So despite the slow black cigar, the ubiquitous farmacia and pasticceria, despite the pervasive petrifaction of past glory, I feel that a vigorous breeze of young thought moves through Italy, and that Mazzini is not entirely swallowed up in the belly of the Great Horse. “Il nullismo” was an Asti election-poster’s shrewd summary of the programme of the Clerical Moderates, “lo star quieti—forma ipocrita di reazione.” If Italy escapes the reaction involved in standing still, we may yet see a Third Risorgimento that will resurrect Mazzini. Even a Republican Congress has met freely, if with closed doors.

The popular Italian newspapers, like the windows of the bookshops, are far more intellectual than our own, and there is a healthy readiness to try social experiments under the popular referendum. If the nationalisation of the railways does not yet pay, on account of the multiplicity of officials, it has at least provided a more punctual service than of yore, and the third-class passenger is treated as a human being. A Jew as Premier and another as Syndic of Rome constitute an amende honorable for the Italy which established the Ghetto and, cramping a prolific race, produced in Venice the first specimen of the American sky-scraper. Capital punishment is abolished—the apostle, Beccaria, duly petrified at Milan—and despite the legend of the stiletto and the vendetta nobody demands its restoration. Phlebotomy prevails alarmingly, through the habit of using a knife as if it were the mere point of the fist, but it is a peaceable and polite people. The niente with which the veriest vagabond deprecates your thanks, the prego of the courtlier defence against gratitude, are the outer and audible sign of an inner gentleness. Irritatingly vague as regards time and space and money, a foe to definite agreements, a lover of the horizon and the buona mano, running restaurants with unpriced menus, and shops with unmarked goods, the Italian has always the saving grace of respect for things of the mind. Who ever saw a picture of Tennyson labelled—like the photographs of Carducci—“Mighty Master, Sublime Poet, Refulgent National Glory!” There are moods in which I could applaud even the stones.

But it is the revolt against Rome which stirs most furiously the intelligenza of Italy—as of all the Latin world. While in England the fight against Christianity is confined to a few guerilla papers in low esteem, in Italy it is a pitched battle. And the modern Anti-Pope is far more formidable to the Vatican than the mediÆval, being a rival idea, not a rival man. The Vatican handicaps itself superfluously by sneering at the Risorgimento—though I am told its haughty refusal to recognise the Unity of Italy brings in shekels from Mexico, Colombia, and other strongholds of the spirit. Instead of joining in the recent Garibaldi jubilation, it asked through its organ whether the prosperity of the South had not been sacrificed to the interests of the North. And so far from making concessions to Modernism, it is sitting tighter than ever, issuing lamentable Syllabuses and Encyclicals, accumulating lists of suspects. It censured Minocchi for allegorising the first three chapters of Genesis, and excommunicated Murri for saying the Pope ought not to play at politics. The freethinkers complain uneasily of its aggressiveness, lamenting—with unconscious humour—that it makes propaganda! The army itself—ay, even the old Garibaldians—are not safe from its guiles! As if the Congregation of the Propaganda were of to-day!

But the confiscation of monasteries and churches to military and civil uses—to barracks, agricultural colleges, gymnasia, hospitals, what-not—the transformation of elaborate historic shrines into State Monuments, are indications of the ground lost to the Church in its own peculiar land. Strange was it to see squads of half-nude lads at gymnastics in the old Renaissance church of St. Mary Magdalen at Pesaro. Still more surprising to see a carpenter sawing away in the lofty, well-preserved Church of the Jesuits in Pavia, his wood stacked in the forsaken frescoed chapels, as in a strange return of Christendom to its origins, or an illustration of the new Logion, “Cleave the wood and ye shall find me.” I bought coal at a still more decayed church, taking off my hat involuntarily.

The journalism of the street-nomenclature keeps pace with the progress of anti-Clericalism. “Sons of an age which you foresaw,” the epitaph on Giordano Bruno’s tomb assures that victim of the Inquisition, and many a Via or Piazza Giordano Bruno in places apparently remote from the currents of thought—Pesaro, Perugia, Foligno, Urbino on its isolated rock—testifies that even a tombstone may speak the truth, provided that it is only posthumous enough. Urbino, indeed, lonely rugged Urbino, is compelled to put up in the Church of S. Francesco the significant warning: “The law punishes disturbers of religious functions.” And even more illuminating than the Giordano Bruno streets or the Giordano Bruno societies is the mushroom rapidity with which streets of Francesco Ferrer have sprung up all over Italy. Florence, with biting sarcasm, has made its Via Francesco Ferrer out of its Archbishop Street. Tiny San Gimignano of the many towers has inserted a tablet to Ferrer in the wall of an open loggia of a theatre, “in order that Thought should be fruitful and survive Death.” ... “Victim,” it cries, “of the sacerdotal tyranny, inaugurating the not distant time when there shall be neither oppressed nor oppressors!”

Such millennial dreams in such mediÆval cities prove that Mazzini was no sport of nature, but a true son of Italy; seed-plot of all the mysticisms and aspirations from St. Francis and Dante to Gioberti and David Lazzaretti.