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familiar with Latin and Greek literature and would spend vast sums for ancient manuscripts as well as for the newest works of art. The Renaissance tradition of individualism and wide cultural interests has never died out in Italy, and it still contributes to the quality of life there. (u/ou)
The everyday Italian in the city goes to work through a museum of architecture: ancient, medieval, and all kinds of modern—jumbled together, lived in, worked in—the electricity, plumbing, and heating more or less obtrusive depending on the period or century when they were installed. The great cultural periods are as much a part of his life as the furniture of a childhood home, and even to the Italian who has given no thought to abstractions since primary school, the implications of the Roman temples, circuses, and country villas; of the massive medieval defenses; of the exuberant multicolored marble elegance of the Renaissance are present always. (u/ou)
The country man is no less aware of the past. His lanes are as likely as not to be the straight Roman roads, crossing by an arched bridge over a river—only the country wagons, still built to the Roman gage, can use them; the modern roads go elsewhere. His church probably has faded Romanesque frescoes, flat and staring, above the altar, or the baroque saints, their robes perpetually swept by the high winds of the 17th century. (u/ou)
The very landscapes in the background of Renaissance painting—horizons of tumultuous hills as delicately cultivated as gardens, which any American in an art appreciation class considers a romantic exaggeration—are the landscapes the Tuscan farmer lives among and the Tuscan commuter views from his bus. The continuity is obvious. (u/ou)
The appreciation of beauty, focused by great painters, is perpetually refreshed in Italy; and the people are accustomed to beauty and can respond to it without self-consciousness or pose. But the obvious continuity has another effect—many Italians have something in common with the ordinary children of extraordinary parents; a puzzled sense of inadequacy, or is it loss, or have we been robbed? All that was commonplace in Rome and Florence is forgotten, and only the impression of vanished power and glory remain. It is a proud and disturbing heritage. (u/ou)
Italians today are proud of their noble heritage, but they also want to be modern, with the best cars and neon signs and the latest fashions. Many a family living in an 18th century walkup would trade its priceless facade for good plumbing, and many a builder, encountering yet another mosaic as he digs a foundation, conceals it from the historical monuments official, for he is understandably reluctant to idle his construction crew and tie up his funds during months or years of archaeological debate over the value of the new find. (u/ou)
The Shallow Roots of Democracy (c)
With 35 changes of government since World War II, the Italian Government is a remarkable example of instability. This becomes easier to understand when viewed against the backdrop of Italian history, for the people have had little experience with representative democratic government. Even after unification in 1870, relatively few Italians could vote until after World War II, except for the democratic experiment from 1919 to 1922. The government, shaped on the British model in the mid-19th century, was created by a few north Italians—particularly by Garibaldi, Cavour, Mazzini, and the central figure, King Vittorio Emanuele II of Piedmont. There was no system of popular local government to build on, and little understanding or support among people to whom government had always been sometime one endured.
Cavour, "the Bismarck of Italian unity," forged the peninsula's kingdoms, principalities, and Papal States into a centralized constitutional monarchy with a king, a parliament, and a cabinet ministry responsible to the parliament. Elections were held—among a tiny band of male property holders. In the south the land
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