ... ... 117 VII. " LIBERTY, EQUALITY, AND THE FEUDAL SYSTEM" ... ... ... ... 130 VIII. WILL ITALY GAIN VENICE AND ROME? ... 158 IX. WILL ITALY LOSE NAPLES? ... ... ... 184 X. 'TIS MASERONI HIMSELF WHO NOW SINGS ... 208 XI. THE NEMESIS OF WOMAN ... ... ... 224 XII. CATHOLIC ITALY ... ... ... ... 260 XIII. PADRE PASSAGLIA ... ... ... ... 288 XIV. MADONNA IMMACOLATA ... ... ... CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE XV. PROTESTANT ITALY ... ... 335 XVI. ITALIAN FURNITURE ... ... ... 349 XVII. PEOPLE ONE MEETS IN ITALY ... "... 373 XVIII. PLACES WHERE THE AUTHOR WROTE THIS BOOK. — PEACEFUL PISA ... ... ... 446 XI. NERVI, WITH NO SIGHTS ... ... ... 488 XX. CI-DEVANT ITALIE ... ... ... ... ITALICS.

Chapter I. Italia Rinascente

T\ESCENDING* from the Alps into Italy is ■*^ always like passing from winter into summer. Be the season of the year what it may, we never fail to feel the same sense of com ing into sunshine, and into the freedom of out door life ; and the first time we have occasion to open our lips after crossing the frontier, we are sure to air our Italian — " dolce favella" — with all the satisfaction belone-ing: to the use of a cool smooth fabric suited for warm weather and idle hours. The kindly courtesy of the people — that nation of born ladies and gentlemen — completes the transition, and we feel that we have left be hind the atmosphere of black frosts, moral and physical, and may expand ourselves happily in a much milder medium. As we sweep down the B ITALICS. giant hills, and look over the vine-wreathed slopes and chestnut forests, stretching far away to the towers and nomes of sun-bright Italy, we re call the summer days of childhood — perhaps those days in old country houses when the season was solemnly opened with a great May-day exodus from winter to summer dwelling rooms — fresh delicious days, when all the coming months lay glowing before us hke one long bright holiday, and the Present overflowed with joy, and the Future had just enough of reserve of pleasures in store to save us from regret (little epicures that we were !) to be hving over that joyous passing hour.

For the last few years this entrance into Italy has had, however, another interest added to all the old and natural attractions. There is a human Spring reviving the beautiful land after its long winter of frostbound oppression. The darkness and the torpor are passed away, and a new life is through the nation and bursting out into a thousand fresh forms wherever we turn our eyes. It would be a mind singularly constituted which could visit Italy just now without feeling an interest in the vast change going on ITALIA KINASCENTE. therein, greater than that which we all experienced in years gone by, when we approached it as " la terre des morts" — the land of the mighty departed heroes, and poets, and painters — of Cæsar, and Dante, and Michael Angelo. The Italian Revolution, mixed as it is, like all human things, with elements ignoble, and some what barren in the production of those great men whom lesser convulsions have rarely failed to draw forth, — is yet, assuredly, judged in all soberness, one of the grandest events in modern history.

It is no sudden gust of national passion impetuously overturning the thrones of the past, but a slowly elaborated achievement wrought out with immense sacrifice — sacrifice not only of lives and gold, such as every Revolution claims, but of provincial and national interests and pre judices, which are the last things usually abjured in such convulsions. It is not an outbreak of fanaticism either religious or pohtical, the work of men disgusted by the falsehood of one system, and blindly rushing at its opposite. Rather do we see with regret the Italian Catholic caring so little to cast down the idols of his church, and re joice to find the Italian citizen content to replace b2 ITALICS. political despotism by a Constitutional Monarchy, and not by any more democratic system for whose enjoyment he is yet untrained.

Lastly, it is not a Revolution of a single class of the population — a cabal of nobles, or a rebellion of the middle ranks, or a riot of the mob — nor yet is it the work of a great capital city, deciding by itself the cause of the whole country, as Paris has so often presumed to do for France. Never, perhaps, in any history has a revolution been so completely the reverse of all this. Before the campaign of 1859 (as I have been told by a statesman then in Italy), men of all ranks, nobles, professional men, and citizens, to the number of many hundreds, all severally moved by the same desire, went from every part of the country to ask of Cavour and Victor Emanuel — " What can be done to free and unite Italy?" And from the opening of the war to this time, it would be impossible to tell which class has been most earnest in its efforts, most ready with its sacrifices, from the old historic houses of Ricasoli and D'Azeglio to the poorest of the artizans and the peasantry.

The great cities, Florence, Milan, Bologna, Naples, Palermo, are not more engaged in the cause than ITALIA EINASCENTE. the lesser burghs, the villages, the scattered hamlets over the whole peninsula. It is Italy, the country, which has arisen — Italians, the race, who have made the Revolution. In a peculiar manner, also, the unification of Italy forms an experiment to the last degree interesting and important at this time of the world's history. On a large scale, in a country possessing a splendid geographical position as well as unparalleled historical associations, and among a race with rare endowments, is being tried the solution of problems, social and political, on which the character of the future of our race for centuries, must in great measure depend. Can populations, which have for ages been degraded by all the evils of a double despotism, spiritual and political, be raised to steady self-government by that vast machinery which modern science has given us — education, free press, and free locomotion ?

Can the principles of con stitutionalism, evolved by ages of effort in Eng land, — the freedom which has come to us Slowly broadening down From precedent to precedent — be grafted on another land, and become an equal ITALICS. source of prosperity and peace to a race the moral antipodes of the Anglo-Saxon ? Can the downfal of a vast Church, whose shadow has been the graveyard of religious thought for a thousand years, be the signal for a resurrection of Faith and Piety? Can the overthrow of a whole social system lead to social re-organisation and social regeneration, wherein for Ignorance we may find Education; for Brigandage, Com merce and Manufactures ; and for Celibacy of clergy the reverence of Marriage and rehabilita tion of Woman ? These are surely problems of surpassing importance, and, besides them, we may perhaps discern in the peculiar conditions of Italy the opening of other political questions hardly less significant.

If the existing order of things in Europe is ever to be so modified as to relieve the nations from the terrible and yearly-increasing weight of gigantic armies ; if each is not to be crushed to protect itself from the other, it must, doubtless be effected mainly by three great reforms : by the establishment of Free Constitutions, which shall put it out of the power of kings, for their dynastic purposes, to embroil nations against ITALIA KINASCENTE. 7 their will ; by the amalgamation of small states into sufficiently large ones (of fifteen or twenty millions), to enable them to act as Great Powers ; and, lastly, by the restoration of those natural boundaries of Nationalities which appear to be indispensable to the real cohesion of populations. By these means it would appear possible that each country might obtain sufficient gua rantee of the stability of peace with its neigh bour to warrant the diminution of its arma ments, instead of prolonging further the neck and neck race towards universal bankruptcy in which one now vies with another, expending on the myriads of soldiers which challenge the myriads of their neighbours the treasures which would render each prosperous beyond example.

As time goes on, and the competition becomes more terrible, as the armies of half a century ago, which consisted of eighty or an hundred thousand men, swell to hosts of two or three, or four hun dred thousand, and only desolating conscriptions can supply the vast levies they demand — the problem becomes daily more urgent, and its possible solution more important. The cost of a great European army, such as statesmen aver to ITALICS. be indispensable in the present day, to give the nation supporting it a place among the great Continental Powers, is from £12,000,000 to £16,000,000 per annum. This charge may, in a certain sense, be considered as doubly imposed on the country, for it has to be raised in money to pay and support the soldier, and it has to be deducted from the productive labour, to which the soldier, if left in his civil capacity, would have contributed.

The nation is drained of the finest of its youths, and also compelled to pay down an enormous annual sum to support them in unproductive labour, the per contra of their expenditure in the country neither making up for the loss of their hands, nor for the taxation needed for their cash payments. To conceive the relief to the revenue, and the impulse given to every kind of free labour by the return of four hundred thousand men to a civil life, is to imagine probably a greater boon to any country in Europe than any territorial conquests, any colonial acquisitions, any mechanical discoveries, or any political reforms could possibly effect ; yet this boon is every year further and further away under the present order of things. The ITALIA EINASCENTE. one hope for it lies, as we have said, in the formation of a real Balance of Power of great and free Nationalities, needing no Treaties of **15, nor diplomatic arts, nor huge armies to keep them safe and firm, but standing on their own basis of voluntary loyalty.

Towards such a millennium the formation of a Free and United Italy is a real approach, albeit her first step has inevitably been the creating of another huge army to vie with all the rest. Italy is not doing her work by halves. She is putting out her whole strength to the task before her. In a political sense, it is improbable that such efforts would long be sustained by any peo ple, unless such visible success should crown them as should serve to silence discontent. In a financial sense, it is still more unlikely that the same outlay can be continued without national bankruptcy. Already it is calculated the kingdom has cost the nation more than £40,000,000 sterhng, or upwards of £2 a head. The annual deficit in the revenue is 300,000,000 of francs (of which 30 millions are expended on the Two Sicilies over and above the revenue derived from them) ; and this deficit neither the sale of railb3 ITALICS. ways, or royal domains, nor the confiscation of monastic property, nor general development of national resources and increased taxation, is even expected to supply.

It is, therefore, visibly a battle of limited duration. Italy must gain her point, complete, organise, and firmly establish herself as a great and free country, or in a very short time her arms will drop powerless, the struggle will fail, and a worse state of things than the past must almost inevitably supervene. She has great resolution, great energy, great resources of all kinds. She has also great difficulties, great weaknesses, great enemies. Who can watch such a struggle even afar off, without some stirring of the blood ? AVTio can go into Italy now and think of it only as the scene of old classic story, or the great museum of Cinquecento Art ? While Waterloo was being fought, there would have been found few geologists or botanists to chip rocks or dissect wild flowers on the field of Quatre Bras.

Even a woman is not called upon to spend her time beyond the Alps just now in strolling through galleries, criticising the singers in San Carlo and the Pergola, and choosing mo saics and merletto antico. If she can do no more, ITALI-A EINASCENTE. she may at least keep opeu her eyes and ears, and ask questions of those who may be willing and able to give her information. She may read on the spot the local publications and periodicals which carry with them the feeling of the hour, and (if she desire it) she may easily obtain from the kindly and courteous officials of Italy all pos sible reports and statements illustrative of their work. Perhaps, the result of such superficial in quiries as these must necessarily be of trifling value. They can at best assume to be only of temporary interest, addressed to those who have already studied Italian affairs, and merely desire to carry on their knowledge of them a few months later.

Trusting that this little book will be understood to have no pretensions greater than these, I have ventured to put down as suc cinctly as may be the facts concerning the new order of things which have become known to me during five visits to Italy, and especially a resid ence in Tuscany and Liguria from October last to May 1864. A few sketches of places and people are added, which may, perhaps, recall pleasant reminiscences to other travellers. Assuredly, Italy possesses above all countries that peculiar ITALICS. charm which makes us always recur to the thought of it with a glow of tenderness ; and it must be a very bad description indeed — so bad as to fail utterly to recall the original — which will not give a little pleasure to an old " forestiere."

Chapter II. Italy Mends Her Wats

T T is a common event all over Europe when those who are engaged in making excavations, and laying foundations for buildings in old cities, come upon Roman remains : Baths, villas, temples, palaces he everywhere under our feet, if we only dig deep enough to find them. In a very similar way, when we have groped about for some new grounds of civilisation and cleared away some long-existing nuisance, it is ten to one but we fall on the traces of the Romans and their wise old laws and noble works, and find that they made our discovery twenty centuries ao'o, and put it in practice on the scale of the empire of the world. We, in London, are just now making drains which may match those of the half-mythologic king who built the Cloaca Maxima, and Italy has taken a vast step by dis- ITALICS. covering that two thousand years ago she had great straight roads which led from Rome every where and from everywhere to Rome, and that those same roads were the first missionaries of civilisation.

Pictures and statues, and marble Duomos and bronze gates of Paradise, are all very good things in their way ; but the history of Italy shows that their existence is perfectly compatible with uttermost oppression — utter most stagnant corruption of the whole social atmosphere. No painting of Raphael's has helped any city to self-government. The very finest of Michael Angelo's sculptures has failed to im prove the condition — moral, pohtical, or sanitary — of a single parish. Nay, it would actually seem, if we consider which were the great artistic ages, classic and Renaissant, that there was some singular correlation between the production and pa tronage of high works of art, and the synchro nous apparition of the most portentous depravity the world has known. The century of the Borgias was the very culmination of Italian painting and architecture.

The greatest dilettante in history was Nero. No other land, probably, in all the earth has been the scene of so much cruelty, perfitly, and pollution, as Italy, the land of Art; and no other ages in the dark story of that land are black as those of the Cæsars and the Medici — the times of which the sculptures in the Vatican and the Museo Borbonico, the paintings in the Pitti and the Uffizij are the relics. Does art, then, make Saints and Heroes ? Nay, it cannot withhold man from a single vice, nor stay the hand of one solitary tyrant. Rather does it gild over corruption otherwise too gross and hideous, and add a delusive nimbus to the crown of the despot, who redeems the tortures of a nation by picking up the brush of a painter. Italy has had enough of such. Were salvation to have been attainable for her through pigments and chipped marble, she would have been beatified, yea canonised, by the world for three hundred years.

But it was not so to be. Before her last revolution, where had all her glorious Art left Italy ? Not merely poor in mere commercial sense, poor in trade, poor in manufactures, in agriculture ; not merely behind all the nations of the north in inventions and machinery. This would have been a poverty more than outbalanced by her transcendent achievements in higher lines of ITALICS. human labour. But Italy's Art left her poor in Freedom, poor in morals, poor in all such con ditions of human happiness as security of person and property, a righteous system of jurispru dence, and social confidence between man and man ; poor even in Religion itself — that true Religion, which does not stop when it has built splendid churches and endowed magnificent monasteries, and obtained from a priest a passport through purgatory to paradise.

In all these things her Art has left Italy poor — poorer, per haps, than any other country in Europe. For a pendant to the Vatican, Rome has got her prison of San Michele, crowded with men, kept for months and years untried in the poison ous cells al segreto (equivalent to death in a Roman summer), or else, — after the iniquitous mummery of a Papal political trial, — huddled sp as to provoke from De Merode the brutal jest to their jailor: " Why do you not make more room by hanging these wretches hke hams from the ceiling ?" Is the room in the Vatican containing Raphael's Transfiguration and Domeuichino's St. Jerome a fair compensation for one of these dungeons full of living men, pining away the best years of life in unmerited misery ? Perhaps some dilettanti in England may think 'so. The mothers and wives of the incarcerated wretches are likely to be of another opinion.

But if any number of square feet of canvas, covered by the very finest designs, are not found successful in stopping judicial murder and robbery, in putting down despots, or improving society, it does appear, strangely enough, that a certain amount of iron tramways with loco motives running up and down them, — or even of good post-roads with requisite appliances of vehicles and horses, is not inefficacious in these re spects. Tyrants, lay and ecclesiastic, seem to have the same difficulty in sustaining the scream of a railway whistle, that ghosts used to feel at the crowing of the cock. Mankind is only manage able by such gentry in a stationary condition. Locomotive humanity is always troublesome, full of new ideas, wanting to have rights like other humanities encountered in its travels, and gene rally fuming and spluttering and wanting safety valves in the most inconvenient manner.

We can fancy a good old despot of the Henry VIII type (not Mr. Froude's Henry VIII, but ITALICS. the Bluebeard we used to know long ago) — a great burly tyrant who cut off men's heads from gaiete de cœur, and thought nothing of it — as brought into unnatural juxtaposition with steam engines and being utterly disgusted therewith. A short time since, we heard of a poor labourer in the Fens in Lincolnshire, whose brains were rather of the agricultural order, thickened still more, poor fellow ! by the effects of his last ill ness, but to whom a zealous young clergyman most vigorously expounded his peculiar views on the subject of Justification and the absolute neces sity there was for adopting them forthwith. The poor man, who had been hearing from other visitors of more secular but not less surprising things, at last looked his pastor in the face with lack lustre eyes, and delivered himself of these words : — " What with justification and what with rail roads, it's all a buzzin' and a fuzzin', and I know nothing about it."

This said, he fell back and died. Probably many an old king called on to receive modern doctrines of constitutionalism and submit to the cutting up of his dominions by iron lines, would equally object to the " buz zin' " and the " fuzzin'," and be inclined to give up the ghost. Much suffering, alas ! much sorrow and crime (as Lancashire knows too well), may exist in a land whose map in Bradshaw looks like an iron cobweb. But somehow, not much regular tyranny — not corrupt judges — not unques tioned, unpunished brigandage and assassination. Railways, and trial by jury, and coroner's in quests, and large newspapers, seem to have a deep occult relationship between them. Civilisa tion means Roads, and Roads mean Civilisation, in the original Dictionary which existed before Johnson. And despotic governments (which at the utmost produce only veneered civilisation, not the sohd article), do not like railways, however they may pretend to patronise them.

Say in France, for instance. The harmless traveller, intent only on getting from Boulogne to Mar seilles as fast as may be, and harbouring no regi cide designs in his soul, nor contraband cigars in his portmanteau, finds himself from the moment he enters the premises of any of the various Rail way Companies, in strict custody. He is not to run hither and thither after his ticket and his luggage, and rush up and down platforms and change his carriage at pleasure, and get out and ITALICS. call for his luggage half way, if he so desire it. Oh dear no, nothing of the kind ! Persons who are guilty of wanting to travel must be treated very differently from this. They are not (as we fondly imagine in England) the customers of the Company to be used by its servants with every attention, but, on the contrary, persons, if not actually convicted of crime, yet open to grievous suspicion — men found about unlawful business, trespassers, and probably politically disaffected individuals, who are not content to stay at home.

The tenor of official behaviour towards them is necessarily regulated by this sad position in which they have so improperly placed them selves. Sometimes moved by natural clemency, a railway porter will answer them with curt dig nity when meekly implored to do so, and when pretty sure of a franc or two in return ; but this is an unusual case. The " Repression of Crime," as the venerable Recorder of Birmingham would say, strictly regulates the tone of French rail way officials towards their passengers. We have read somewhere, how the late Emperor of China, wearied with the difficulties suscitated by the litigious propensities of his subjects, published a Decree, wherein it was set forth that thenceforth throughout the Celestial Empire, " Whosoever shall go to law before the tribunals for any cause whatsoever, shall be treated without any pity."

In like manner, he who desires to travel by public conveyance in France is properly felt to have put himself out side the pale of indulgence. He must come early to the station, else he cannot go at all — yet not too early, or no admission is vouchsafed. He is pushed and pinched through a species of wolf-trap up to the window, where a fearful officer of justice demands his money and his intentions, and conveys both to the inner majesty behind the scenes. He is knocked over by twenty boxes and twenty porters before his luggage is weighed, and then another officer and another hidden majesty fine him again (be his trunks of the smallest), and he is ushered into a Pen or Dock, first class, second class, or third class, as the case may be, where he is locked up in closest arrest with the other criminals of the day, probably for about half an hour.

By and bye, a jailor comes to the glass door of the prison and proclaims the joyful news of relief: " Prenez ITALICS. vos places." Everybody is ready to take his or her place directly ; indeed, a dozen of the more hardy prisoners have been long crowded round the portal of escape, toilsomely holding up their huge cloaks, bundles, and travelling bags, and brandishing their umbrellas so as to inform the rest of the gang : " We mean to get out first and choose the best places." They do get out first, but a moment of blank bewilderment always ensues ; for the train is never near the door, and generally at the other side of the vast Terminus, so that the grand coup which has been so dramati cally managed, proves a failure. No porters are ever permitted to attend the prisoners on this occasion ; but old or young, sick or strong, each must carry his or her bag, bundle, and infinite etceteras, and make his or her way to the train, across rails and down platforms, in the midst of screaming* engines and shoving carriages and frightened passengers and trucks of luggage.

Of course, as is right and proper, the feeblest arrive last, and vainly implore corner places. Every carriage usually must be filled to repletion; and the process of climbing up into it (about equal to that of getting on the roof of an omnibus) performed unaided by all alike. At the end of the journey the case is pretty similar. Of course the traveller must go to the end he originally proposed ; for heaven and earth may be moved sooner than a guard or Chef de Gare induced to allow his luggage to be taken out half-way. Ar rived at the platform, say at Lyons or Marseilles, he is driven into a first Salle d'Attente, where he waits half an hour or three quarters. Then his prison is opened again, and he rushes into another salle, where he claims his colis, and then after infinite worry, and probably a slight scuffle with the octroi, is for that day set at liberty by a too indulgent government.

Some people applaud' all this system, and tell us of safety of limb and luggage thereby secured. I can only say the argument seems to belong to the same order as that we often hear in behalf of negro slavery. It must be so pleasant for the black man to have all care taken off his mind ! What matters a little durance vile, and being treated as a chattel, and bullied by every overseer, provided you are sure of your dinner, or your bandbox ? French civilisation is despot's civilisation, al most as hollow as that which Peter and Catherine ITALICS. the Great tried to introduce into Russia; and, therefore, locomotion is essentially an inimical thing, which it instinctively treats with harsh ness.* Real civilisation, which implies freedom and self-government, is fostered by every journey of every citizen; and, therefore, in countries where it has taken root, equally instinctively is locomotion favoured and respected.