More instinct with vitality than the most eloquent tablets to the Risorgimento are the mural inscriptions of hatred to Austria rudely chalked up by anonymous hands, especially on the Adriatic side. “Down with Austria!” “Death to Austria!” “Death to Trent and Trieste!” is the general tenor, varied by the name of Francis Joseph scrawled between skulls and crossbones. ’Tis a strange comment on the Triple Alliance, and the authorities do not seem hurried to remove this glaring contradiction. Even “Death to the Czar” survives the royal meeting.

But the Irredenta is not to be taken seriously. Not along political lines does the Risorgimento proceed, any more than along the moral lines for which Mazzini worked. The second phase, the second Risorgimento it may indeed be called, is the Industrial Resurrection. Resurrection—because Italy, whose Merchant of Venice reminds us that the Italian nobleman was always a trader, and whose leading Florentines were Magnificent Moneylenders, can hardly be regarded as an Arcadia transformed by the cult of the dollar. Even Mazzini demanded revival of “the old commercial greatness”; perhaps he might have been content to wait patiently through this materialistic epoch, if he were sure it would lead to a third Risorgimento.

Hygiene has yet to penetrate and suffuse the new prosperity. But if even Perugia still stinks in places and Foligno everywhere, the country is getting perceptibly cleaner, and perhaps godliness is next to cleanliness. But the severest moralist cannot grudge Italy her rise in wealth and happiness: the poverty of the peasantry, accentuated by the extravagant ambition of Italy to be a Great Power in the smallest of senses, has been terrible. At what a cost has Italy achieved her first Dreadnought, so perversely christened Dante Alighieri!

Beggars abound—blind, crippled, or with hideous growths—especially in the South. Doubtless the influx of the pleasure-pilgrim has increased the deformity of the population, and the Italian beggar pushes forward his monstrosity as though it were for sale, but there is real physical degeneration all the same. The discovery of New York and South America by the Italian has fortunately co-operated with the discovery of Italy by the pleasure-pilgrim and the foreign investor, and some 600,000 Italians in the South of Brazil provide the makings of a Trans-atlantic Italy. Even the semi-savage villages of Sicily are sown with steamer advertisements, and batches going and returning for jobs or harvests make an ever-weaving shuttle across the Atlantic.

And if the monuments of the First Risorgimento clash with the old historic background of Italy, still more is the Second Risorgimento in discord with it. One almost sees a new Italy, infinitely less beautiful but not devoid of backbone, struggling out of the old architectural shell which does not in the least express it. The old ducal and seignorial cities, the old republics, are developing suburbs, sometimes prosperous if prosaic, like the new quarters of Florence and Parma; sometimes grotesque, like Pesaro’s sea-side resort, with its “new” architecture—lobster-red and mustard-green lattices, and sham golden doors, carved with busts; sometimes hideous, like the outskirts of Verona, where under the blue, brooding mountains rises a quarter of electrical workshops and chemical factories. Ancient towered Asti grows sparkling with its new brick Banca d’Italia, and its blued and gilded capitals in the Church of S. Secondo Martire. Look down on Genoa, with its fantasia of spires, campaniles, roof-gardens, green lattices, marble balconies, chimneys decorated with figures of doges and opening out like flowers, and see how the old narrow alleys are almost roofed with telegraph and telephone wires. Go down to the widened harbour and see the warehouses, the American sky-scrapers, the smoking chimneys, the great steamers sailing out for Buenos Ayres and New York, the emigrants with their bundles. The blue bird sings here no more; you hear only the bang of the hammer, which Young Italy declares is the voice of the century.

I look out of my window at Forli (in the Via Garibaldi!) and see a white minaret and a white campanile gleaming fantastically in the moonlight over a panorama of russet roofs. There is a stone floor in my bedroom and no chimney. In the Piazza all is heavy and mediÆval: dull stone colonnades and a rough cobbled road. In a church a grotesque griffin ramps over a pavement tomb. Yet through these cumbersome stone forms I feel the new Italy struggling. The Ginnasio Communale of the town shelters with equal pomp and spaciousness the picture-gallery and the chemical laboratory. These colonnades and cobbles have no more congruity with the new spirit than the old seignorial and episcopal Palazzi with the poor “tenement families” whom they house to-day. Presently life will slough off these forms altogether. Where an old castle like that of Ferrara or an old palace like that of Lucca or Pistoja can be tamed to civic uses, it becomes a town-hall; where no old building is available, an adequate modern form is created, as in the handsome post-offices with their almost military sense of the dignity of the common life.

At Pesaro I lodged in a Bishop’s Palace with “steam-heat, telephone, electric light in all the chambers, garage for automobiles, motor omnibus to all the trains!” Palatial was it indeed, so absurdly spacious that the dining-room was only accessible through vast, empty, domed and frescoed halls, and I could have held a political meeting in my bedroom, where I slept with a sense of camping out under the infinities. I had no notion that provincial churchmen were thus magnificent, and I do not wonder that the Lord Cardinal of Ostia, when he saw how the Franciscans of the Portiuncula slept on ragged mattresses and straw, without pillows or bedsteads, burst into tears, exclaiming: “We wretches use so many unnecessary things!” And yet the Cardinal did not use a single thing advertised by the ex-Palace of Pesaro.

Nowhere do new and old clash or combine more disagreeably than in Modena, where crumbling marble-pillared colonnades are painted red, and meet continuations in new brick. The Cathedral, begun in 1099, guarded and flanked by quaint stone lions, bears on its ancient campanile a tablet to Victor Emmanuel. In the great Piazza, church, picture-gallery and war-monument swear at one another. The Ducal Palace is a military school, the moat round the old rampart—where once resounded that archaic song of the war-sentinels—is a public laundry.

And the statues, tablets, monuments, of the Second Risorgimento begin to vie with those of the first. Pro Nervi, painted on the benches on that desolate cactus-grown shore, among the Leonardesque sea-sprayed rocks by the old Gropallo tower, attests the activity of a society created to boom the summer resort, while a tablet celebrates the Marchese who, foreseeing the future of Nervi, put up the first hotel and died with the name of the municipality on his lips. I do not think the Marchese himself foresaw how far Nervi would go. I know I walked miles along its tramway amid monotonous streets, with no sign of an end. Indeed the tram-line reaches Genoa.

Nor is the Marchese the only hero of the Second Risorgimento. Trust Carrara for that—Carrara and Guglielmo Walton!

And the creations of this Risorgimento rival those of the Renaissance in costliness. Where in all Europe will you find a street as luxurious as Genoa’s Via XX Settembre—the long colonnade, the granite pillars, the gilded and frescoed roof, the mosaic pavement where the poorest may tread more magnificently than Agamemnon.

And the great Gallery of Victor Emmanuel in Milan, what is it but a secular parody of the Cathedral it faces—nave, transept, dome, complete even to the invisible frescoes, a CathÉdrale de luxe? Very sad and solemn looked the old Cathedral at night, for all its fairy fretwork, as Life passed it by for its glittering counterpart.