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Of these friends, one, who was to hold a lasting place in my admiration and love through after-years, shall be mentioned here Contessa Maria Pasolini. Contessa Maria for some thirty years has played a great role in the social and intellectual history of Italy.
The foundation of its fortune lay in the remarkable fruitfulness of the family; Francesco's father, Jacopo, himself a celebrated man, had twenty brothers and sisters, all brought up roughly at Cotignola, near Faenza, amid the perils of one of the endless Romagnole 'vendette' between their own house and that of the Pasolini.
She is the daughter of one of the leading business families of Milan, sister to the Marchese Ponti, who was for long Sindaco of that great city, and intimately concerned in its stormy industrial history. She married Count Pasolini, the head of an old aristocratic family with large estates in the Romagna, whose father was President of the first Senate of United Italy.
The day on which Count Pasolini gave him a copy of Il Primato he created that great, and under some aspects pathetic illusion, the reforming Pope. The Conclave opened on the 14th of June 1846. During the Bishop of Imola's journey to Rome a white pigeon had perched several times on his carriage.
Therefore, forestalling a vote of censure in the Chambers, where he had never yet had a real majority, Rattazzi resigned office with a parting homily in which he claimed to have saved the national institutions. The administration which followed contained the well-known names of Farini, Minghetti, Pasolini, Peruzzi, Delia Rovere, Menabrea.
It was in the neighborhood of the Pasolini estates that Garibaldi took refuge after 1848; and one may pass through them to reach the lonely hut in which Anita Garibaldi died.
Pius IX. seemed to throw in his lot definitely with the revolution when, on the 19th of March, he too granted a Constitution, having previously formed a lay ministry, which included Marco Minghetti and Count Pasolini, under the presidency of Cardinal Antonelli, who thus makes his first appearance as Liberal Premier.
Marsh specially introduced me to a very charming young couple, the Count and Countess Pasolini of Ravenna, as the author of A Siren. They said they had been most anxious to know who could have written that book! They thought that no Englishman could have been resident at Ravenna without their having known him, or at least known of him.
Very little remains in the church that is of any interest to us. In the sacristy, however, we may see in the present lavabo some fragments of the ancient ciborio. And in the nave at the western end on the Gospel side is an ancient sarcophagus of Greek marble which was carved in the Renaissance and in the seventeenth century became the sepulchre of one of the Pasolini family.
A letter from Fortunati to the countess announces the appointment: "I have been with the signori," wrote Fortunati, "to learn whom they would send and when. They tell me that Nicolo Machiavelli, a learned young Florentine noble, secretary to my Lords of the Ten, is to leave with me at once." Cf. "Catherine Sforza," by Count Pasolini, translated by P. Sylvester, 1898.
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