su le torri ondeggiar vede il temuto
tricolorato libero vessillo." (3)
Vincenzo Monti, in his tragedy Caio Gracco (finished in exile at Paris in 1800), makes his hero appeal to the Romans in the name of "l'italiana libertà," and receive as answer from the assembled citizens:—
"Itali siam tutti, un popol solo,
una sola famiglia."
"Italiani
tutti, e fratelli."
Ugo Foscolo, in the days of Napoleon's power, had fearlessly admonished him in the name of Italy. On the return of the Austrians to Milan, in 1815, he chose to leave his native land rather than swear allegiance, "Cosí Ugo Foscolo diede alla nuova Italia una nuova istituzione, l'esilio" (4). In that same spring, almost exactly a century before Italy drew her sword in the great European war, came the proclamation of Rimini—Murat's abortive call to the Italians from the Alps to Sicily to assert their independence. A poet, then thirty years old, destined in old age to become a citizen of the Rome of United Italy, Alessandro Manzoni, hailed the proclamation in a noble canzone, cut short by the failure of the enterprise:—
"Liberi non sarem se non siamo uni."
It is the first lyric of the Risorgimento (5).
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