Between 1894 and 1910 we lived more in Italy than in America and had the opportunity of observing the amazing developments that were taking place in the country that was, until the World War, the youngest of the Nations. Modern Italy was born in 1870, when France and Germany were too busy cutting each other’s throats to interfere with the realization of that dream of a United Italy that had so long haunted the imagination of poets and patriots. America’s part in the Risorgimento has still to be written; like England, the Great Friend, she played no small rôle in the happy consummation. From the early part of the last century Italian patriots and political exiles were comforted and upheld in the United States. In my mother’s girlhood some of the greatest lived in New York by giving Italian lessons. She and her sisters numbered in their circle of friends Foresti and Albinola, the companions of Silvio Pellico.
In Italy Margaret Fuller and other ardent Americans threw themselves and their resources into the struggle that gave the world a free and united Italy. We Americans are bound to Italy by the strongest of all alliances,—sentiment and sympathy. The American colonies in Rome, Florence, and Venice, while not to be compared in size with the “Little Italys” of Boston and New York, have done much to create a mutual good-will. They have fostered a reverence for Italian genius in our own land, and the reaction has been that the Italian immigrants in America have been received with a more intelligent understanding than many others. The marriages between American heiresses and Italian nobles—though it has been the custom to scoff at them—have proved, for the most part, extremely fortunate. The children of these unions show that the American woman can be safely trusted to choose her mate among Italians, to the advantage of both races.
About the middle of the nineteenth century Luigi Monti, a young Italian liberal, fleeing for his life, managed to conceal himself on board an American vessel lying in an Italian port. Though he had little English, the lad made the Captain understand that he wished to go to America.
“I will take you to the only place in America worth living in,” the Captain assured him. After a long cruise the skipper brought his young friend to Nantucket, where he was hospitably welcomed by the inhabitants, and settled down to learn English and teach Italian. He remained on the island for some time, in the belief that he was in the most important place in the United States, an impression first given by the skipper and fully maintained by the islanders. Somehow—and here my memory is at fault as to just the how and wherefore—Longfellow got wind of the young Italian teacher at Nantucket and managed to convince him that Boston was even more important than Nantucket. In my youth Signor Monti was one of the most prominent Italian residents of the Hub and held, if I mistake not, the post of Italian Consul.
In Sicily, after the Messina earthquake, Roosevelt was given a reception by the survivors that surpassed their welcome of their own King Victor. The horses were taken from his carriage and he was drawn by a cheering populace, who hailed him with shouts of:
“Viva il nostro presidente!”
The other day two Italians were seen at Oyster Bay, scraping up handfuls of earth from Roosevelt’s grave.
“What’s the idea?” asked the guard on duty.
“We are returning to Italy, where Theodore Roosevelt is greatly honored, and we wish to take this sacred earth with us as a relic,” the Italians explained.
On one of my visits to America, during our long residence in Rome, I had the happy idea of founding in Boston a little Italian club, now grown into an influential society, known as the Circolo Italiano. During the first few years of its existence, my mother was the leading spirit of the Circolo, in which she held the office of Honorary President. The first acting President was Count Salone Campello. We met at the houses of the members once or twice a month, and from time to time enjoyed a banquet at one of the Italian restaurants at the North End. At a certain dinner at the Lombardy Inn my mother made a great hit when she said in her speech of welcome: