He goes to the play. This is his impression of the tragedy:
The last act when he kills himself and her
I can tell you was just satisfying
(M' ha proprio soddisfatto).
Or take his summary of the problems life presents:
... a sto paese tutto er busilli
Sta ner magnà allo scrocco e ddì orazione.
"The whole difficulty in this life is how to eat without paying for it, and to get your prayers said."
But the scene may change, and the same Roman is called upon to go forth into the campagna with the beneficent confraternità dell' Orazione e Morte in search of the body of some victim of violence. He is found pancia all' aria and brought back to his family; but amidst the keen observation of all that happens, of the situation, there is not a pitiful or generous sentiment; the scenes suggest nothing of interest but the faithful gross record of purely external impressions. Yet these men have trudged along the heavy roads, up and down, stumbling and struggling through the dark night to perform the act of pity which teaches them, apparently, so little.
Tragedy, comedy, a funeral, a marriage, the visit to your dead, the game of hazard, the incidents of an assassination, all these things come under the same clear, coarse, unintimate, unloving observation of a people who hold, wisely enough, that "L'occhi so' fatti pe' guardà"—the eyes are made for looking—but who care as little how they look as they trouble to select what shall be looked upon.
"Che bella giornata; che peccato che non s' impicchi nessuno" is the traditional greeting to a fine day, repeated even now with a modern humorous sense of its ghastliness. "What a fine day! what a pity no one is going to be hanged!" And the Roman's liking for distraction and noise is not sated even when he goes to bed. Before 1870 serenaders waked, and charmed, the sleeping city; but the Roman who is supposed to have been "killed between a policeman and official red tape," still reminds us that he is not so very dead after all, or that the guardia "non s' è fatto viva," for he now roars down the thoroughfares in the small hours of the night, thus procuring for himself the pleasure of disturbing you—a form of recreation with which even the police have too much sympathy to interfere. For the Roman tolerates other men's lawlessness but has no respect for their liberty.
The "Coltello" and Crime
As with children who cannot "play the game," his games of chance degenerate into quarrelling and killing. The terrible habit of carrying, stowed away in a pocket at the back of the trousers, or up the sleeve, what the Romans call "the instrument" gives them a ready means of converting hot blood into hot deed. The coltello used to be, and still is at times, the favourite gift of a girl to her lover—to have used it with deadly effect is in her eyes a necessary sign of prowess, and to feel it always ready is in his sight the welcome earnest of power to assert his virility. Italian crime is committed in hot blood; sudden rage or "love" supply the motive, and there is very little of the premeditated cold-blooded crime of which Dickens gives us an example in the details of Nancy's murder in Oliver Twist. The worst crimes of violence, however, are brought about from motives so futile as to seem incredible when they are mirrored in some ghastly assassination. It is enough to disagree with your comrade, to win a litre of wine from him, to refuse to withstand the police—to find yourself on the way to Sant' Antonio or the Consolazione with three inches of steel in your stomach, nay not unfrequently in your back. Primitive, terrible, childish, barbaric, this love of blood, this power of "seeing red" in a quarrel, has made the Italian the bravo of Europe, and makes the total of Italian homicides at the present day exceed those in England, Germany, Belgium, France, and Austria put together. Ninety-five homicides for every million of the population contrast in Italy with six for every million in England. In the time of the Venetian pope Clement XIII., in the middle of the eighteenth century, the proportion of homicides in Rome was twenty-five times higher than this.
Is the Italian more cruel, more brutal, more wanton than his fellows? To the first two questions I should answer No, to the last, Yes. The cruelties of the French Revolution, the coarse brutalities of England even down to the century just passed, the horrors recently revealed in the German army, would at no time have found their counterpart in Italy. But the Italian—the Roman—is wanton, he is an egoist who sates his impulses without any reference at all to the other people and the other interests involved. He is wanton, for he lacks the sense of personal responsibility; wanton, for he carries on life and government with no regard to justice. The Italian is a child of nature, a combination of his own two conceptions of "faun"-like irresponsible grace and "satyr"-like animality; an undisciplined creature living in the conditions of modern civilisation. But although the Italians are a vital people, a people alert on the side of the self-protecting instincts, and with the egoism of the vital temperament, they are not an inhumane people: they have in abundance the imaginative sympathy which instructs and softens, and if they lack the sense of justice they are in some ways more merciful than we.