It has not been easy to find a title for the collection of memories, personal and otherwise, which this book contains, but I hope that the reader will feel that in calling it “Italian Yesterdays,” I have honestly tried to describe its contents. Recollections of my own experiences have found a place beside the stories and legends of saints and sinners long passed away from the land where they played their parts,—some virtuous, some infamous, but all notable and worth remembering for the glory or the tragedy of their lives. I have sometimes thought that we modern people scarcely know how rich we are, how many and how choice the treasures that History has devised to us, and which, for the most part, lie unclaimed in her storehouses. And I have hoped, in opening some of them, to induce others to seek out for themselves and make their own some of the wonderful tales of love and valour which shine at us from the pages, not only of the old books, but from those which the writers of our own day have so wisely and lovingly compiled for us. In this connection I must acknowledge my own indebtedness especially to Hodgkin, Dill, Montalembert, Dom GuÉranger, Hazlitt, and Coletta, historians who, each from his own point of view, make the past really live before our eyes. For the incidents connected with Pius IX., no better book can be found than “Rome, its Ruler and its Institutions,” by J. Maguire. In regard to subjects outside the range of the writers I have mentioned, it is almost impossible to give my references, as they cover many scattered records not easily accessible to the public; but the stories, strange as some of them appear, are all real ones, very carefully collated and verified.

This seems the right place for the withdrawal of a statement printed in my last book, “Reminiscences of a Diplomatist’s Wife”; and since the recantation removes a stain from a memory which I have already been forced to treat none too gently, I make it with great willingness. I said that Mr. Nathan, the Mayor of Rome, was the son of Mazzini. The statement has been sharply corrected, both by Mr. Nathan himself and by a well-known English writer who was Mazzini’s intimate friend. Misled by what I must call at least a widely accepted impression, I evidently fell into a grave error, for which I now wish to tender my apologies to the memory of the dead, and the expression of my sincere regret to the living, whose susceptibilities I have wounded on this delicate point.

Mary Crawford Fraser.

October, 1913.