APPENDIX I
ANTONIO MASCHIO AND THE CELEBRATION OF 1865
The Dante Celebrations of the last fifty-six years—the years that mark the duration of the Poet’s life—have always had about them, as was meet, a touch of fervid Italian patriotism. For Dante is in a true sense “Pater Patriae.” The sexcentenary of his birth in 1865 coincided with the new dignity of Florence as temporary capital of a largely united and independent Italy. It was celebrated by the unveiling of Dante’s statue by Victor Emmanuel, protagonist of the New Italy in the chief Piazza of his new Capital, and it was celebrated with military as well as civic honours.
The Celebration of 1921, on the sexcentenary of the Poet’s death, was marked again with patriotic fervour. The troops who had redeemed “Italia irredenta” in the Great War offered a wreath of bronze and silver at his shrine in Ravenna; and shouts of “Viva l’ Italia! Viva Fiume!” echoed in the Banqueting Hall of the castle of Poppi in Casentino, where Dante had been a guest of the Conti Guidi, and in sight of which he had fought as a young man in defence of his native city. The patriotic cries had now a new note of triumph about them, because Dante’s prophetic envisaging of Italy as “one, and to be loved” and his incidental marking out of her true boundaries had at last been verified.[377]
Between these two, on September 14th, 1908, Ravenna, his “last refuge,” was the scene of a most enthusiastic ceremony, to which flocked representatives of the as yet unredeemed Italian fringe, and men of Trent and Trieste and Gorizia and Pola and Fiume claimed Dante as the prophet of their own “italianità” and of their proximate liberation from the foreign yoke.
There is a little-known incident connected with the first of these Celebrations—that of 1865—which is worth recording, if only for its simple pathos. The story of an attempt at Dante-worship that was motived rather by personal loyalty than by patriotic ardour, yet was baulked by the barrier set up by a foreign domination between a true-hearted Italian and his goal.
Antonio Maschio[378] was close upon forty years old when the news came to him in his humble Venetian dwelling that Italy was going to celebrate her greatest Poet in his native City of Florence.
He was a simple gondolier, son of a small pork-butcher on the island of Murano. In the year ’48, so notable in the annals of Italy’s fight for freedom, he picked up some stray sheets of paper in a tobacconist’s shop, on which were printed Cantos xiii. and xiv. of the Inferno. He took them home and read and re-read them: From that day he took Dante as his Master, and devoted all his spare moments to the study of the Divina Commedia. He lived to see, as he conceived, Dante’s prophecy of the “Veltro”—the great Liberator—fulfilled in 1871; when Victor Emmanuel entered Rome, and before he died he was in correspondence with some of the greatest Dante scholars in Italy and abroad.
Far advanced in his Dante studies in 1865, and over head and ears in love with the great Poet, he dared to brave the Austrian frontier guards—for Venetia was still Austrian territory—setting out on foot for Florence to keep tryst with his Maestro “duca, signore e Maestro.” Before the middle of March he packed up in two great bundles all the Dante material he had collected and evolved, put a favourite “Dantino” in his pocket and started with his precious burden on the adventurous pilgrimage. He passed the first line of guards, posing as a wine-seller from Chioggia. His great obstacle was the river Po, running high and with current all too swift. Moreover it was night, and no boat was to be found. It was but human to shrink back, but the love of Dante conquered his fear. Did he recall the passage where Dante, shrinking from the wall of flame, hears Virgil’s appeal: “Senti figlio, Fra Beatrice e te è questo muro”?[379] Dauntless he flung himself into the chill waters and struck out for the farther shore. In a life and death struggle with the current he lost his precious bundles, and landed more dead than alive, with nothing in his pocket but the little volume of the Divina Commedia; and he afterwards declared that Dante had saved his disciple from drowning that night, even as in his earthly life he had saved a child in the Baptistery at Florence.[380] Next morning the hapless man fell into the hands of the Sindaco of La Mesola, who handed him over to the police, and he suffered a month’s durance in an Austrian prison, after which he was ignominiously sent back to his native town.
It was a famous gathering on that 14th of May in the broad space before the church of Santa Croce; and many learned and ingenious speeches marked the occasion. But the Festival was the poorer by the enforced absence of one who had risked his life to be there: Antonio Maschio, “il Gondolier Dantista.”