Italian Impressions [antikvár]

Introduction After extensive travel in Italy and experience of Italian ways, one arrives by various stages into a love-hate relationship rather like the case of Maecenas who could neither live with his wife nor without her. There have been times in my wanderings in this incomparable land when I have felt that I could not endure it a moment longer - that even Albion, now become a devils' island of degeneracy and decadence, where each preys on the other and the law and order men prey on the entire corpus, was preferable. And then something unexpected happens - something charming or pleasurable and quite unlooked for - that brings one's temperature and pulse back to normal, and one stays on; and, indeed, comes back for more, like some one-time champion who cannot quit the ring. That at least is my experience, but it was not always so, I fancy. The sensitive English visitors and expatriates of the nineteenth century, such as Ruskin and the Brownings - those who came and went or stayed in the English colonies in Rome, Venice, Naples, Florence and elsewhere, who are themselves one of the most fascinating aspects of Italian history - found Italy beautiful but poignant, a once great nation lying poverty stricken and helpless under papal or Austrian tyranny or both. But the Italian energy - too exclusively, it may be, and too long devoted to architecture and the arts, however beneficial to the rest of the world - was only dormant. Mazzini, the thinker appealing to the élite, and Garibaldi, the man of action appealing to the masses, made it impossible that Italy should continue to be excluded from future history. Not that I, myself, believe in the virtues of unification, with its mistaken decision to make Rome the capital instead of Turin or Milan (a piece of sentiment that led to the destruction of much that was ancient and interesting in Rome, quite unnecessarily). Indeed, I think the movement towards liberation did not go far enough, but drew back somewhere along the line, and, as it were, expressed its slackening vitality by a nonendty, the imposed figure of Victor Emmanuel II. His magnificent statues, dotted all over Italy, and most particularly that mountain of marble, the Victor Emmanuel Monument in Rome, heavy without significance, as bombastic as Baroque, but without art and without belief, appear to me to suggest a brave but forlorn hope. A great task then avoided and still awaiting accomplishment is the total elimination of priestcraft, the making redundant of that vast class i dudapes