Page:The National Idea in Italian Literature.djvu/31

 And he can utter his thought with a coarseness of invective unknown to the Petrarchists, when he invokes a horrible curse upon every Italian, rich or poor, who desires the presence of the foreigner within his land (3).

Now in the period that followed the Renaissance and preceded the French Revolution—the period in which Italy first lay under the dominion of Spain, then became again the battlefield of Europe, and finally in great part a political dependency of Austria—there were two states that preserved the Italian independence and remained the depositaries of Italian nationality: the Republic of Venice and the Duchy of Savoy. Bernardo Tasso wrote of Venice:—

"Is she not the ornament and splendour of Italian dignity? Does she not represent an image of the authority and greatness of the Roman republic? In this dark and tempestuous age, what other light or splendour remains to hapless Italy? Are we not all servants, all tributaries, I will not say of barbarian, but of foreign nations? of those, I say, whom the noble Italians of old led captive in their triumphs? She alone has preserved her ancient liberty; she alone renders obedience to none save God and her own well-ordered laws" (1).

The part of Venice, in the shaping of the national destiny, was to maintain the glory of the Italian name and preserve the Latin civilisation on the eastern shore of the Adriatic, bequeathing her 19