I.
You are searching for the Fatherland. An instinct that God has instilled in your hearts, a voice that comes from the graves of your great ancestors, a sign that the powerful nature of Italy has put on your face and in your eyes, which tells you that you are brothers, called to have one Flag, one Pact, one Temple, which clearly shines from above to all the people, the Italian Mission, the the part that God committed to our Nation for the good of all Humanity.
And for this reason every man among you pronounces that holy name of Fatherland. This is why the best among you have died for half a century, martyrs of an Idea, on the scaffold, in the dungeons or in the slow agony of exile, with the smile of someone who sees the future before him, with the word Italy on his lips. This is why your multitudes tremble from time to time from a thrill that lifts the lid of the tomb where the popes and kings placed you to rest, then fall exhausted and try again after a time.
[...]
X.
There are not five Italies, or four Italies or three Italies. There is only one Italy. Foreign and domestic tyrants have held it and keep it servile and dismembered, because tyrants have no Fatherland... The Fatherland is one, like life. The Fatherland is the life of the People. God gave it to you; men can not remake it. Men can, through tyranny, prevent it from rising for a short time; but they can not make it arise free or different from what it is.
When God created Italy, He smiled upon her, and awarded her the two most sublime frontiers in Europe, symbols of eternal strength and eternal motion: the Alps and the Sea. May three curses be upon those who would dare presume to mark different boundaries!
From the immense circle of the Alps descends a wonderful chain of continuous ranges that reaches to where the sea bathes her, and even beyond into severed Sicily. And, where the mountains do not gird her, the sea girds her as with a loving embrace; that sea which our forefathers called Mare Nostrum—Our Sea.
Scattered around her in that Sea, like gems fallen from her diadem, are Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, and other lesser islands, where the nature of the soil and the structure of the mountains and the language and the hearts of men all speak of Italy. Within those boundaries all the nations passed, one after the other, as conquerors and savage persecutors; but they have not been able to extinguish the holy name of Italy, nor the innermost energy of the race that first peopled her; the Italic element, more powerful than all, has worn out the religions, the speech, the tendencies of the conquerors, and superimposed upon them the imprint of Italian Life.
...from the Alps to the Sea and from the Sea to the Alps. All the people between the Alps and the Sea are brothers. And the curse of Cain awaits those who abandon their brothers who groan in the bondage of slavery and who do not offer them a life of loving peace and happiness under the holy banner of the Tricolour; such ones can not have the Fatherland nor do they deserve it.
XI.
Come with me: follow me where begins the vast campagna which, thirteen centuries ago, was the meeting place of the races of humanity, that I may recall to you where beats the heart of Italy.
Thither did the Goths, Ostrogoths, Herulians, Longobards, and an infinite number of other barbarians and semi-barbarians descend, thereon unconsciously to receive the consecration of Italian civilization, before going forth again upon the various lands of Europe; and the dust which the traveller casts from his shoe, is the dust of nations.
Silent is the vast campagna: over the wide solitude hovers a silence that oppresses the soul with a sadness like unto that felt by one who wanders through a place of burial. But he who, nurtured in high thought, and strengthened and purified by misfortune, pauses in that solitude at eventide, when the sun has shed his last ray over the long undulating line of the horizon, will hear an indistinct murmur, as of life fermenting beneath; as if it were the quickening stir of generations awaiting the fiat of a potent word to call them into being, to repeople a site that appears created for a Council of the Peoples.
I did hear that thrill, and I prostrated myself before that prophetic sound.
There, upon the roadway that recalls the name of one of the strong slayers of Caesar, extending between the debris of extinct volcanoes, and the relics of the Etruscans, between Monterosi and La Storta, close by the lake, lies Baccano. Pause and gaze southward towards the Mediterranean, far as the eye can reach; in the midst of the immense expanse before you, like a Pharos in mid-ocean, rises an isolated point, a sign of distant grandeur. Kneel down in worship—there throbs the heart of Italy; there, in eternal solemnity, lies Rome!
That isolated point is the capital of the Christian world, and, but a few paces distant, stands the capital of the Pagan world. And these two worlds lie there awaiting a third world, vaster and more sublime than they, which is emerging amidst their mighty ruins. It is the Trinity of that history whose Word is in Rome.
And tyrants and false prophets may delay, but none can prevent the incarnation of the word. For while many cities have perished on earth, and many will yet perish in their turn, Rome is, by decree of Providence, divined by the people, the Eternal City, because to her has been entrusted the mission of diffusing over the world the word of unity. And the life of Rome reproduces itself ever amplified and extended.
And just as the Rome of the Caesars, having united a vast portion of Europe through the power of action, was succeeded by the Rome of the Popes, which united Europe and America through the power of thought; so the Rome of the People will succeed the other two and unite Europe and America and the rest of the terrestrial world in a faith that will make thought and action one.
And when the Pact of the new faith shall be displayed upon the pantheon of humanity which the nations will one day build up,—between the Capitol and Vatican, and dominating both—the long dissonance between heaven and earth, soul and body, matter and spirit, reason and faith, will cease into harmony of life.
And all these things will be when you shall have learned that the life of a people is religion—when, asking counsel only of conscience, and of the tradition, not of the sophists, but of your own nation and the other nations of humanity,—you shall constitute yourselves priests, not of rights, but of Duty, and, rejecting all cowardly compromise, give battle not merely to the civil power of the Lie, but to the Lie itself that now usurps the name of authority in Rome. These things shall be when you remember the prophetic cry which re-awakened Rome sent forth to Italy ten years since, and inscribe upon your banner and upon your hearts: We own but one Master in heaven—God; and but one interpreter of His law on earth,—the People.
Rome is your metropolis. You cannot have a Fatherland without her. Without Rome, no Italy is possible. It is the Sanctuary of the Nation. Just as the Crusades marched to the cry of “Jerusalem!”, you must march to the cry of “Roma! Roma!”, and agree to neither peace nor truce until the flag of Italy is flying proudly and victoriously over each of the Seven Hills.
[...]
XX.
The sky was starless, leaden-hued and dark. Descending night had spread over the deep azure a dense, unbroken veil, like a shroud slowly sinking over a corpse. From time to time an icy breeze swept noiselessly over the vast campagna: the long thick grasses bent as noiselessly beneath its breath. I gazed around, and the pure bright visions of the virgin soul rose up before me; the sweet hopes of my young years, fallen, one by one, beneath the icy breath of delusion and discouragement.
There was sadness in the hour; sadness over earth and heaven, and over the wide silence, a sadness profound, inconsolable, mute. Life seemed suspended without power of revival.
Slowly enwrapping my whole being like a garment that takes the impress of the form it covers, there came over me a sense of supreme fatigue, a quiet, passive, weariness of life, and of every earthly thing; a nameless langour, without grief, but worse than every grief,—as it were the death of my soul. And I thought of the long years I had lived through, joyless and un-caressed, in the solitude of an idea; of the friends, dead to earth, or dead to me; of illusions vanished for ever; of men's ingratitude, and of my mother's grave, which I had been unable to approach save in secret and by night, like one bent on a crime—till I felt the need of weeping, weeping, weeping;—but I could not weep.
And I sat down, broken-spirited, on a stone by the way, and buried my face in my hands, as one who strives to hide from himself the path he has trodden and the path he has yet to tread.
And while I was sitting thus, I seemed to feel, at intervals, a breath upon my forehead, and a faint murmur reached my ear as of voices afar off, or rising through the ground, and I seemed to know those voices.
And as I rose up and looked anxiously around, it seemed to me that the whole campagna was as if sown with little crosses, and by the side of every cross there rose a pallid form, now of man, and now of woman. And the faces of some of these were known to me, others not; but all of them seemed to me brothers and sisters of my soul.
And some of these forms bore upon the breast or forehead a round bloody sign, as of a wound; some of a bloody ribbon around the neck; or other mark of sudden and violent death; while others wore no sign save the impress of a long and grievous anguish stamped upon every feature—and these were the saddest of all to see. And they gazed mournfully, and as if questioningly upon one another.
At length, from one of these forms came a sound of voice saying:—
"Still forgetful!"
And other voices, in accents of deep anguish, answered:—
"Still!"
And a long wailing groan sounded over the vast campagna. Those spirits, who had smiled in torture and on the scaffold, groaned aloud over the forgetfulness of their living brothers.
Then a voice rose, saying: "Did we die for the truth or for falsehood? The will of our Father in heaven gathered us here together, that we might give the signal of the third life of our nation, which shall be when our brethren take heed of the lessons written for them in our blood. And the months pass by, and the years pass by, and the spirits of new martyrs are daily added to our number, but the hour of emancipation sounds not for us."
And another voice rose, while the spirit gazed upon the many forms around:—"What need they more? Voluntary victims of the foreign foe we fell, to teach them that he who would redeem himself must seek salvation in his own arm and his own weapon only. Wherefore do they still entrust their destiny to the councils and decision of strangers?"
And a third voice rose:—"Forsaking the sweet shores of the Adriatic, we departed, inspired by the Father, to die in the far Calabrian land, to teach them that each Italian is responsible for all Italians; that each zone of Italian territory is a zone of the common country. Wherefore axe they encamped each on the fragment of territory himself has won, and careless of the sufferings of their brothers a few paces distant?"
And a fourth voice said:—"We died to teach them that faith without works is falsehood to God and man. and that action is the best training that can be given to a people. Wherefore is the spirit of life manifested but by thousands, while the millions look idly on?"
And a fifth voice spoke disdainfully:—"Deliberately, solemnly, did we front death and infamy from the many, to teach them that a single weapon may restore equality between the most tyrannic power and the multitude enslaved, if that weapon flash in the hand of one who sets his own life truly at naught, and owns no judges but his conscience and his God. Wherefore, then, do they childishly bewail the tyranny of a single despot?"
"And a female form, bearing no mark of violent death, but the sign of the sorrow of Niobe upon her wasted features, arose, and made as if she fain would speak, but could not; she only pointed with a glance whose reproach seemed to embrace both earth and heaven, to the forms of four youths by her side.
And after a time of silence, all of those forms broke forth in lament:—"Where is the country promised to our children by those who witnessed our deaths and swore to avenge us? Where is the tomb that should shelter our bones in a free land, beneath the lovely banner for which we laid down our lives? Why are the promises of our loved ones dispersed in air? Wherefore call us great, if our example is un-followed? Of what avail are the words of affection pompously bestowed upon our memory, if the idea, the desire, the aspiration of our souls is forgotten, perverted, profaned? Have we died for the truth or for falsehood?
And a shiver ran through those shadowy forms, and I covered my head in grief and shame.
And when I looked again, I saw nought but the starless heaven, the vast, desolate campagna, and the long thick grasses bending beneath the icy breeze.
But often in my dreams does the dolorous vision rise before me again.
[...]
