She is “that lowlying Italy” on whose behalf the heroes and heroines of the Aeneid shed their blood so freely:
... Quell’ umile Italia....
Per cui morì la vergine Cammilla,
Eurialo, e Turno, e Niso di ferute.
He loves her passionately, torn as she is by faction, her own worst enemy; and he calls on the representative of the Holy Roman Empire to control her madness and to bring her peace.
The close association of Italian aspiration with the name of Dante which Witte observed in 1861, came forcibly under my own notice nearly fifty years later, when I made a pilgrimage to Ravenna to take part in the “Feste dantesche,” on September 13th, 1908. Isidoro del Lungo, perhaps the greatest of Italy’s modern Dantists, was to inaugurate the opening of a special Dante wing in the Ravenna library, and to dedicate a beautiful silver lamp—an expiatory offering from the Commune of Florence—to adorn his tomb.
The occasion was nominally a Dantist celebration; but it might with equal truth have been described as an “Irredentist Orgy.” For one of the great features of the festival was the arrival of a pilgrim-ship, flying the Italian tricolour, from Trieste, bearing some hundreds of Italian-speaking devotees from “Italia Irredenta”—the “unredeemed” cities which remained under Austrian rule when the rest of Italy threw off the yoke of the foreigner—Trieste itself, and Pola, and Fiume. The people of Ravenna and the visitors to the Festival, spurred on by eloquent “posters” exhibited in the streets at the instance of clubs and societies of every description, and by the proclamation of the Municipality itself, to give the “Fratelli irredenti” a fraternal welcome, poured out towards the quay in their thousands, and escorted the pilgrims through the streets with flags flying and bands playing patriotic airs. Conspicuous in the procession were half a dozen Garibaldini, veterans of the War of Liberation, clad in their red shirts; and emotion rose to a high point when the monument was reached which commemorates those who fell in the struggle for a free and united Italy. Laughter, tears, embraces and echoing Evvivas proclaimed the arrival of the cortège at the Municipal Buildings.... It was a scene which one will never forget, as the Italians from across the water flung themselves upon their fellow-disciples of Dante, with the romping and vociferous enthusiasm of children just let out of school!
There were, so far as one could judge, from the floods of printed and of spoken eloquence which marked that day, two prominent thoughts in people’s minds: two prominent points of contact and association between the thought of the Divino Poeta and the aspirations of Italian patriotism. The first of these is more general, the second more specific. In general, Dante is rightly held to be the true Father of the Italian language and literature—that “bond which unites us to our native place.” “Love for our native tongue,” says Witte—and he has in mind a passage of Dante’s Convivio—“is the expression of our love of our native land.” For Dante Italy is—
Il bel paese dove il Si suona.