And, in addition to all these busts, statues, allegories, tablets, pillars, cairns, lions, bas-reliefs, wreaths, lists of heroes, records of plÉbiscites anent annexations, loggias whence Garibaldi orated; in addition to all the Piazze Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel, all the Corsi Cavour and Mazzini, all the streets of the Twentieth of September and other heroic dates, there is the specific Museum of the Risorgimento from which no tiniest town is immune. To see one is practically to see all. With the same piety with which their ancestors collected the relics of the saints, the modern Italians have collected the relics of their heroes and the war—swords, sticks, photographs, crude paintings and engravings, old hats, letters, tricolour scarves, medals, pictures, patriotic money, helmets, epaulettes, broken bombs, cannon-balls, cartoons, caricatures, faded wreaths, autographs, sculptures, crosses, proclamations, prayer-books, pictures of steamers conveying insurgents! And Garibaldi! What town has not some shred of the “Genius of Liberty,” as the tablet in the old castle of Ferrara styles him—his flask, his sword, his shirt, his gun, his letters, his telegrams! Peculiarly sacred is the red shirt which he wore at Aspromonte, though it recalls the ironic fact that when the charmed, invincible hero was at last wounded and captured, it was by soldiers of the king he had created and of the Italy whose triumph he was seeking to consummate. Something Miltonic seems to emanate from that red shirt:

But for the rest, all these relics are as ugly as the relics of the saints. Beautiful and exalting as are the Museums in reality, with their record of sacrifice and patriotism in one of the most wonderful chapters of history, infinitely touching as is every yellow letter or worn glove, when imagination has transfused it, these glass cases are outwardly depressing to the last degree—a warning to the Realist, and a proof that Art in expressing the soul of a phenomenon is infinitely truer in its beauty than Nature unselected and unadorned. The wooden-legged curator of Bologna, who lost his leg at Solferino, is a mere stumping old bore; the little photograph of twenty-four Garibaldians minus arms or with crutches is simply discomforting. Even the story of the modern mother of the Gracchi, Adelaide Cairoli, who gave four sons to her country, exhales but tepidly from the picture at Pavia of a middle-aged lady in a bonnet surrounded by young soldiers in variegated costumes.

“Leonessa d’Italia,” cried Carducci to Brescia, and the one word of the poet wipes out all the crude photographs and grandiose inscriptions by which that seemingly prosaic town asserts its heroism; one ceases even to smile at the tablet at the foot of the castle hill, veiling a defeat in the guise of ferocious Austrian charges, “frequently” repulsed. From a mock passport of Radetsky in the Vicenza Museum I got a more vivid sense of the racial hatred than from all the relics and tablets: “Birth: Bastard of the seven deadly sins. Age: Eighty-two, sixty-five of which have been passed in robbing Austria of the money she stole. Eyes: Of a bird of prey. Nose: Of a Jew. Mouth: Open for the swallowing of divorce! Beard: Nothing. Hair: Enough. Visage: Not human. Occupation: Projector of Conquests. On the field of battle always at the tail; in the destruction of unarmed cities always at the head. Country: No country will own him. Signature: The last five days of his stay in Milan have paralysed him and he cannot sign. VisÉ: Good for nowhere.” And my most lively realisation of the transformation wrought in Europe since 1820 came, not from a Risorgimento museum nor from an official history, but from a black-and-white engraving of Raphael’s Sposalizio “dedicated humbly” by Giuseppe Longhi in 1820 “to the Imperial Royal Apostolical Majesty of Francesco I, Emperor of Austria, King of Jerusalem, Hungary, Bohemia, Lombardy, Venice, Dalmatia, Sclavonia, Galicia, Laodomiria, Illyria, &c. &c.”